space

Divorced woman sends wedding ring into orbit

When relationships end, there isn't just one guilty party. Unless there is.

It might well be that your ex was a lovable person whom you treated like an errant musketeer. Or it might be that, one fine day, you discovered your ex's words were merely the arbitrary squeakings of a pygmy.

Rebecca Gibbs clearly became disenamored of her husband, Stephen Page. Where once their wedding proudly adorned YouTube, more recently the site reverberated with the whooshing sound of their marriage going up in smoke.

Or into space, to be more precise.

For Gibbs decided to take their wedding … Read more

A revamped MySpace will stay 'true to roots'

MySpace's new owners, which includes actor/recording star Justin Timberlake, are teasing the coming of a revamped service.

A video found at New.myspace.com features a slick video touting a service flush with photos, video, and music from young and beautiful people. Yep -- as expected, MySpace appears to be coming back as a media-centric social networking service. The Financial Times spotted the new teaser clip first.

Managers posted a note that says, in part: "We're staying true to our roots."

Before Facebook began stomping all over MySpace in 2008, the then No. 1 social … Read more

En route home, Endeavour soars over Golden Gate Bridge

SAUSALITO, Calif. -- With thousands of fans looking on from around the San Francisco Bay, the space shuttle Endeavour soared over the Golden Gate Bridge this morning en route to its final home in Los Angeles.

After taking off a little after 8 a.m. PT from the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California's Mojave Desert, and piggybacked on top of a specially-outfitted Boeing 747, Endeavour made its way north to Sacramento and then turned west toward San Francisco. The journey was a farewell tour for what was called the "Baby" space shuttle, a replacement for the ill-fated Challenger, which exploded after liftoff in 1986. Endeavour made 25 launches during its lifetime, the first in 1992, the last in May 2011. … Read more

Soyuz brings three station fliers home to pinpoint landing

Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA flight engineer bid their three space station crewmates farewell Sunday, strapped into their Soyuz ferry craft, undocked from the lab complex and fell back to Earth, making a pinpoint landing in Kazakhstan to close out a 125-day voyage.

Descending through a clear blue sky under a large orange-and-white parachute, the charred Soyuz TMA-04M descent module settled to a rocket-assisted touchdown near the town of Arkalyk at 10:53 p.m. EDT (8:53 a.m. Monday local time).

The final stages of the descent were carried live on television relayed through the Russian mission … Read more

Watch now: Enormous space rock slated for Earth flyby

A massive space rock traveling 25,000 miles per hour will get within 1.7 million miles from the Earth tonight. You'll be able to track its path live during a Slooh Space Camera show, starting at 4 p.m. Pacific/7 p.m. Eastern.

The asteroid, called 2012 QG42, will have about the same amount of brightness as the dwarf planet Pluto. Discovered a couple of weeks ago, 2012 QG42 is estimated to be between 625 feet and 1,500 feet in diameter.

The good news: There's no chance of a collision between the asteroid and Earth … Read more

Curious about Curiosity? Here's the latest from Mars

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has driven some 357 feet from its landing site on the floor of Gale Crater -- 269 feet as a martian crow might fly -- on its way to an intriguing area about five times farther away where three different types of rock come together. The rover continues to chalk up near perfect scores during extended checkout operations, with detailed robot arm tests on tap over the next week or so.

"We've been on the surface of Mars for about a month and Curiosity continues to be very healthy and continues to surprise … Read more

Voyager 1, NASA's 1977 iPod, turns 35

For a mobile music player that's 100,000 times less powerful than a crummy 8GB iPod Nano, Voyager 1 is mighty awesome.

The NASA space probe was launched 35 years ago today, on September 5, 1977, three months after a new space opera called "Star Wars" hit theaters. Programmed to explore the outer planets, it has traveled farther than any man-made object since then, and is leaving our solar system for interstellar space.

With its 68-kilobyte computer memory and 8-track tape recorder, Voyager is bringing old-timey tech to the stars. It's currently some 11.3 billion miles from the sun in the heliosheath, the region where the solar wind slows down as it hits gas and dust outside our solar system. … Read more

Fly Virgin, earn a shot at space

Avid jet-setters aspiring for something more should check out Virgin America's new Mission: Galactic contest. Whoever earns the most status points with their Elevate loyalty program by August 7, 2013 earns a Virgin Galactic suborbital space flight aboard SpaceShipTwo spaceplane. … Read more

Luxury watchmaker turns hand toward retro games

A gentleman's timepiece should never be too exuberant, but Crave feels compelled to give a curious nod to the ultra-expensive Pac-Man and Space Invaders watches by Swiss timepiece crafter RJ-Romain Jerome. Each dial features a miniature replica design of the arcade classics set in a pixelated appearance.

Perhaps understated from first glance, these geeky watches (waterproof to 98 feet) with rubber straps contain some real stellar inspirations. For starters, each steel timepiece features real fragments of the Apollo 11 lunar module, and the designer took it a step further by modeling the four joints of the watch after lunar landing module legs. To top off the extravagance, the back of the watches contain low-oxidation silver mixed with real moon rocks, specially patterned like the lunar surface. … Read more