Former U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon may or may not have been a crook, but one thing’s for sure: He had a backup plan in case the astronauts of the first manned mission to the moon never returned to Earth. Nixon had a speech and a plan of action prepared in the event of a spacebound disaster, according to The Smoking Gun:

After making condolence calls to the “widows-to-be,” Nixon would have said, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.” We’ve also included a second memo–prepared by NASA for the president and vice president–suggesting statements in the event of Apollo “crew fatalities.” The presidential lamentation ended by noting that the dead men “have followed a star, in night of space, and we for whom they went will not forget.” 

He even had a statement to the families of the space explorers of Apollo XI, complete with blanks to fill in with the astronauts’ names.

Luckily, as we’re all aware, the mission went smoothly. But this just-in-case plan (you can read the actual memo here) gives us the creepy feeling of reading the obituary of someone who is still alive.

Addendum: This memo was first published on The Smoking Gun in August of 2005.

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Image: flickr / karismafilms

Former man-on-the-moon Buzz Aldrin apparently has taken one giant leap for rapkind: He has recorded a rap song called “Rocket Experience.”

Aldrin teamed up with Snoop Dogg, Quincy Jones, and Soulja Boy to produce the rap. Check out the video spoof of Dogg, Jones, and Aldrin recording, Spinal Tap style. Aldrin hopes the song will foster an interest in space in today’s young people. He told USA Today:

“I’m not too good at carrying a tune, but I do have rhythm,” says Aldrin, who got the idea from a family member who felt the genre would have a broad reach. Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation, which promotes science and exploration, is one of three beneficiaries of the song’s iTunes sales. “I want kids interested in space. It’s their future”….[Aldrin] says rapping with Snoop Dogg proved almost as daunting as space. “Snoop had this great hand language going as he sang, which was hard for me,” Aldrin says. “But when it comes to getting people’s attention, comedy goes a long way.”

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Image: flickr / insidetwit

In reality Chris Pine’s character in Star Trek might well have looked more like Seinfeld’s George Costanza—that is, if the makers of the sci-fi flick had considered the fact that long-term space travel is likely to make a person look fat and ugly.

Besides food and water, humans need gravity in order to look normal—without it, our muscles would wither away, our bones wouldn’t develop properly, and our faces would become bloated. According to astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell at the University College London, when a person is in space for an extended amount of time, fluids that are normally kept in the lower limbs start to accumulate in the head, causing it to swell up. The hair would fall out, because hair is no longer needed to help keep the bodywarm. To top it all off, astronauts could expect the onset of space-obesity, the result of a lack of exercise in microgravity.
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• Bees and their hives aren’t just for honey anymore: They might help farmers in Kenya deter elephant raids that threaten crops.

• It’s a nice day for a weightless wedding, at least for the Brooklyn couple that will get married in zero gravity later this month. They’ll tie the knot on a commercial weightless flight, with a price tag of $5,200 per person.

• Conservatives are more easily grossed out by bugs, blood, and guts than are their liberal counterparts, according to a study in the journal Cognition & Emotion.

• And, finally, a video of the world’s only pet hippo!

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• Forget Graceland: If you’re in Huntsville, Ala., be sure to visit the graves of spacemonkeys Able and Baker, the first monkeys to survive a space flight. You can find the graves easily—they’re strewn with bananas.

• If you’re reading this, you have a UFO to thank—at least according to a Russian scientist, who claims an alien spacecraft saved earth from an approaching meteorite by smashing into it a century ago.

• To test whether beer or a joint does more damage to driving skills, researchers got students drunk, or high on marijuana. The results? Stoned drivers drive significantly slower than drunk ones, but—surprise!—both groups drove less safely than their placebo’ed peers.

• Think you’re smart? Not compared to this 16-year-old Iraqi. It took him only four months to solve a math problem that had been baffling academics for 300 years.

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Not that Star Trek was lacking for an audience to begin with, but it’s now been screened in space, surely spoiling entertainment for astronauts from here on out.

Last week, Paramount Pictures transferred a copy of the movie to NASA’s Houston center, which then uploaded the blockbuster to the International Space Station. Astronaut Michael Barratt then used a laptop to watch it inside the Unity module.

Still no word on whether he found it as uniformly “meh” as we did (well, not all of us).

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Image: Flickr / culture.culte

Astronaut Mike Massimino is the first man to tweet from space. Now we know for sure that the “launch was awesome!!”

Now that the anxiety over swine-flu fears have receded somewhat, a virus that up to 99 percent of us have can cause high blood pressure.

There’s something in the air in Barcelona and Madrid. It’s not love, it’s drugs.

Who needs Gatorade when all you need is the Michael Phelps diet—corn flakes and milk—to perform well.

English rats have reportedly developed resistance to poison. Sometimes we wish evolution were not true.

Last week’s Weird Science Roundup included a NASA-funded report warning if a glob of the sun’s plasma were to escape and enter the earth’s magnetic shield, it could disrupt our entire power grid… and basically cause the end of the world as we know it.

So just how credible is this theory? We asked our own Phil Plait for his thoughts on the matter, which, alarmingly, did not include it being a totally bogus possibility. Here’s what he had to say:

Actually, while they play up the worst cases, what they say is not totally out of bounds. I’m not sure about the number of deaths quoted, but the scenarios are plausible. Our grid is running nearly at capacity, and a huge DC current dumped into them from a geomagnetically induced current could overload a huge number of transformers. The 1989 Quebec event was a taste of how that could happen.

From what I understand, North America is more sensitive to this because of the huge granite slab that composes most of the continental plate; it sets up huge currents underground when the magnetic field of the Earth gets slammed from a CME from the Sun, and that induces current in the gird, and bang.

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In the age of unmanned missions to the moon, flowers might become the next iconic picture that will “stir enthusiasm for spaceflight.” And Paragon Space Development wants to be the first company to plant said flowers on the moon. Paragon’s CEO, Taber MacCallum, will plant the seeds in a greenhouse that has been designed to block off space radiation and withstand the moon’s extreme temperatures —which can dip to 240 degrees below Fahrenheit (F) at night and rise to 225 degrees F during the day.

Here’s how MacCallum plans to pull off his feat. First, the greenhouse (made of metal-reinforced glass) will hitch a ride on the Odyssey Moon, one of the competitors for the Google Lunar X Prize. When the greenhouse lands on the moon’s surface, the incubated mustard seeds will complete their life cycle, and bloom into six flowers (that’s all there’s room for). While it would take two weeks for a mustard seed to blossom into a flower on earth, it’ll take just a single lunar day for the flower to bud on the moon.

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It takes Sandra Magnus more than two hours and a roll of duct tape to cook garlic and onions. Granted, she’s doing it all in space, where for the last four months she has been practicing orbital cooking. It’s not the easiest of tasks in a low-gravity environment, where even the tiniest crumbs can get lodged in a shuttle vent or even float into an astronaut’s nose, posing a breathing hazard.

One of Magnus’s first space culinary efforts: pesto canned chicken with vegetables, olives, and sun-dried tomatoes. The result? “Mediocre,” she said. She kept a journal of her cooking experiences, jotting down observations that are sure to come in handy for astronaut posterity. She noted that mixing was most easily done with sealed plastic bags, duct tape proved useful as a way to keep items (especially waste) in place, and when slicing, large pieces were most practical.

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