While space travel is safe for the most part, sometimes things go really wrong. Like last week's NASA's rocket explosion on the Wallops Island, where an ATK Launch Vehicle X-1 exploded only seconds after liftoff, with hazardous debris falling on land and sea. We are used to seeing the fireworks in the air, but what happens when that flaming debris hits the ground is much more spectacular and scary, as you can see in this video.

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The Boston Globe's Big Picture blog continues its incredible coverage of all things wonderful to look at today with a spread relating to the space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope. Atlantis is scheduled to launch on October 8, equipped with all manner of instruments, batteries and gyroscopes for Hubble. Pictured above is one of the massive Atlantis engines being moved to the main bay for installation. That's just one engine, though—there's plenty of space-related tech porn to be found in the rest of the spread, too.

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The ISS is full of laptops, used for experiments, email, or just watching movie rips on VCDs in 2001. But this time, someone's laptop has managed to make it all the way up into Earth orbit carrying the Gammima.AG worm--one that leeches login data for Asian MMORPGs. We're doomed!

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According to the NASA International Space Station status report, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko used a digital camera with 800mm telephoto lenses and a video camera to take images of the "after-effects of border conflict operations in the Caucasus." In theory, this seems to have violated the non-military use clause of the station, but Russia has claimed "humanitarian motives."

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Looking for a space shuttle to convert into a funky dwelling? Believe it or not, there are quite a few pieces of once cutting edge space technology that have been left to rot. For example: there is a Russian Buran space shuttle lying abandoned in the Arabian desert, a NASA Jet Propulsion Lab sitting in a dusty lot, and the infamous launch pad 34 where the three astronauts aboard Apollo 1 died in a fire that broke out during a test exercise. The folks at OObject have put together a list of these relics along with 9 others that you may find surprising. [OObject]

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Bill Daley is the food critic for the Chicago Tribune, accustomed to differentiating the finer points of the expensive, aged steaks of Rush Street, not the freeze dried packets of astronaut cuisine. So when NASA sent him a few packets to test out (most of them cooked through injection with hot water) we were pretty keen on hearing just how well our men and women of the cosmos were eating (with no access to real Cosmos, of course). His verdict? Sometimes the food was quite good, other times, not so much.

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Usually the venerable web cam is used for modest, local tasks, like taking deep-in-thought Facebook profile pics, making me-too webcasts, or undercover girl's locker room documentaries. But did you know there's also a web cam circling the Red Planet right now? Called the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC), the cam is attached to the European Space Agency's Mars Express, and was last used to visually confirm the Beagle lander's separation from the main spacecraft. It was then put into sleep mode, and has been in that state for the past three years. Bo-ring. The ESA folks thought so too, and on a whim they gave the command to wake up back in 2007. It did, and now they want your help processing a year's worth of images.

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the last of the space agency's Great Observatories satellites to launch, celebrated its fifth birthday recently... giving me the opportunity to post this amazing multigenerational picture of star-forming region in the constellation Cassiopeia, 6,500 light-years from Earth. The photo takes in an area equivalent to four full moons and puts on show how one generation of massive stars can give birth to the next.

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After a test satellite launch (Iran: success! USA: failure!) this past weekend carried out with one of their many, many missiles, Iran is rolling with the momentum and announcing plans to put a man in space within 10 years. While the feasibility of such a plan remains up in the air, it of course isn't the first time such an audacious goal has been set.

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Wired has a great feature on Richard Garriott, the father of MMORPG OG Ultima and the latest millionaire to get blasted up to the ISS as a paying tourist. More specifically, the gruelling 8 months of training Garriott must first endure at Zvyozdny Gorodok, (Star City), a.k.a. Yuri's house, a.k.a. where space flight was born. All tourists on the ISS must be capable of performing mission-critical duties in the case of an emergency, and Wired followed Garriott through the historic site every step of the way, grabbing fantastic photos of this incredibly historic facility in the process.

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