2009 has come and gone, and it was a banner year for all things related to space, science, Club Galahad and The Big Brain Club. As we roll ahead into 2010 — new year, new decade, new opportunities — we thought it would be appropriate to take a look back at the past 12 months and reflect on some of the highlights. What follows is a small sampling of the stories and events that kept us busy this year. As always, YOU played a crucial role in all of this because of your continued support of the Galahad book series, this website and its sister-sites, BigBrainClub.com and DomTesta.com. So thank you… and Happy New Year! (more…)

We at Club Galahad have made linking to MSNBC’s remarkable Month in Space feature a more-or-less regular practice since we stumbled across it this summer. With such a wide-ranging collection of photos both of and from space, it never disappoints. There is always something to make your mouth open slightly and your head tilt gently to one side in wonder.

So you can imagine how excited we were to come across The Year in Space — a collection of the best space photos from 2009. You can judge for yourself, but some of our favorites include the supermassive black hole, Saturn’s moons, and the eruption of a Russian volcano (pictured left).

Here’s hoping that 2010 has just as many great stories and images in store for us…

‘Tis the season for all sorts of silly, fun, holiday-themed news stories. And this humble blog post is no different.

If you haven’t seen it yet, follow this link to check out the picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) that resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula. It’s called R136.

There’s a lot to like about R136: it’s the “most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood;” this picture of it was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and spans about 100 light years; and, oh yeah, it looks very much like the image of a Christmas tree. See it?

This star cluster is a mere 170,000 light years from Earth, which allows the Hubble to take these incredibly detailed photos. We doubt that we could capture such an image with the 10 megapixel camera we got for Christmas last year — although that remains a lovely and cherished gift.

There’s been no shortage of big news in the world of space science these past few months: water on the moon, the successful completion of the Atlantis STS-129 mission, and the unveiling of the first commercial spacecraft among them.

However, it looks like there are some potentially HUGE developments coming our way in the very new future. Scientists are in the process of discovering thousands of previously unknown planets, and it’s expected that the number of Earth-link planets could easily be in the hundreds.

The official announcements will begin to roll out next month, but based on the comments of those involved, it seems clear that there are some big new discoveries on the horizon. Here’s the quote that got our attention:

“I was not prescient enough to anticipate something that we’re seeing,” David Latham, a mission co-investigator from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told msnbc.com. “There are some good things coming.”

What does that mean? Who knows, but it looks like we’ll be finding out soon. In the meantime, watch this video about the Kepler spacecraft and the COROT satellite and cross your fingers that we’re all about to have our minds blown by whatever it is they’re about to uncover.

In the kind of development that sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, a celebrity British billionaire on Monday unveiled a spaceship designed to take paying customers into space for the low, low price of $200,000. Roughly 300 people have already signed up, and flights are tentatively scheduled to begin in 2011.

The link above will take you to the full story, and this link will take you to a slideshow.

You may know the man behind all this — his name is Richard Branson, and he’s led quite the remarkable life. Branson owns a record label and an airline (among many other businesses) and is known as something of a daredevil. Take, for example, the time in 1987 that he and his cohorts became the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a hot air balloon, reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour.

Since then he’s set his sights even higher, culminating in the unveiling of the first-ever commercial spaceship this week, dubbed ‘VSS Enterprise’ in tribute to the many British and American navy ships that have borne that name, and also to the fictional ‘Star Trek’ spacecraft that has been a staple of American pop culture for over 40 years.

As to the obvious question of the ship’s safety — three people died during an engine-test failure in 2007 — Branson seems confident that any such problems are behind him. H says he plans to go up aboard Enterprise himself, and that he plans to take his mother with him. Godspeed, sir.

You know what’s pretty cool? Science. And do you know why? Because science gives us stuff like this nugget, first reported by the Associated Press:

“A group of European scientists say they have successfully connected a robotic hand to a man who had lost an arm,  allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial hand and control it with his thoughts.”

That’s right. An Italian man lost his left hand and forearm in a car accident, so doctors just gave him a new bionic arm, and he learned to control it with his mind as though it were a real, organic body part. They haven’t released the man’s name, but you can’t help but wonder if it rhymes with duke flytalker, right?