I first saw an article about Virgin’s Richard Branson on Wired magazine couple months ago. Virgin announced that it was launching a public service where people can experience zero-gravity.

Basically, Virgin is taking space travel into reality for normal people like you and me.

Anyways, I was SiteHoppin’ along for some random Entrecard tech blogs and found a blog post that now you can go make your reservations.

How much does it cost?

Flights require three days of training and cost 200k with a 20k deposit.

Wow, it sounds like a lot of fun, especially if you get to be weightless.

What do you get?

The Mother Ship known as Space Ship Two ( 2nd version of spaceship ) flies to an altitude of about 50,000 feet and disconnects a separate space ship. This rocket ship fires up and shoots into outer space at about 360,000 feet, for the ride of your life. Passengers will experience 3 to 4 g’s during the initial launch into space. The zero gravity environment is said to last about 5 minutes before its decent back to earth. The whole trip takes about 2 1/2 hours.

Although the whole trip only lasts about two and half hours, if you got money to burn, this might be better than most “earthy” experiences such as skydiving, snowboarding, etc…etc…  If you are interested, go get a spot for your first space travel here.

via TechCeleb

This is an attempt to get some great images from space, but without the costs involved by maintaining the Hubble telescope in space, which is great but hugely expensive.

This forms part of the NASA Origins program and by working with the DLR who are the German Aerospace Centre they have developed a flying telescope inside a Boeing 747SP. This will fly at 47,000 feet and should some really cool images from space.

This could be a viable alternative to the Hubble and the space used to maintain it, however we will need to wait for until around 2009to see if it works as good as hope, when it is fully operational.

Source [Oh Gizmo]

This is no ordinary joy stick as is comes with a four great games stored on the memory.

The games are a light sabre duel, assault on Hoth, flying an x-wing and finally the battle of Endor, plenty of action for any Star Wars fan.

Priced at $25

Source [Urban Outfitters]

a href=”http://vimeo.com/359554/l:embed_359554″>Launch and Retrieval from natrium42 on Vimeo.Check out this DIY Balloon that made it 30km!

High altitude ballooning is an emerging hobby, since price of GPS and communications equipment has gotten quite low. It is an excellent hobby for people fascinated by space flight and telerobotics and has many learning aspects — from systems design to electronics design to software engineering. There is also an exciting risk factor, namely, that you could lose your precious electronics if something malfunctions. In this project, many of my interest and knowledge areas came together. Also, I have verified that the Earth is indeed round and that space is black.

Bre Pettis of MAKE also built and launched a near-space balloon, but never found it. See his videos (part 1 and 2).

via Boing…Boing

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Check out these Cool ALAVs (Autonomous Light Vessels) by Jed Berk! Tight! It uses Sun Microsystems SunSpot microcontroller, which can be programmed in Java. I like this idea since there’s a lot of Java embedded processors out there but this ones from the creators. Jed tells me that all the pieces were 3D designed on the computer and laser-cut, kinda cool~

Jed says, Make Store will have these cool DIY ALAV kits soon!

Internet is kinda slow here at the Maker Faire. (That’s why our posts are slow too.) We even switched to a Sprint Broadband but with live video streaming, it’s still too slow but we will keep postin’~

You can come and join us to chat here to while watching our live video.

You can also check out our Flickr photos from Maker Faire Day 1 and Jed’s Flickr for more ALAVs.

At first glance this contraption looks slightly rude, in what way I am not completely sure, but having read about the Solar System Chair it appears to be the cutting edge design for furniture, even though it does look somewhat uncomfortable.

The solar system part of this chair has nothing to do with technology of gadgetry but in fact if you study it closer, the red balls represent the planets rotating around the sun, I think!

Whatever the design purpose it is certainly eye catchingly brilliant, made from bright stainless steel tubing, and the red balls, which act as cushioning, it is defiantly a cool design, but somehow I don’t think that I would like to be sitting on that all day long.

At a price of only £99 ($200) it does appear to be good value.

Source [Tech Chee]

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Holy cow, check these guys out, they made cool homemade rockets that almost resemble powerful bottle rockets!

This is the first static test with our homemade tar/oxygen hybrid rocket motor. James Turner and myself (Eric Stackpole), and two of our friends, Jeff Bernard and Caleb Lesher did this project last summer because we wanted to learn more about how rocket engines work. We built the rocket in James’ garage in Humboldt County, CA completely out of parts we got at the local hardware store. We had previously done a little over 20 tests with polyethylene, but none of them came close to this having much power (note the shaking of the camera when the rocket fires.)

via

Also check out this kid who made his own rocket launcher.

Here’s a cool video of Bre trying to track his ballon that’s headed for space.
You gotta check out the real-time data tracking which is the coolest part.

Good luck in spotting your balloon!

via

Check out some of the cool stuff and people that are going to be at the Maker Faire! (Including us but we have no idea what to bring…yet)

We will get to play with an electric giraff (hopefully) and meet with submarine maker Mike Wernecke.

You can get some tickets for the Maker Faire in San Mateo Fairgrounds here.  And check out Maker Faire in detail here.

There’s some cool Maker Faire Pictures from back in the day here.

More Past Participants and Pics from Maker Faire’s Past

• Engadget at Maker Faire Part I
• Engadget at Maker Faire Part II
• BoingBoing and LaughingSquid
• CNET at MakerFaire