I don’t care what you say. Astronauts have balls of steel. They strap themselves onto a rocket, shit in a vacuum, and are risking death by space junk tonight. Read More

Question: What do you do with a 654,000 pound space station with no budget past 2015? Read More

Lucky cosmonaut and astronauts. Not only do they get the best corner office view ever, but they also have a legit version of Star Trek downloaded. The three men currently on board the International Space Station received a special copy of the film via NASA and settled into a dark node of the station to enjoy the show yesterday.

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In true Big Picture fashion, the wonderful photolog is celebrating the 10 years of the International Space Station. The whole story is chronicled through 32 spectacular photos that are well worth your time. Thankfully there isn’t any pics of the new urine to drinking water action shots. Gross.

I can just imagine Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper’s space helmet fogging up as she yelled “Nooo!!!!” while watching her bag of tools slowly but eternally float away from her. It wasn’t all her fault, though, as a grease gun apparently burst inside the tool bag while she was making repairs on the International Space Station.

All of the greased-up tools must have been too much for her to corral and she lost her handle on the bag itself. The tools will be monitored for a while to make sure they don’t cause any damage to the ISS but once they’re far enough away that they won’t pose a threat, they’ll endlessly hurtle through space with a 14-inch putty knife, a bolt, a spring, and a washer, all accidentally lost on previous repair missions.

Remember that scene in Independence Day when Jeff Goldblum’s character suggests the U.S. upload a computer virus to the alien mothership in order to take it out? It’s one of Hollywood’s greatest moments, obviouslly. Well, it turns out that something along those lines has just happened, minus Will Smith, invading aliens, and exploding skyscrapers.

There’s a computer virus, Gammima.AG, aboard the International Space Station! NASA confirms as much, and has said that it—it’s technically a worm—has been roaming around the station since August, 2007. The worm, in truly dumb fashion, attempts to steal login info for games including Rohan and R2 Reign of Revolution. These games are popular in the Far East, claims the BBC.

It’s not known how the virus made it onboard the ISS in the first place, especially since all traffic between the ISS and Earth is sniffed.

And no, no vital ISS operations are endangered because of the worm’s presence; it’s just annoying.

Whuh oh. Seems the only toilet on the ISS is busted and they can’t get a plumber out there until next week. Astronauts aboard the space station have been able to impose upon the nearby Russian Soyuz spacecraft, using its limited-capacity toilet in a pinch, and have now apparently rigged some sort of sack-like contraption to the toilet on the ISS. Sounds delightful.

The good news is that the problems are only occurring when going number one. The astronauts can go number two just fine, Lord o’ Mercy.

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In order to promote its Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the European Space Agency held a contest last summer. The rules were simple; send in a playlist of ten songs to load onto an MP3 player that the un-manned ATV would fly up to astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Therese Miljeteig, a 14-year-old from Norway, won the competition with this playlist…

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