Just because we civilians have to suffer through meals of stringy beef and stale chicken onflights doesn’t mean that astronauts must tolerate the same.

Even at zero-g, space explorers can get hankerings for something a bit more interesting. This summer, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) unveiled 29 Japanese food products to be used on the International Space Station.

More on the menu here.

But the food of the future sure looks a lot like those pureed fruit bags that caused quite a stir at Pop!Tech 2006.

Peter Diamandis on the bottom right

On April 26th 2007, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking experienced complete weightlessness making him the first person with a disability to have the experience. The historic trip also brings one of the most influential thinkers on the cosmos closer to the stars.

Zero-G the privately held “space entertainment and tourism” company was founded by Peter Diamandis (Pop!Tech 2005 Speaker). Zero-G and The Sharper Image sponsored Hawking’s trip embarked from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Flights take place in a modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft.

When asked about the experience, Hawking said, “It was amazing. I could have gone on and on–space here I come!”

The Hawking flight was organized to benefit several charities.

Easter Seals
Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation
The X Prize Foundation
Augie’s Quest

Two seats aboard the flight were donated by Zero-G to each charity for them to auction off. All together the charities raised $144,000 dollars.

This trip on the Zero-G shuttle is in preparation for a hopeful space launch for Hawking on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic which launches in 2009.

And if you have $3,500 to spare, you can reserve a seat in one of Zero-G’s upcoming flights.

These two images, separated by nearly half a century, represent the dreams of human exploration of space. Together they tell a story of lost opportunity and future promise.

Forty-five years ago today astronaut John Glenn completed an epoch space mission making him the first American to orbit the Earth. The Port Arthur News reported: “Glancing at the Earth at altitudes ranging from 100 to 160 miles, Glenn had a breathtaking panoramic view stretching 1,800 miles from horizon to horizon. He described the view as ‘tremendous’ and a ‘beautiful sight.’”

Just a few weeks ago the Cassini spacecraft snapped the above picture of Titan, the biggest of the 56 known moons orbiting Saturn and the second largest moon in our solar system. The Cassini spacecraft is the first to explore the Saturn system of rings and moons from orbit.

As planetary scientist (and 2005 Pop!Tech speaker) Carolyn Porco writes in a fabulous New York Times Op-Ed piece published today, in the 1960s the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating: plans were laid for the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars by the 1980s.

Instead, by abandoning the Apollo space program the country lost a capital investment of close to $160 billion and the collective knowledge of the tens of thousands of space engineers and scientists.

Yet Porco also paints an amazing vision: one of a revitalized NASA with plans to return to the Moon with a party of humans by 2020, a solar-powered human-tended research outpost by 2025 and preparations for a Mars trip soon after.

As she says: “Humanity’s future need not be confined to mere survival on our home planet. Other worlds beckon, we know how to reach them and we will once more be outward bound.”

It’s an ambitious and inspiring vision of the future–and one that maybe this time around, we can get right.