From Nov. last year, but posted recently as a NASA image of the day we bring you a killer 3D view of the San Andreas Fault running up the peninsula and out to see north of Pacifica. This project is about mapping which parts of the fault are creeping past each other with little “stickiness,” and which parts appear to be locked together—places where pent-up stress may be released suddenly in a major earthquake.

San Andreas Fault Satellite Imagery

To read more about NASA’s mission to map the San Andreas and related faults with radar imagery, please read Scientists Search for a Pulse in Skies Above Earthquake Country.

Wired magazine has a hilarious and fascinating piece on training for space tourists, those wealthy former businessmen who cashed out companies and thus have $30 million to blow on a year in training and a week in space on the shuttle. (One of the men profiled in the piece — and they’re always men — refers to himself using the ghastly neologism “thrillionaire.”) As a Russian press liaison says about the attitude toward these dilletantes: “People say it is better to send monkey.”

Then there’s the old-fashioned way: earn it. Not the money, but the job. Meet Megan McArthur, Ph.D. (pictured at right), who went to high school in Mountain View and whose parents live in San Jose. McArthur will be blasting off in October to operate the Big Robot Arm — I’m sure it has a less colorful NASA-like acronym — on a mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.