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Maksim Surayev/Roskosmos

We’ve mentioned cosmonaut Maksim Surayev’s blog before, but it really is worth checking out—some of the most entertaining dispatches ever written from orbit.

Even his photos have personality, like this one, of his watch floating in front of the space station’s window.

Here’s the link.

Sony Pictures

A shame that Cessna doesn’t seem to recognize a potential PR gold mine. Remember when Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 near Red Square in 1987? Not a peep from Cessna headquarters. Now the company appears to have missed out again: In the mega-apocalyptic move 2012, a lowly Cessna 340A saves one extended family from a variety of spectacular demises.

The world’s only Antonov An-225 makes a valiant attempt to do the same but ends up sliding off a cliff and exploding (as does just about everything else, everywhere, 24/7, in this movie). Oh, and Kennedy is back in the White House — the aircraft carrier, that is.

Concept courtesy of Lockheed Martin.

Size matters. (Well, at least in the surveillance world.)

And three projects under way take dimensions to whole new lengths. The LEMV (it stands for Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle) is a mammoth hybrid airship championed by the U.S. Army as part of a future fleet of reconnaissance vehicles. As required in the U.S. Army’s LEMV proposal request, the non-rigid autonomous airship must be able to operate at 20,000 feet above sea level, have a 2,000-mile radius, and remain deployed for 21 days.

The 250-foot-long airship will be able to house a 5,000-pound payload of radar and motion-imagery sensors, in addition to other spyware. While the LEMV has yet to be built—Lockheed Martin is one possible airframe supplier—the buoyant behemoth is expected to deploy to Afghanistan within 18 months.

Photograph courtesy AeroVironment, Inc.

On the other end of the spectrum is AeroVironment’s NAV (Nano Air Vehicle) “Mercury,” which weighs less than an ounce. Mercury mimics a bird in flight with its ability to climb and descend vertically—as well as fly sideways and backwards—and is part of a new class of small remote-controlled gadgets able to fly indoors and gather intelligence in urban settings.

Lockheed Martin’s NAV, based on a maple seed, is in the second stage of testing. As we reported in 2006, Lockheed Martin hopes that soldiers will be able to carry the NAV in their pockets, and use the technology to photograph cave interiors, or to see what’s lurking down a blind alley.

Photograph courtesy Lockheed Martin.

According to Jill Krugman, a public affairs officer with Lockheed Martin, DARPA stopped funding the project at the conclusion of phase one. But the company felt development should continue, and the corporation has been funding the project through Independent Research and Design (IRAD). “Through IRAD,” says Krugman, “the team developed the approximately 30″ SAMARAI as a technology demonstrator.” (View a YouTube video of the 30″ prototype here.) As the project progresses, the team will build increasingly smaller versions, based upon what they learn during testing.

Seiran on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (Carolyn Russo/NASM)

Workers at the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory announced on November 12 that through the use of submersibles, they had located at 2,600 feet two Japanese submarines that the U.S. military had scuttled off Oahu in 1946 after post-war assessment. One, the I-14, was designed to carry two Aichi M6A Seirans (“storm from the clear sky”) intended to catapult from the sub after it surfaced and attack the U.S. naval fleet. Aichi built 28 Seirans; the sole survivor was restored in 2000 at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and put on display in 2003.

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory is financed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A documentary on the Laboratory’s find will air on the National Geographic Channel (check local listings).

Photo: ESA/ OSIRIS Team

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft took these spectacular views of a crescent Earth last week during its final close fly-by. The first frame starts at a distance of 683,000 miles. The last was taken from 198,000 miles.