Backstory: Space by the numbers

As the United Nations began celebrating World Space Week Wednesday, the US readied plans to revisit the moon, astronomers were finding new planets, and the record was set straight on Neil Armstrong's famous quote –marking one small word for him and one giant leap for grammarians . A statistical look at the final frontier.

Reigniting President Kennedy's dream, NASA wants to launch a new series of missions to the moon and lay the groundwork for future flights to Mars.

$12 billion is how much President Bush asked NASA to devote over five years to putting astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2020.

$25 billion was the price tag for the 12-year Apollo program – roughly $122 billion in 2006 dollars.

4 other spacefaring nations or groups of nations are also planning missions to the moon in the next 20 years: Japan, China, India, and the European Space Agency.

8 new Orion spacecraft (on the left in the artist rendition, above) will make up NASA's lunar fleet, replacing the shuttle program.

6 manned Apollo ships landed on the moon, starting with Apollo 11 in 1969 and ending with Apollo 17 in 1972.

After putting International Space Station (ISS) construction on hold following the 2003 shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA is back to bolting and building the 16-nation outpost. The shuttle Discovery will blast off on another construction mission in December.

$100 billion is the current estimate needed to complete the station, up from the initial projection of $17 billion.

15,000 cubic feet is the amount of room the astronauts have inside the station – about the size of 15 mobile homes.

454,000 lbs. is the weight of the ISS – the equivalent of 100 mobile homes.

218 miles separates Earth from the ISS – about the distance from Boston to New York City – and it spins around Earth at 17,500 miles an hour.

1 "big screen" 17-inch TV adorns the inside of the ISS. Over the years, NASA has sent up several hundred DVDs for the crew's entertainment.

2 different menus float around the ISS, one for the Russians and another for the Americans. Each country sends up its own food. A favorite for the Americans: shrimp cocktail – freeze-dried, like everything, to order.

100 food choices and 50 beverages make up NASA's full menu.

The fall of Pluto is still ricocheting through astronomy cliques and science classrooms around the world. This past August, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its planetary title, reclassifying the distant ice ball as a "dwarf planet" (read: big asteroid).

3 criteria must now be fulfilled to be a planet in our solar system. A planet must (1) orbit the sun, (2) have enough gravity to pull itself into a round shape, and (3) be the major object in its orbit. That final point is the problem. Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's.

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