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For the first time in the history of humankind, economical participation in space exploration is a reality. With Mars One's recent launch of a crowdfunding campaign, it's now possible to send a personal item to distances far beyond your wildest dreams. For many, the Mars One mission is the gateway to a new era in man's historic reach for the stars.

For about 50 years, government organizations have been funding and managing space exploration across the globe. Government run exploration, funded by public monies, has provided limited access to most citizens of those countries. In the last few years, private organizations such as Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Eric Anderson's Space Adventures have made space exploration possible for the mega-rich. A flight with Virgin Galactic 68 miles above Earth goes for a cool $250,000 while the potential 2017 flight to the moon from Space Adventures is rumored to cost an astronomical $150 million. There are others in between, but none as accessible as Mars One. Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One, has set his sights on involving the everyday man and woman in space exploration

The public is responding in novel ways to share its own enthusiasm. There's the annual Yuri's Night space party April 12, celebrating Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space April 12, 1961, and promoting space exploration. The Desert Wizards of Mars, a global group of scientists, designers, and builders, bring space education to Burning Man. The Facebook community Space Hipsters disseminate news about space issues, enthusiast meet-ups, and related personal anecdotes among its roughly 3000 members. (NASA's Jacobs drops in on occasion to say hi "and show that we're paying attention.")

The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to launch an experimental space plane this Wednesday to test out technologies needed for vehicles to survive the return to Earth from space.

The unmanned space plane, called the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), is slated to blast off Wednesday (Feb. 11) at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) from French Guiana. Its suborbital flight will last 100 minutes. But first, the reusable spacecraft must separate from the rocket by itself while out of contact with Earth. (You can watch the IXV liftoff live here on Space.com, courtesy of ESA.)

Read any debate about space exploration, and this question will invariably come up. "Why should we be spending money exploring space when there are so many problems here on Earth that we need to solve first?" It's a tricky one. I've got a simple answer; space exploration is awesome. Come on, think of space ships traveling to other worlds - that's really cool.

Okay, perhaps I've got too simplistic an argument, so I turned to the astrosphere and posed the question to other space bloggers. Here's what they had to say…

The space program was forged from paranoia and fear. Our first rockets were weapons. Our first moves into the world beyond our own were motivated by competition. But when we finally got ourselves into space -- when we first traveled around our lonely planet, and took our first bounding leaps on the moon -- many of those baser motivations transformed into something more transcendent and profound: Space came to mean something much more than ideology. Space ended up teaching us about life on Earth.

The story of how the space missions evolved from the X-15 fighter jet in 1959 to get people into space is explained. The programs began with the Mercury missions: 7 men were selected to carry the first astronaut into space "on top of a rocket capsule". There was a rush because of competition with Russia: initially not much was known (a) whether the rockets would work, and (b) whether man could survive in space. At the beginning an ape called "Ham" was the first animal that flew. Eventually Alan Shepard was selected, BUT it is learned that the Soviet Union had been the first nation to put a man in space: Yuri Gagarin.

"Russia plans to send probes to Jupiter and Venus, land a network of unmanned stations on Mars and ferry Russian cosmonauts to the surface of the Moon - all by 2030. That's according to a leaked document from the country's space agency. Wired U.K. The cosmically ambitious plans were submitted to the government by the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) this month, according to a report in the Kommersant, Russia's business-focused daily newspaper. The document lays out a blueprint for the country's space industry to follow in the next 18 years, up to 2030. It's rare for Russia to set a deadline for its future space plans."

"Science and communism are inseparable! That is the basic message of this amazing collection of Soviet space propaganda posters that will be auctioned off on Apr. 22. Featuring Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, the first and second humans to reach space, along with Krushchev, and of course Lenin, these posters glorify the the Soviet Union's technological prowess and importance in the world, and in the universe. Many of the posters focus on the role the workers played in the space race, and the ordinary citizen's duty to feel immensely proud of Mother Russia's accomplishments. The posters have messages such as "Comrades! Soviet Land Has From Now On Become the Shore of the Universe!" or "The Tenth Planet Symbolizes the Victory of Communism!" and "Be Proud, Soviet, You Opened a Path from the Earth to the Stars!" One of my favorites is "Lenin Is With Us, Immortal and Majestic, the Thoughts, Words and Deeds of Ilyich Are Propagating Through the Universe.""

National Geographic Channel is taking viewers around the world-literally-in this spectacular two-hour television event broadcasting LIVE from the International Space Station (ISS) and Mission Control in Houston, Texas. Made in collaboration with NASA, we'll go into orbit with astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata as they fly at 17,500 mph nearly 250 miles above the earth's surface on the International Space Station, while astronaut Mike Massimino joins host Soledad O'Brien on the ground at Mission Control in Houston. From space, Mastracchio and Wakata will give viewers a fully guided tour, showing us how they live for months in microgravity. They'll conduct never-before-broadcast experiments that demonstrate the real-world value of the science conducted on the floating laboratory. Plus get ready for stunning shots of Earth, from sunset and sunrise, to city lights and green aurora, to lightning storms and shooting stars. You've never seen our planet like this before.

This NASA documentary celebrates 50 years of extravehicular activity (EVA) or spacewalks that began with the first two EVAs conducted by Russian Alexey Leonov in March 1965 and American astronaut Edward White in June 1965 . The documentary features interviews with NASA Administrator and astronaut, Charles Bolden, NASA Deputy Administrator and spacesuit designer, Dava Newman, as well as other astronauts, engineers, technicians, managers and luminaries of spacewalk history. They share their personal stories and thoughts that cover the full EVA experience-- from the early spacewalking experiences, to spacesuit manufacturing, to modern day spacewalks aboard the International Space Station as well as what the future holds for humans working on a tether in space. "Suit Up," is narrated by actor and fan of space exploration Jon Cryer. Cryer recently traveled to Star City, NASA Headquarters and the Johnson Space Center to film an upcoming Travel Channel documentary series.

Here at Popular Science, we love space-and we know you do too. From seeing the nearly-true colors of Europa, a molten metal orb levitate in microgravity, or even a map of a distant protoplanet, pictures of and from beyond Earth are often the best way to journey to the final frontier.
To that end, this is your (almost) daily dose of amazing space imagery. Bookmark this page to see a wide variety of space-related eye candy, including photographs our home planet taken from orbit, stunning scientific visualizations, and of course, amazing astronomy images.

Find out why NASA astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison wanted to go into space in this profile from NOVA's The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers.

A physician, a chemical engineer, a teacher, a dancer, and the first African American woman astronaut to go to space, Dr. Jemison launched into orbit on September 12, 1992 as a STS-47 Mission Specialist for Space Shuttle Endeavor. During the eight day mission, she and the STS-47 crew conducted 44 life science and materials processing experiments.

"Astronomers are worried. It's not some new unexplained mystery of the universe or the upcoming launch of a space telescope that is unnerving them, though. The problems they currently face are much more down-to-Earth - and the future of space exploration hangs in the balance. The anxiety stems from the fact that astronomy, especially space-based astronomy, is just plain expensive. And with federal budgets tightening, the government will be less and less able to make huge investments in big science projects. "We may see in the next decade or so an end to the search for the laws of nature which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes," warned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg in January during the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas."

I like to point out that the space program technology transfer is two-way. Many NASA engineers give their expertise and spare time to apply space program technology to problems facing the developing world. In doing so, they learn valuable lessons that will allow us to push space exploration beyond low-earth orbit. The highly efficient engineering approaches that are required in the developing world - robust solutions that do not require a lot of maintenance, resupply or training - are the same approaches we need to employ if we are going to break out of the bounds of low-earth orbit.

Final preparations are under way for what could be one of the most ambitious feats in space exploration.
On Wednesday, the European Space Agency will try to land a tiny spacecraft on a comet. This has never been attempted before.
The comet is about 300 million miles away (500 million km), far beyond Mars and is racing through space at about 34,000 mph (55,000 km/h).
Esa's Rosetta satellite has flown for 10 years in a four-billion-mile (6.5 billion km) series of loops around the Sun to pick up enough speed to fly alongside the comet, and it will now release a lander, called Philae, to try to touch down.
But the landing will be extremely challenging, as BBC Science Editor David Shukman explains.

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Update 5:53 p.m. Well that was quick. High upper altitude winds scrubbed the launch for tonight, so SpaceX will have to try again tomorrow. See you then!
Update 5:50 p.m. We're getting ready to roll! The SpaceX livestream is up and running, with some snappy elevator music to keep us occupied until we see what's going on at the launch pad.
Original story below:
For SpaceX tonight, it's time for round two of "catch the rocket."
The company will attempt to launch another Falcon 9 rocket at 6:05 p.m. ET. On board is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite designed to orbit the Earth and keep a lookout for incoming solar storms that can muck up communication and power systems.
DSCOVR has waited 17 long years to get into space, making this launch particularly exciting. But an extra-special part of this mission happens after launch: The majority of the Falcon 9 rocket will attempt to safely land itself on an autonomous drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean. If the feat is successful, it'll be a big step toward a future in which reusable rockets may become the norm.
Typically, most of a rocket is either destroyed or lost after it leaves the launch pad, never to be recovered. This makes space travel pricey because an entirely new rocket must be built for every launch. SpaceX hopes to change that paradigm by recovering as much of the rocket as it can for reuse in future launches. And that could drastically reduce the cost of spaceflight.
To save its rockets, SpaceX now equips them with "hypersonic grid fins." These pop-out devices slow and guide the Falcon 9 toward its target, and they're powered by a hydraulic system that releases fluids over time to control the descent. In a previous attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX apparently didn't store enough hydraulic fluid in the system. The result: The rocket hit its target a bit too hard:

We've seen dozens and dozens of photos and videos of Friday's solar eclipse, but most of them have one thing in common: They're taken from Earth.

The European Space Agency posted an image of the eclipse as seen from an entirely different perspective: space. The agency's sun-watching Proba-2 mini-satellite took this photo Friday, using extreme ultraviolet wavelengths to capture the sun's corona.

The first six weeks of Scott Kelly's marathon year aboard the International Space Station (ISS) haven't been easy. There was the reacclimation to zero-gravity, the failure of a Russian cargo ship carrying needed supplies, the cancellation of singer Sarah Brightman's planned visit-to say nothing of the constant, minute-by-minute work schedule that is the stuff of any day aboard the station.

Kelly and astronaut Terry Virts discussed those things and more in one of at least four video chats TIME will conduct with the ISS during our exclusive Year in Space coverage.

On March 28, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly began a historic year in Space. Time follows Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, as they work the test the boundaries of long-term space travel.

A video from a female astronaut on the International Space Station showing how she washes her hair.