As reported here a few days ago, Russia has announced its plans adding another Soyuz craft to its fleet dedicated to and taking two paying passengers along with a professional astronaut pilot as early as 2013.

So you want to take a trip into space, and you happen to have a $200,000 in your pocket. Congratulations, you’re eligible for a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two. So how do book your trip when you can’t find a listing for “space” on Travelocity?

In a press release dated 9/27/10, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos announced its plans to allow two space tourists to ride its Soyuz craft along with a professional cosmonaut as pilot. “Such a proposal is under consideration of Roscosmos and the American Space Adventures (company)” said Alexei Krasnov, head of Roscosmos’ manned flights department. “There are also detailed offers which we will study in Washington at a meeting of space agencies’ heads,” he said.

There’s only one way to get from Earth to the International Space Station ( ISS): First, you have to pay about $30 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz. Then, you spend six months learning both Russian and other necessary skills to handle yourself in weightlessness and during possible emergencies. Only then can you join the elite seven civilians who have made the trip to date.

The TED Conference lecture series includes anecdotes and stories from the movers and shakers of the world, such as Richard Branson and Benoit Mandelbrot, as well as other people with tales to tell. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, but TED has come to mean “ideas worth spreading.”

Before he retired from NASA in 2000, Dr. Charles T. Bourland had researched and designed food for astronauts from the Mercury program to the International Space Station (ISS). With all that Dr. Bourland knows about food in space, he could write a book. So he did. It’s “The Astronaut’s Cookbook: Tales, Recipes, and More.”

In Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, food comes just below water, a little above shelter and sex. In the hierarchy of curiosity about what really goes on in space, food comes in right after how they use the toilet. In other words...really important.

When you think of manned space flight, what comes to mind? For some, it’s images of astronaut candidates being tested for the “right stuff:” getting poked and prodded in myriad medical exams, climbing in and out of mock space capsules, and undergoing training in jungles and deserts...as well as being strapped into large centrifuges and subjected to crushing g-forces.

In a recent interview with Cosmic Log famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking declared that humans must be off planet Earth in the next 100 years or face possible extinction.

In a previous article, we reported that Sean O'Keefe may have perished in an airplane crash that killed Alaskan senator Ted Stevens, among others.