No indication of the moon wobbling dangerously off its axis, starting an inexorable descent towards earth. No huge chunks of the moon breaking off, starting an inexorable descent towards earth. No angry aliens rising out of the moon's core in their battle crafts, starting an inexorable descent towards earth. No reason to call out the Army's top secret interstellar fighting force. In contrast to this direct quote from NASA's director of nerd propaganda, yesterday:

The government pumps about $20 billion into NASA each year to levitate mice and study crystals. Whatever. All most of us want from space are pictures. And some MIT students did that for a far cheaper fee. Math lesson, anyone?

Here's the stuff of conservative nightmares: The Obama administration wants to "mind map" America using computers, inspired by the Big Brother of Silicon Valley

[Today NASA released images taken by the refurbished Hubble telescope, including this picture of 100,000 stars in the Omega Centauri cluster. Image via NASA]

[A 360-degree view from the top of Mt. Whitney in California. The stone structure at the peak—the highest point in the continental U.S.—was built a hundred years ago today. Image via Nasa]

The woefully underfunded yet "inspiring" NASA found some money to send mice into space.

Elon Musk is becoming a welfare case. Federal auto-industry loans helped save his electric-car company, Tesla. Now Musk wants another federal bailout for his embarrassing space startup. And he may well get it.

One more argument for healthcare reform: Astronauts—actual NASA astronauts who fly to space on multibillion-dollar rockets and stuff—are scared that they can't get coverage. Or so says NASA's "chief bioethicist" in an interview with the New York Times.

On this, the 40th Anniversary of the day Mankind conquered the moon, it is time to issue another clarion call for this generation: fuck Mars, let's focus our attention here, for now.

Ugh. We knew the whole scene was getting lame when the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service moved into the McKibben Lofts.

Most federal bureaucracies are happy to see a competent Democrat take charge and clean house, but one dysfunctional agency is furious with Barack Obama. It's NASA, and there is a problem with the "space transition team"!

NASA announced today that deadlines and budget overruns have forced them to "cut certain features" from the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory. The feature? A "debris container" designed to "collect and store rock fragments for future study purposes." One small cost cut for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

NASA deemed successful a month-long test of image transfers to and from the Epoxi space probe, currently 20 million miles away somewhere near Mars. Alleged Internet inventor Vint Cerf helped NASA design the enabling technology, known as Delay Tolerant Networking, a decade ago. (I know: What does that guy do now?)For NASA, DTN means not having to send exact signals at an exact time to a spacecraft. A missed connection can be tried again until it succeeds. If you've been around long enough, it sounds conspicuously like USENET back in the acoustic-modem days. NASA touts the technology's usefulness in communicating with deep-space robotic craft. Who are they kidding? The real win is that when human beings inevitably go back into space, they'll be able to keep up on Earthbound puppycams. (Illustration by NASA)

When visionaries clash, whose vision do we believe? On newsstands this week, Newsweek's Dan Lyons savages Tesla Motors, the electric-car maker. Tesla was once the brightest hope of Silicon Valley's clean-transportation industry; now on its fourth CEO in less than two years, it's better known for manufacturing boardroom drama than actual vehicles. Lyons writes that Tesla's Roadster is a "classic Silicon Valley product — it's late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned. Company founder Martin Eberhard (left, at bottom) says that lead investor Elon Musk (left, at top), who recently installed himself as the company's fourth CEO, made costly changes to the car's design and is "a terrible CEO." Musk's retort: "Martin is the worst individual I've ever had the displeasure of working with."Eberhard and Musk have long feuded, even before Musk ousted Eberhard as Tesla's CEO. But I'd note that for once, they're not outright contradicting each other here. It's far more common for Musk to have a version of events that conflicts with everyone else's accounting. His history of events at PayPal, the electronic-payments startup he cofounded, seems to be shared only by him. And Musk has been telling everyone who will listen that SpaceX, his rocket startup, has a "Nasa contract to build the Space Shuttle replacement after 2010." If you ask Nasa administrators, they'll say that's more than a stretch of the truth. (In fact, SpaceX is competing for a contract, but it has only hit some of the milestones; Nasa is currently planning to rent out space on Russian rockets to supply the International Space Station, and a future supply contract for SpaceX is a possibility, not a certainty.) So Musk has a tenuous relationship with reality. Is this a handicap in his business? Apple CEO Steve Jobs is famous for his "reality distortion field" — a charisma that leads others to believe the most exaggerated claims, because the vision behind them is so compelling. Of course, Jobs actually has brought his outlandish vision to life four times: With the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Musk has realized the Roadster, and SpaceX has managed, after several crashes, to launch one lone rocket. He's also got SolarCity, a startup which installs solar panels on roofs. If in 2011, we live in a shiny future where we drive Tesla cars powered with clean electricity from SolarCity panels, and SpaceX's Falcon1 rockets are supplying orbital space stations, then we will be living in a reality of Musk's making — much as Jobs envisioned the iPod in the dark days of October 2001, and then, three years later, saw them everywhere on the New York subway. There's another possibility, however, which would also make Musk like Steve Jobs — the Jobs of two decades ago, who was forced out of Apple by the CEO he hired. Tesla could go under, SpaceX could fail to win the Nasa contract, and SolarCity could get beaten down by rival cleantech startups. And then Musk, driving his Roadster on the lonely roads of Silicon Valley, would find himself facing a reality not constructed in his mind. An unpleasant thought, that. Far easier just to succeed.

Odyssey Moon is an international partnership of guys with space cred on their resumes. They've hacked Google's $30 million Lunar X Prize contest brilliantly: Instead of hiring private contractors to build a lunar rover better and faster than Nasa's risk-averse bureaucracy, Odyssey Moon has hired Nasa to do the job as a contractor. Everybody wins! That is, as long as you think Odyssey Moon's vision of the Moon as an eighth continent paved with solar farms is a win.

Zeppelins went out of style when the Hindenburg went down in flames over New Jersey. But Airship Ventures, a startup backed by quirky angel investor Esther Dyson, is trying to bring them back. With a little help from Dyson's friends. Airship's Zeppelin NT, the first to fly over the U.S. in 70 years, has just completed a transatlantic journey and is scheduled to touch down this afternoon at the Nasa-operated Moffett Field, where it will be permanently stationed, operating aerial tours of the Bay Area. Curious — a private enterprise making use of public lands. Nasa's excuse for hosting the zeppelin: It will be used for scientific investigations and other public-spirited purposes. Where have we heard that before?Why, with the Google founders' fleet of party planes, which are also parked at Moffett Field, with the excuse that they sometimes fly scientific missions. (In fact, the Google founders' jets proved impractical for Nasa's science needs; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt bought a fighter jet to fly those missions instead.) One of Airship Ventures' backers is an entity called Amphitheatre Holdings. Amphitheatre is incorporated in Delaware under the address of INV Tax Group, which Google may have purchased in a real-estate transaction two years ago. Google's headquarters is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Calif. This hardly seems like coincidence. Dyson is an investor in 23andMe, the Google-backed startup of Anne Wojcicki, wife of founder Sergey Brin. Has Dyson taken Google's shareholders for a ride, by having them take a hidden stake in a blimp startup?

Larry, Sergey, and Eric have a fighter jet, and you don't. They also have a sweet place to park it: Moffett Field, the airstrip closest to the heart of Silicon Valley. Even Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has to get chauffeured down to San Jose to board his private plane. Remind us, how did the Googlers get such a sweet deal?Last year, Google struck a $144 million deal to lease land from Nasa's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, for future office space. Separately, but not coincidentally, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, through a company called H211 LLC, struck a deal with Nasa to lease a hangar at Moffett Field for their growing fleet of private jets. Why on earth, or in space, did the Googlers get parking privileges at Moffett? Nasa and Google came up with a great spin: The jets would be available to fly scientific missions. Larry and Sergey got to geek out, thinking their party plans served a higher purpose — while saving hours commuting to and from SJC or SFO. One small hitch, Miguel Helft reports in Bits: Using the party planes for scientific missions required tinkering with their electronics. And changing anything about the planes required new FAA certifications. This may explain why Larry and Sergey pulled their party plane from a recent Nasa mission. We know it wasn't out for repairs — around the same time, they used it to ferry guests to and from Gavin Newsom's wedding. Hence the Dornier fighter jet, which is deemed an "experimental" plane, and which will now satisfy H211's space-mission duties. But that leaves the Googlers and Nasa in a rather unsatisfying position. When the Googlejets were flying for Nasa, they had a reasonable excuse for parking them at Moffett Field. But the purchase of a special plane to run space missions leaves Larry and Sergey's party-plane fleet used solely for civilian purposes. What are they doing at the field? Why, satisfying a quid pro quo, like they always were. This latest twist on Larry and Sergey's lease just makes it more obvious.

Two weeks ago, NASA spokespeople acknowledged that the $6 billion Hubble Space Telescope had stopped transmitting data back to Earth. Today, the optimistic news is that ground control technicians have remote-booted the telescope's backup computer. The Hubble's No. 2 system is built around a pre-Pentium Intel 80486 microchip. Five of the six "redundant components" activated this week haven't been powered up since 1990. Before you type this is not news, read Nasa's carefully crafted PR prose from 1999. Look how much we've gotten used to commodity PC hardware since then:

Google began indexing the text context of Flash animations, movies and interfaces in Web pages a few months ago. But no Google improvement is complete until the professional SEO's document how to game the system. Here's the first well-done guide to getting your world class Flash content the placement it deserves on the Internet. Author Brian Ussery steals one of Google's best tricks: If you're going to tell a bunch of techies how to lie, blanket it in soothing geek imagery by using examples tied to science. NASA is good. Executive summary for globalists: "Google doesn’t seem to translate text content in Flash files, especially when text is supplied by a server or some other third party source." So it's kind of Speak English or Die for now.

Nasa may be regretting a sweetheart deal it cut with Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In exchange for a 90-year lease on land at Nasa's Ames Research Center adjacent to Google's headquarters, the space agency made a side agreement with Page and Brin to let them park their fleet of private jets at Nasa's Moffett Field. The only requirement: That the Googlers loan out their planes for space research missions as needed. But it turns out that for Larry and Sergey, partying with politicians is more important than studying space.Larry and Sergey yanked a promised Boeing 757 from their private fleet, operated by a company called "H211 LLC," just weeks before the originally scheduled reentry date of the Jules Verne ATV-1 space freighter, forcing Nasa and the European Space Agency to scramble to find an old DC-8 to be able to observe the freighter's burn up in the Earth's atmosphere as planned. What prompted the Google execs to pull the 757, and jeopardize a mission of the American and European space agencies? Days before the announcement that the 757 was no longer available for the mission, the promised jet was instead used as a limo for San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's wedding. But it should have been ready for action after the unremarkable flights to and from Montana. In the end, the Googlers did deliver one Gulfstream V party plane to watch the Verne burn. But one hopes it was a spare, not the same one used to chauffeur Larry, Sergey and their wives to the Google Maps satellite launch in September, right around the time of the originally scheduled reentry date. Was that the event which forced the rescheduling of the Verne mission? And if so, should Nasa be relying on billionaires' personal jets, and their whims, to complete complex, dangerous and time-critical missions?