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Martin Thoburn (www.martin-thoburn.com)

Over at the Flickr photo sharing site, they’ve found a creative new use for all those zillions of photos NASA posts on the web for free.

The NASA Remix Project invites people to grab their favorite images of planets, rockets, and astronauts, and turn them into something more artistic. Or fanciful. Or whatever.

Check out some of the results here.

Jody McNary

Zond 5 back from the moon, awed tortoises inside (Photo: S.P.Korolev RSC Energia)

Fifty years ago today, the monkeys Able and Baker were placed inside the nose cone of a missile and launched to an altitude of 360 miles, on a suborbital flight that lasted just 16 minutes.

They weren’t the first creatures sent into space (that honor goes to fruit flies, in 1947), nor even the first primates. In 1951, another monkey named Yorick, launched from New Mexico, was the first to survive a suborbital jaunt (two Russian dogs, Dezik and Tsygan, had made a similar trip a few weeks earlier).

But Able and Baker, whose launch came shortly after NASA introduced the first Mercury astronauts, became famous. Half a century later, Able, who is preserved in the National Air and Space Museum, is starring in a Hollywood blockbuster and even has his own online game.

Most animals-in-space stories, like the saga of Laika the dog, end badly. One of my favorites, though, is the tale of two Russian tortoises (unnamed?) who, along with some meal worms and fruit fly eggs, traveled to the moon onboard the Zond 5 capsule in September 1968. Three months before the Apollo 8 astronauts, they rounded the lunar far side and returned to Earth safe and sound. Tortoises are fairly intelligent creatures, and long-lived. I wonder what happened to them. I like to imagine they’re sitting in some reptile retirement home in Moscow today, shaking their heads and asking each other, “Man, do you believe we did that?”

Captain Chesley Sullenberger was thrust into the media spotlight in January, when he landed his stricken Airbus in the Hudson River and the aircrew evacuated all passengers, largely uninjured, to safety within minutes. A remarkable piece of airmanship by the entire crew, to be sure. But since then, we’ve seen Sully receive the keys to the city of New York, be named an honorary member of the Seaplane Pilots Association and a featured guest at the annual Oshkosh, Wisconsin fly-in, throw out the first pitch of the major-league baseball 2009 season, and testify before Congress. We’ve seen him on “60 Minutes,” on “the Today Show,” and at the Obama inauguration. And there’s always Facebook.

Now comes word that three books about/by Sullenberger will be available to the clamoring public before the end of the year. Rumor is that HarperCollins, a William Morrow imprint, offered $3 million to Sully for a book about “a narrative of his life and the key moments that prepared him” for the ditching, and for a “collection of Sully’s inspirational poems.” And Farrar, Straus & Giroux has signed up William Langewiesche, currently writing for Vanity Fair, to write “Fly By Wire: The Truth About the Miracle on the Hudson.” The book’s editor, Jonathan Galassi, says, “I’m hoping we can do books in four months, because today, readers’ interest is intense and immediate—and sometimes it dissipates.”

Especially when it comes to inspirational poems.

De Winne: Standing by for your questions

More than a decade after construction began, the International Space Station is about to get its first full-size crew.

A Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Kazakhstan tomorrow with three people onboard—Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European astronaut Frank De Winne, and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk. They’ll join Russia’s Gennady Padalka, Japan’s Koichi Wakata, and NASA’s Michael Barratt onboard the station, bringing the census to six for the first time.

When Padalka leaves in October, De Winne, a former fighter pilot with the Belgian air force, will become the station’s first European commander. He’s already taking questions from the public about his mission.

Bas-relief at the WW II Memorial in Washington.

A bit of Memorial Day perspective from Mark Wells, a historian at the U.S. Air Force Academy, from his excellent 1995 book Courage and Air Warfare: The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War:

However dramatic or tragic, statistics alone cannot possibly tell the whole story of the Allied air offensive. The air war over Europe was not won merely by the number of sorties generated, bomb totals, targets destroyed or victory tallies in air-to-air combat. Although this was a war which employed scientific and technical means to a greater extent than had ever been seen previously, its results nevertheless still rested on the individual courage, stamina and determination of thousands of men and women. These were the human qualities, above all others, that air war seemed to demand.

More than 45,000 members of the U.S. Army Air Corps were killed in action during World War 2. Here’s the story of one of them, from our Oct/Nov 1995 issue.