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Even if we delegate future space travel to private companies, they will still need fuel in order to fly around, once they used conventional means to get off the earth. An unmanned space probe called the Pamela, launched 5 years ago, has detected a field of antimatter particles called antiprotons in a thin band around the earth that could provide fuel for these craft ("Pamela" does not refer to an astronomer’s girlfriend, it stands for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics).
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One that is shooting water! A geyser of water is spurting up from the poles of a star that is 750 light-years from the earth at a rate of 124,000 mpg, creating "water bullets" that it shoots deep into space. If it has other planets around it, the inhabitants (if any) will have plenty to drink.

If this kind of star is common, there’s a possibility that stars like these distributing water throughout the universe. And since water is one of the things necessary for life as we know it, it implies that life is more common than we’ve thought.
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There’s so much trash out there in space that it’s getting in the way of astronaut operations. The solution? ZAP it! The US military currently tracks about 20,000 items of space junk in low-Earth orbit, most of which are discarded pieces of spacecraft or debris from collisions of satellites. The Earth could even end up with a permanent junk belt that could make space too dangerous to fly in. In Wired.com, Lisa Grossman quotes NASA engineer Creon Levit as saying, "There’s not a lot of argument that this is going to screw us if we don’t do something. Right now it’s at the tipping point, and it just keeps getting worse." read more

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More exciting discoveries from the Kepler telescope: A planetary system of the kind never seen before, with two planets in the same orbit around their star. They circle their sun every 9.8 days, one of them ahead of the other. In the night sky of one of the planets, the other planet must seem like a constant light, almost a second sun (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show).
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