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Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews' health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency's technological focus in the next five years.

Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential "Goldilocks" planet in a different solar system. A "Goldilocks" planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star - not too hot, not to cold - that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth's natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC's recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.

NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has released the first footage shot of the moon's far side.

The 30-second clip (after the jump) sweeps from the moon's northern pole to the southern polar region, passing, among other features, the Mare Orientale, a 560-mile wide dry sea that extends onto the side we can see from Earth.

We all know that the world is going to end in December 2012 because a giant solar eruption is going to swallow the Earth. Or is it supposed to be the implosion of the Yellowstone Caldera? Reversal of the global poles? Does anybody even care about how the Earth will end if we are all doomed anyway?

Apparently, yes. NASA has set up a Frequently Asked Questions page on its website to answer questions pertaining to the end of existence. According to NASA, there is no scientific evidence that the world is going to end in 2012. Contrary to popular beliefs, put your trust in science and do not set up the foundations for that underground bunker just yet.

We last wrote about the Random Hacks of Kindness operation a year ago. Twice a year, a group of programmers gather together for an intense weekend in 28 different cities around the world to benefit some good causes and write some code. Last weekend was the fifth such occurrence, with about a thousand different participants and with more than 90 projects being worked on. That is a lot of hacking going on, almost too much to review in a single article.

Philosophically, the open source concept borrows some selected elements from socialism. It upholds a notion of the "common good," it eschews the appearance of authority or hierarchy, and it often frowns upon capitalizing on one's own work, insofar as being exclusive. In practice, however, open source projects may look less like Big Brother from 1984 and more like Big Brother from reality TV.

Joshua McKenty's still-young career is, compared to those of other capitalist executives, surprisingly replete. He's led development teams for the Netscape browser, and is intimately familiar with Netscape's successors at Mozilla. His next stroke of luck was with the space program, helping to create and then lead one of the world's most successful cloud computing projects, NASA Nebula. His work with NASA spawned the open source community's most successful - and perhaps most important - project in the last few years, the OpenStack cloud operating system - and he sits on that project's governing body. In-between jobs, he just happened to pioneer an earthquake modeling system for the World Bank.

The space program is not entirely about space, and never was. It's about learning about how to solve problems. First, you change your perspective about what those problems are. From a new angle, the most insurmountable challenges can seem resolvable.

The next generation of cloud computing resources can be traced back to NASA, and not very long ago. Faced with the onus of either evolving for much greater cost efficiency or shutting down, NASA's Ames Research Center came up with a way to fit a cloud computing nucleus full of fairly ordinary blade servers into a simple shipping container. From Project Nebula, created with considerable help from RackSpace, came the concept of a radically scalable cloud infrastructure, which we now know as OpenStack.

Today at OSCon former NASA CTO Chris Kemp announced his new company Nebula, which will sell an OpenStack based appliance for cloud computing. The appliances are based on the OpenCompute standards. The idea is to make it possible for an organization to be able to purchase a bunch of these appliances and be up and running on an industry standard cloud environment without the need for extensive consulting and expertise.

OpenStack is a popular open source cloud operating system used by more than 90 companies and the U.S. government. In the world of cloud, OpenStack is where the cool kids hang out and where some of the most talented developers in the world program. Yet, it almost never came to be.

OpensStack had its one-year anniversary on July 19. The cloud structure has its roots in NASA. The story of OpenStack is really the story of how NASA created its Do It Yourself cloud environment - NASA Nebula. With just a few developers working on a side project in the basement of the NASA Ames Research Center outside of Mountain View, Calif., the seeds of OpenStack and Nebula were planted. Yet, as with any government program, lack of funding almost killed the project several times and threatens to kill its future. It took the president to really get it off the ground.

Spend your own money to travel to Florida during its least pleasant season, bum a ride to a rented house split with strangers, and wake up on a couch before dawn multiple days in a row. That's no vacation - unless NASA requests your company.

The space agency invited a selection of its Twitter followers to the last five shuttle launches, including the July 8 liftoff of Atlantis, the last of the shuttle program. (I attended the Tweetup held in April and May for the final launch of Endeavour, then returned this month with a press pass.) Some 700 people have now traveled to its launch Tweetups, while hundreds more have attended shorter gatherings at its centers.