The WhiteKnightTwo is the aircraft that will launch SpaceShipTwo into suborbital space. Today in the Mojave desert, those who are still dreaming the dream unveiled the top-secret craft. The craft’s first job is to serve as a flight simulator next month for pilots. Pilots that will shuttle citizens into space and usher in a new era of space travel. Assuming everything goes as planned, it should begin flight testing at the end of September. Except for the engines and landing gear, the entire craft is made from carbon fiber composite.

According to Virgin Galactic, both ships will be ready for their first flight together in 2009 or 2010. Fittingly, Richard Branson and his family will be the first onboard. The space flight lasts 2.5-hours with five minutes of weightlessness before the ship comes back to Earth.

According to the Space Adventures tourism company out of Virginia, Sergy Brin, cofounder of Google, has put a $5 million deposit down for a vacation in space aboard a Russian spacecraft. The total trip will cost $35 million dollars and the launch date is scheduled for sometime in 2011.

Brin joins a small number of elite individuals who have both the desire to travel into space and more importantly the deep pockets to make it happen. Richard Garriott’s trip with Space Adventures is still coming up this fall. Brin’s $5 million deposit also makes him the founding member of a new Space Adventure club called the Orbital Mission Explorers Circle. The membership appears to work something like a vacation timeshare, but for space. Brin and any other new members that join get preferential options to the mission seats or can sell the seat to another space traveler if there schedule just doesn’t allow for traveling to space that day.

In a joint project, the University of Leicester and Doritos have been working together to create and broadcast the first commercial aimed squarely at aliens. You know, because they might be looking for a different kinda chip after all several millenia of the same old junk.

Maverick Professor and crazy as a bag of chips, Darren Wright says that “everything is going as planned” and that it’s sure to be “an historical moment for it is the first time that we will broadcast a message to the space, far beyond our Solar System.” The target seems to be alien consumers located about 42 light years from the Earth, in an area that’s virgin territory for Cool Ranch and the mystery flavor gimmick known as “The Quest”. I’m sure they’re itching to corner the market in that sector of space before everyone from Coke to Pringles starts sending their own spam.

You can see right off the bat that this is an ideal way to save space in your bathroom. It uses very little floor space and so the Vertebrae vertical bathroom system is a perfect multi-purpose bathroom unit for luxury apartments with a space shortage. The name obviously comes from it’s design.

It houses everything you expect to find in a regular bathroom, it even has showerheads, a sink, a cistern, a potty and lots of storage units. This has got to be the ultimate space saving bathroom design.

Sometimes the coolest gadgets in Sci-Fi are not gadgets at all. But robots. Here’s a look at some of the most memorable robots from sci-fi in no particular order. It’s not a complete list. Think of it more as a walk down memory lane. Because geeks love Sci-Fi and Sci-Fi has a long history of loving robots.

Chances are if you have this Star Trek Enterprise bottle opener lying around your home, you probably don’t have many female friends coming over for sleepovers. I believe this particular Enterprise with the oval hole in the saucer section is inspired from that episode where Shatner’s ego blew a hole in the command deck. The same episode where Bones said, “Damnit Jim, I’m a doctor not a Tribble vet aboard a floating bottle opener.”

Obviously, if you’re a Trekkie that likes beer you’ll want to spend the $24 to open your beer with this tiny starship, get drunk, then have a toy to play with.

We’ve seen some crazy awesome watches lately. Like the UR-202 for instance. But the DeWitt Concept No. 1 is something else again. It’s a unique one-of-a-kind timepiece that’ll set you back a cool $633,000 if you have a pile of cash that’s burning a hole in your bank vault. It was bought from an auction, sight unseen.

What makes it so special? According to the creators of the watch, this “gothic pirate spaceship of a watch is taking the steampunk oeuvre to new heights with its expanding riveted case, flying tourbillon, five barrels and a 21 day power reserve.” Yes, they know that the way to a geek’s heart is through his wrist. Steampunk and the mention of Gothic pirates don’t hurt either.

Here’s an interesting image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s an image of the variable star V838 Monocerotis which lies near the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy. Yes, it looks like the Firefox logo. The red area also resembles HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssesy.

I picture the starship Enterprise investigating and ultimately finding that this area of space is some higher beings hard drive. “I find this highly illogical Captain. Sensors are also picking up signs of Windows Vista, which indicates that the entire region is unstable and could implode at any time.”

No, not the candy bar… If you’re one of those people who like to have totally unique and cool objects decorating your home, then why not display the Milky Way galaxy for all to see and be impressed with? This device is also great for those bent on Galaxy wide domination. Imagine being able to hold the galaxy in the palm of your hand while you laugh maniacally at your enemy’s staship movements.

Living World’s Milky Way galaxy 3D model was created using real space data from Eiichiro Kokubo, Assistant Professor at Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory and Osaka University’s Kato Tsunehiko. Holding the galaxy in your hand isn’t cheap though, it will cost you about $770.

To quote Dave Bowman from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, “My God, it’s full of stars!”. A whole watch face that looks like the cosmos? Count me in. The Astrodea collection from Citizen looks sweet. The watch face has a 35° view of the heavens as seen from the Northern Hemisphere, which rotates in real time, showing 1,109 stars and 169 cluster galaxies. It has other features that include measurements like equinox indications, constellation markers, location of the sun, solar position, sunrise and sunset times and the daily duration of sunshine. That might be too much info for me, I just dig the looks.

It comes in both a blue or gold face version, with stainless steel case and band with non-reflective sapphire glass. And since the face is so detailed, it even has a 10x magnifier for close-up inspection. Both versions are available for $585.

Does this photograph really prove that we are not alone in the universe? The internet has been buzzing about this photo beamed back from Mars. It may be just an odd shaped rock.

But I can’t help feeling like we are missing something obvious here…Hmmm.