Austrian daredevil ... "Felix Baumgartner's 38.6-kilometre freefall from the edge of space had us staring in jaw-dropping awe at screens, setting social media alight." Photo: Reuters

Space is hip again. Whether it's a Felix Baumgartner skydiving his way past the sound barrier setting Twitter and YouTube on fire or the space shuttle Endeavour pulling big crowds in the streets of Los Angeles, the final frontier is back in vogue.

Just as families the world over gathered around the box and wireless for the 1969 moon-landing, Baumgartner's 38.6-kilometre freefall from the edge of space had us staring in jaw-dropping awe at screens, setting social media alight. More than 8 million watched the livestream as the Austrian daredevil, perched on a balloon capsule surrounded by the black of space, lunged into the void and tumbled to the blue Earth below. During the jump, half of Twitter's global trending topics discussed the jump, and the first photo of his triumphant air punch landing posted on Facebook was shared 29,000 times and liked 216,000 times in 40 minutes.

On the same day in Los Angeles, thousands of people lined the streets to cheer the slow crawl of the retired shuttle's final 20-kilometre journey from the airport to the California Science Centre, where it will go on display. A constellation of eager spectators had camped out the night before.

The space trend has been growing since August coincidentally, the same month astronaut Neil Armstrong died when the SUV-sized Curiosity rover made a "death plunge" to the surface of Mars, slowing from 21,600 km/h to zero in seven minutes. The hair-raising landing appeared live on the twin screens at Times Square in New York, and was streamed to Xbox 360 dashboards worldwide.

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The blogosphere promptly erupted, the ensuing coverage making a minor celebrity of flight director Bobak Ferdowski, 32. His multicoloured Mohawk haircut, created especially for the landing, scored him 54,000 new Twitter followers some making marriage proposals. A parody music video, We're NASA and We Know it (set to the tune of American electropop duo LMFAO's hit song) was out within days, and has so far had 2.5 million views.

Social media is now what television was to the early days of the space race; but it's also a more personal way for the closet space fan in all of us to connect directly with the exploration of the cosmos. Take the rover Curiosity: it has 1.2 million followers on Twitter, to whom it tweets its daily routine as well as links to pictures and video: A scoopful of Mars helps the science go down. Ready to 'rinse & spit' regolith to clean my sampling system.

NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, whose Twitter handle is @Astro-Mike, has 1.3 million followers, many of whom watched live as he became the first person to tweet from space. And shows like Big Bang Theory (23.5 million fans on Facebook) whose characters banter about Mars rovers and physics non-stop have helped make rocket science a lot cooler than it used to be.

Soon, space won't be just a vicarious pursuit: it'll be a place people will visit in their thousands. Cashed-up space entrepreneurs are popping up everywhere: Jeff Bezos (of Amazon.com fame) with his company Blue Origin; Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic; and Elon Musk of PayPal and Tesla Motors fame with Space X.

Original post:

Space is the new black