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Yesterday, the Hubble Space Telescope reached its 21st birthday. Given the initial problems with its lens, the project to watch our universe from outside of the confines of atmosphere has proven pretty successful. (Just goes to show, neither person nor telescope need be defined by youthful screw-ups.)

To celebrate this milestone, NASA has found a particularly lovely pair of galaxies to photograph. Known by the mellifluous appellation of Arp 273, it consists of UGC 1813, on top, and UGC 1810, the one below, whose gravity has shaped the stars of its sister galaxy into the shape of a pinkish rose.

In the early hours of the morning, Commander Mark Polansky sat watching the Tour de France when he got the call that they'd be fueling NASA Endeavour's external tank. Nearly 30,000 of his Twitter followers woke up and rejoiced at the news. Today we're going to see lift off.

The NASA Endeavour was set to launch to the International Space Station today at 7:13PM EDT from Cape Canaveral, Florida after a 24 hour lightning-induced delay. The mission was delayed several times and while Commander Mark Polansky's Twitter account and NASA's official account announced that the launch was likely to happen, online viewers watched via NASA TV as the mission was scrubbed with only minutes to spare. The launch has been rescheduled for 6:51PM EDT tomorrow.

Social networking has been notoriously hard to monetize. Despite loads and loads of inventory, hitting on an ad model that works has proved thus far elusive. Traditional banners haven't worked, contextual ads have been lackluster, selling app installs isn't sustainable, and getting people to sell to their friends hasn't worked. There's just no native ad format for social networks. A new startup that launches today called SocialCash thinks it has hit on the solution: incentivize ad participation with free stuff.

Note: See update at the bottom of this post.