Bow, nerds, and greet your king. Before this week, Richard Garriott was already geek royalty. The son of an astronaut, Garriott grew up in a NASA village, started writing best-selling videogames in high school, and has voyaged to the bottom of the ocean. Now Garriott has achieved the crown jewel of nerdom: he's in space.

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After decades of staying in Earth orbit, NASA hopes to return to the moon. There, astronauts will drive Chariot, the newly designed replacement for the lunar rover that transported astronauts and moon rocks during the Apollo 15 through 17 missions in 1971 and 1972.

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Snug in Earth’s orbit, Hubble is free from the background glare that earthly telescopes must fight to see the stars. This allows its supersensitive camera to take better photos of galaxies farther away—and thus much dimmer—than any optical telescope on the ground can. But despite being closer to the moon than any other telescope, there’s no way the scope could snap a photo of that one small step man took 40 years ago.

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The three members of the 16th International Space Station crew experienced a "ballistic trajectory" while returning from the station to the steppes of Kazakhstan in their Soyuz capsule on Saturday. Translation: Their spacecraft fell to earth like a lead weight, subjecting them to double the g-forces expected.

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A new survey of active-duty astronauts and flight surgeons reveals that there's only been one incident of a NASA crew member under the influence of drugs or alcohol leading up to launch day. And on the day itself, the survey reports that nobody had been guilty of excessive drinking or drug use.

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