a great collection of quotes in support of space exploration and development. Including one of my personal favorites:

If you are reading this, and feel discouraged by an inability to communicate to others your own feelings about the importance of an active space development effort, comfort yourself with this thought: If you want to be on the leading edge of anything, you have by definition to be a couple of standard deviations away from most people. That makes you an odd-ball. The trick is to learn to accept it, then to like it, and keep on making lots of noise for what you believe in.

- Charles Sheffield, 1978

Free floating planets in the Milky Way outnumber stars by the  thousands, and among them life-bearing planets may exist in large numbers. According to a recent report, for every star in our galaxy a few thousand dimly-lit icy planets could exist in interstellar space and harbor life.  

A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. So argues an international team of scientists led by Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, UK. 
[…]
The scientists have proposed that these life-bearing planets originated in the early Universe within a few million years of the Big Bang, and that they make up most of the so-called “missing mass” of galaxies.  

Check out this list of the top ten non-profit societies lifted straight out of science fiction; except they’re real. If you’re looking for an interesting place to offset your taxable income this year, these are your ticket:

1. Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology
2. The Planetary Society
3. Space Tourism Society
4. SETI: Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
5. Mormon Transhumanist Association
6. Humanity+
7. Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
8. Singularity Institute
9. The Immortality Institute
10. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Good links for tracking what’s going on with the SpaceX/NASA mission of Dragon going to the ISS:

• Live view of Dragon & ISS: http://www.lizard-tail.com/isana/tracking/
• High Rez Photos: http://spacexlaunch.zenfolio.com/
• Broadcast Quality Videos: http://vimeo.com/spacexlaunch

In the photo are the ISS astronaut crew watching the live broadcast of the Falcon 9/Dragon launch, posted on André Kuipers’ photostream.

Scifi author Charles Stross thinks that starships will never happen; at least not in the conventional sense. In a recent article he argues that instead of hauling “ugly bags of mostly water” across the void, our future will be one of transferring the human consciousness as information onto an artificial substrate (thus making it much more suitable to space travel).

What intrigues me is the possibility that the entire conceptual framework of the starship is a dangerously misleading dead-end, and that what we need is a new framework for thinking about interstellar travel.

The very word “starship” is a concatenation of two other words -- star, and ship. The first is pretty harmless; it merely defines the scale factor we’re talking about, as opposed to interplanetary ship, or moon ship, or Atlantic-crossing steam ship. But the second word comes with a whole freightload of unwanted baggage, and I’m of a mind that serious futurists or SF writers might want to think about ditching it completely and looking for something new.