MOON

In Moon Chaser, you are a stealthy ninja, controlling gravity, sliding along hills and valleys, and launching yourself high into the sky. Your challenge is to travel as far as you can, through different mountain stages, before the moon is completely eclipsed. Luckily, between each mountain stage, your moonlight is replenished, giving you just a bit more time to do your thing. Very similar to Dragon, Fly! and the extremely popular Tiny Wings, Moon Chaser is another addition to an already classic genre of mobile game.

By tapping the screen on declines, you can increase the pull of gravity and … Read more

Japanese plastic-model-kit company Tamiya was looking to make a splash in the Vietnamese market, so it decided to drum up some excitement with a series of ads that portray famous conspiracy theories in plastic-model-kit form.

The ads depict kits for the moon landing, the Roswell UFO crash, Elvis, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe. Marketing company Ogilvy & Mather and animation company Cirkus conspired on the project.

For us techies, the moon landing is particularly compelling. It comes complete with Neil Armstrong, a director's chair, the lunar module, movie lights, and a big sack of money.

The Roswell UFO crash kit even has a partially dissected pig. I don't know why the pig is included. Maybe someone with more UFO conspiracy knowledge can fill me in. … Read more

For astronaut Ron Garan and the rest of the crew of the International Space Station, this extraordinary view of a simultaneous sunset and moonset is a daily occurrence (this one was captured on July 31). The station orbits Earth every 90 minutes, so the crew gets treated to this scene about 16 times a day.

Too busy to keep up with today's tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET (and elsewhere) for Friday, July 22.

• Encrypt your data? Here's a scoop you'll want to read: The U.S. Department of Justice swipes at the online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation over encryption passwords. Here's the situation: A Colorado woman named Ramona Fricosu is being forced to decrypt her laptop for police. Phil Dubois, Fricosu's criminal defense attorney, told CNET's Declan McCullagh that "to force my client (assuming that she has the ability) … Read more

What's a search engine geek doing in the space business? Barney Pell, CTO and co-founder of Powerset, a search technology company that was acquired by Microsoft, has for the last year been working on building a robotic spacecraft to land on the moon, as the co-founder of a new company called Moon Express. (Pell also co-founded StockMaster, which was acquired by Red Herring when I worked there.)

It turns out that Pell is an old space hack. He has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Cambridge and worked on the AI program for Deep Space 1, … Read more

Quadraphonic was the first music surround format, and the first to bite the dust. That was in the 1970s. The SACD and DVD-A formats debuted at the dawn of the century, promising vastly improved sound quality over the CD, and both formats flopped. Their futures looked bright, so why did they fail?

Of course the record labels knew selling a new format on the basis of sound quality was a risky business, so they tacked on 5.1 surround sound. There were millions of households in the early 2000s with multichannel home theaters, so selling new music surround formats looked … Read more

opinion Today, May 25, marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's famous speech urging Americans to reach for the moon. With the U.S. space program in desperate need of new direction and genuine inspiration after years of neglect from Washington, we could use a 2011 equivalent of that oration.

One of Kennedy's finest speeches--and arguably one of the greatest in presidential history--it called on the U.S. space program to achieve what many thought to be impossible:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth," Kennedy said in addressing a joint session of Congress and a national television audience. "No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

Kennedy's call was more than a boastful assignment. It was a daring attempt to inspire national morale in the face of a Soviet Union seemingly winning the Cold War. The Russians had Sputnik--the world's first artificial satellite--in orbit, and the growing fear among many Americans was that superior Soviet space science meant greater military might and more lethal missile technology.

But the speech was also one of history's greatest examples of an American leader trying to inspire and rally citizens toward an incredible achievement. It's a sentiment lost not only on the 21st century space program, but on modern American politics as a whole. No one--from the White House to Capitol Hill to the campaign trail--challenges us to achieve at the very highest levels of scientific and inventive endeavor these days. … Read more

NASA today announced its plans for its next-generation deep space crew exploration vehicle.

President Barack Obama last year pulled the plug on the space agency's long-planned and multibillion dollar Constellation program. That system, which was expected to replace the Space Shuttle after its retirement this year, was thought to be central to bringing humans back to the moon, and possibly even to Mars.

But today, the space agency unveiled its plans for what it called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), a new spacecraft based on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle that was related to the Constellation program.

While Obama'… Read more

On Saturday, the world was treated to a super perigee moon, a rare sight that happens only every 18 years or so. The moon has an elliptical (oval) orbit around the Earth; when it seems smaller and more distant, it's on the farthest side (apogee) of its orbit, while the perigee side is about 31,000 miles closer to Earth. What made Saturday special was the fact that it was a full moon on the perigee side, resulting in our lunar friend appearing 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than normal.

Our friends on Flickr snapped some incredible … Read more