Astronomy can be pretty tricky business. For one thing, all the stuff you're looking at is actually spread very far apart, and apparently sometimes a star will just flat out disappear on you. That's what happened to a team operating NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope, who discovered a 5,000-year-old pulsar in 2009 only to then lose track of it for the next three years.

Though it's still really expensive to put people in space, it's hard to deny the age of space tourism is approaching. Tourists like to visit historical sites, so it seems certain that someday we'll get gaggles of them on the moon gawking at the places were NASA astronauts landed. And just in case those tourists are jerks, the space agency's already taking steps to preserve the history left on the lunar surface.

Funding for space travel has been slashed so much in recent years, it could be decades until we actually set foot on another rock other than our own. But a new Dutch start-up hopes to combine the world's love for reality TV and passion for space travel into a sure-fire hit that will get us to the Red Planet in about a decade: The Real World Mars. Or, something like that.

Thanks to that one small step back in the summer of '69, the name Neil Armstrong is now synonymous with American space exploration. Armstrong is still a household name because of Apollo 11, but the man himself says he thought the odds were 50/50 that he'd ever actually touch the moon during the mission.