NASA followed one of the classic rules for Internet videos during its first space-to-Earth Google Hangout on Friday: If you want to bring in the viewers, don't forget the cats.

Astronaut Tom Marshburn's demonstration of how an astronaut in the International Space Station's zero-gravity environment can imitate a falling kitty was one of the highlights of the hourlong video chat, which addressed more than 30 questions sent in via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and real-time hookups with kids across the country.

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One of the questions, phrased in the form of a video, came from the host of the "Smarter Every Day" webcast series, a rocket engineer known as Destin. (He keeps mum about his last name to protect his kids, who appear in the webcasts.) Destin ran his own mini-video showing how a falling cat rights itself in the air to land on its feet, and asked if the astronauts could match that feat in zero-G.

"We don't have any cats onboard," said space station commander Kevin Ford, "but we have a medical doctor who maybe can try to demonstrate the next best thing to a cat."

Marshburn, who's a physician as well as an astronaut, then proceeded to float in front of the camera and twist his body to change position — not quite as adroitly as the cats, but not bad for a human.

"I hope you believe that what you saw happened with the cat isn't a mystery, and that it can happen in space, too," Ford concluded. You can watch the demonstration around the 33-minute mark in the Hangout video.

Other astronauts participating in the chat included Canada's Chris Hadfield aboard the station, and NASA's Ron Garan and Nicole Stott on the ground. They took questions passed along from social media by NASA moderator John Yembrick; from live-video hookups with classrooms at University High School in Orlando, Fla., and Mescalero Apache School in New Mexico; and from a youngster named Fred whose video link was facilitated by the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Here are a few more nuggets from the video:

• Hadfield said that this week's communications outage on the space station was "not that big a deal," and that the crew members were well-trained to operate the station even when they were out of contact with ground controllers. "It wasn't any sort of panic or anything, it was just us dealing with a problem on the ground, and our crew dealing with the problem on board," he said. 
• Getting into the right sleep cycle is a big challenge on the space station, where there are 16 sunsets and sunrises every day. Garan said that when it gets close to bedtime, some astronauts avoid looking out the window at Earth's bright side. Stott said NASA is experimenting with a scheme that makes the lighting inside the space station more bluish for the "morning" of the astronauts' workday, and more orangish during the "evening."
• The station's crew members showed off the medical kits they kept on board for health problems, but if there's a life-threatening emergency on board, astronauts would get into one of the Russian Soyuz capsules attached to the station and fly the stricken crew member back to Earth. "Our Soyuz is our ambulance," Marshburn said. 
• When the astronauts were asked which scientist from the past they wish they could bring to the space station, Marshburn instantly said Isaac Newton, who drew up physics' three laws of motion in the 17th century. "We see what he could only imagine," Marshburn said. 
• Taking pictures from space is a challenging task that requires advance training, due to the sharp contrast between the blackness of outer space and the brilliance of the planet below, Hadfield said. But there's one big plus: Because of the zero-G environment, it's a lot easier to handle huge telephoto lenses. "Every photographer in the world would love to have that much glass in front of their eyes ... and not have to balance it," Hadfield said.
• When the astronauts were asked about their growing social-media stardom, Hadfield said, "I don't think anybody tries to push the edge of human experience more than we do." Being able to see the whole world below is "too good an experience not to share," and avenues such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ help facilitate that, he said. He noted that a lot of the astronauts' popularity had to do with their unique perspective. "We know just how lucky we are to be here," Hadfield said.

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For more outer-space video goodness, tune in the Weekly Space Hangout at 3 p.m. ET Friday. Yours truly will be on the screen along with other scribes to review the week's space news, including the meteor blast that hit Russia a week ago.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Friday's live Google+ Hangout represents one small step for NASA, one giant leap for the Web-based videoconferencing tool.

Space-to-Earth hookups are nothing new for the International Space Station: NASA TV regularly broadcasts video from the orbital outpost as it circles the globe at an altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers). Astronauts have been sending Twitter updates and Flickr photos from space for years. Heck, even NASA's robots have Facebook pages. But Friday's hourlong event, scheduled to run from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. ET, marks the first time that NASA has done a Hangout.

"We're looking forward to it," said Jason Townsend, a spokesman at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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He said NASA has selected 20 video questions from the scads that were sent in by the agency's social-media followers, and at least some of those questions will be aired for the space station astronauts to answer during a 20-minute downlink opportunity starting at 11 a.m. ET. "We're angling to fill every minute," Townsend told NBC News.

Three of the space station's six astronauts — station commander Kevin Ford, NASA colleague Tom Marshburn and Canada's Chris Hadfield — will participate in the space-plus-Earth Hangout. (The three others, all Russians, will presumably be minding the store.)

Townsend said that for the balance of the hour, questions will be handled by two NASA astronauts on the ground: Ron Garan, a social-media star who's in nearly 3 million Google+ circles; and Nicole Stott, who participated in the space station's first live NASA Tweetup in 2009.

Questions can be submitted during the Hangout via Google+, via Twitter (by including the hashtag #askAstro) and via NASA's Facebook page.

The outer-space Hangout is just the latest leap for NASA's social-media strategy: The Tweetups of the late space shuttle era have given way to a string of NASA Social gatherings. One took place just this week at NASA Headquarters. NASA regularly sets aside seats for social-media mavens at big events, including next month's SpaceX Dragon launch.

Last year, NASA's social-media teams presented 16 events that brought more than 1,000 followers to NASA facilities and other spacey locales. Mars Curiosity rover has been the star of the show, thanks in part to her (yes, her) 1.3 million Twitter followers. During the rover's landing last August, NASA served up a record 36 million webcast streams, and the six-wheeled robot has been known to check in to Foursquare from Mars.

How can the Three Amigos on the space station possibly compete with Curiosity (and her cantankerous, non-NASA-sponsored alter ego, Sarcastic Rover)? Tune in on Friday and find out.

More marvels from the space station:

• Astronaut's artistry hits warp speed
• Space-plus-Earth duet makes debut
• Online contest to boost space station power

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After NASA's Hangout, keep an eye out for the Weekly Space Hangout, which brings space scribes together for an hour starting at 3 p.m. ET. Universe Today's Fraser Cain and Astrosphere's Scott Lewis (the Bald Astronomer) are among the ringleaders.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Commercial spaceship companies are due to get some additional breathing space, thanks to legislation that was approved by the House on Friday and seems certain to become law.

The provision takes up just a few words in the reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration, but the impact of those words could be incredibly significant: Basically, they extend the current regulatory environment for reusable space vehicles for an additional three years, to October 2015. If the provision hadn't been worked out, things could have become much more difficult for space tourism companies.

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Right now, the companies that are building passenger spaceships are required to demonstrate to the FAA that they're taking sufficient measures to protect the uninvolved public from harm. They're also required to disclose the risks of space trips to would-be passengers, and get their informed consent for flight. But beyond that, the FAA is restricted in its power to regulate crew or passenger safety.

The reason for that goes back to 2004, when Congress passed a law setting up an eight-year moratorium (some prefer the term "learning period") for passenger spaceflight regulation. The idea was that those eight years would give the space tourism industry a chance to get off the ground, and give regulators a chance to see how the industry's realities would mesh with future regulations. Should commercial spaceflight be regulated like air travel, for example, or more like deep-sea adventure diving?

The only problem is that no paying passengers have yet flown on commercial spacecraft, so it's not possible to do any sort of regulatory reality check. The three-year extension provides more time for companies such as Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace to get their rocket planes ready and build a track record. The current expectation is that passengers will start going into space on suborbital vehicles in the 2013-2014 time frame.

U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a news release that the extension will "promote continued innovation, growth and job creation in this cutting-edge sector of our economy." McCarthy's district includes the Mojave Air and Space Port, where Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, XCOR's Lynx rocket plane and other spacecraft are being developed.

McCarthy's news release provided positive comments from executives at several space companies, including XCOR Aerospace and Virgin Galactic as well as Space Adventures and Sierra Nevada Corp. Back in 2004, I wrote that Jim Muncy, a Washington-based space consultant and founder of PoliSpace, greeted the news of the initial legislation's approval with a "mild expletive of wonderment." Today, Muncy was slightly more measured in his response, but just as positive about the extension's effect.

"The status quo is restricted regulation, it's not a ban on regulation," he told me. "We would like this period of learning and limited regulation to continue for at least a few more years, so that the industry gets flight experience — and oh, by the way, the FAA gets experience with spaceflight as well. We're trying to make this a learning and data-driven process, so that future regulations are based on actual data rather than speculation."

The action in Washington is just one of several small moves reported this week by commercial space companies. But sometimes, small moves are what progress is all about. At least that's what the alien told Jodie Foster in the movie "Contact."

Here are some of the latest small moves, plus a big move that's coming up:

SpaceX conducted a successful full-duration, full-thrust test firing of its SuperDraco rocket engine, which is destined to be used in the launch escape system for its Dragon crew capsule. The eight-engine thruster system would be used to power the Dragon out of harm's way in the event of a problem during ascent, and it's a critical piece of SpaceX's plan to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting in 2017 or so. Discovery News' Ian O'Neill discussed the SuperDraco tests during Thursday's Weekly Space Hangout (you can tune in that part at about the 25:30 point in the video below):

Armadillo Aerospace launched its third STIG-A test rocket from Spaceport America in New Mexico to an altitude of about 50 miles (82 kilometers) on Jan. 28. A test of a balloon-parachute recovery system ("ballute") was not fully successful, but the Armadillo team was nevertheless able to recover the vehicle and pass along some fantastic imagery from the flight. Armadillo says its next test launch is due to go beyond 62 miles (100 kilometers), the boundary of outer space. Eventually Armadillo plans to develop a craft capable of taking passengers on suborbital space rides.

Space Adventures says it's planning for the launch of a Russian spacecraft on a round-the-moon trip in February 2017, with two paying passengers and a cosmonaut commander on board. The Virginia-based company's chairman, Eric Anderson, says one would-be flier has already paid the $150 million fare, and the other open seat is "very close to being sold." Anderson said the venture is shaping up as a "fantastic validation of the marketplace for private spaceflight."

Sierra Nevada Corp. has delivered the primary structure of its first Dream Chaser flight test vehicle to a Colorado facility where it will be assembled and integrated with other flight systems. The vehicle is due to be used for captive-carry and free-flight tests later this year.

NASA says it will be offering $110,000 in awards this July for the Space Frontier Foundation's annual NewSpace Business Plan Competition, conducted at NASA Ames Research Center. Executives from space-oriented start-ups will present their business plans to a panel of experts and investors, and the plan that's judged the best will receive $100,000. There'll also be a $10,000 second prize.

XCOR Aerospace says it will award a suborbital spaceflight on its Lynx rocket plane to "one lucky paid registrant" at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, scheduled from Feb. 27 to 29 in Palo Alto, Calif. Registration has to be made by Feb. 10 in order to be eligible for the drawing. To read the official rules and register, check out the conference website. The XCOR Lynx flight is valued at $95,000. "We're going to pick a name out of a fishbowl shaped like an XCOR spacecraft," conference organizer Alan Stern told me. "It just shows how approachable spaceflight is going to be."

NASA is due to lay out its plan on Feb. 7 for the next phase in the development of space transportation systems capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Proposals will be solicited from commercial teams, and this summer NASA will select which teams get hundreds of millions of dollars to work on those systems over the next couple of years. It's not yet clear exactly how much money will be available for the coming phase. Nevertheless, if the program goes forward as planned, it'll be a really big move toward once again launching NASA astronauts from U.S. soil on spacecraft made in the USA.

More about the commercial space race:

• NASA says key SpaceX launch may slip to April
• NASA revises its commercial space plans
• The next steps in a new space race
• Boeing runs hard in the new space race
• Future spaceflight goes virtual at Sierra Nevada
• Blue Origin spruces up its rocket report
• Orbital Sciences delivers robotic cargo craft
• Billionaire plans monster plane for orbital launches
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

Previously on the Weekly Space Hangout:

• Jan. 26: Moon-base politics and more
• Jan. 19: Is some poor planet getting blasted?
• Jan. 12: Planets, dark matter, "Trek" tricorders and more
• Jan. 5: NASA's moon probes, the hype over 2012 and more
• Dec. 20: All about Kepler's alien worlds

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To follow every step in the commercial space industry, keep a close watch on Clark Lindsey's Space Transport News, Doug Messier's Parabolic Arc and Jeff Foust's NewSpace Journal.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Did you hear the one about the planet that's boiling away? Astronomers working with data from NASA's Kepler planet-hunting telescope say they're seeing evidence that a star system 1,500 light-years from Earth has a "super-Mercury" orbiting less than a million miles from its sun. At that distance, they surmise that the blasted world (known as KIC 12557548) is slowly being vaporized by temperatures in excess of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius).

The report about the boiling planet appears on ArXiv.org, and was the focus of a posting by Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait. It's also the top story on the Weekly Space Hangout, a Google+ live video show that brings together a gaggle of space writers, including yours truly. Check out the hourlong video above for more about KIC 12557548 as well as the other stories listed below:

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• 'Pillars of Creation' reloaded (11:30)
• Universe Today's Nancy Atkinson on the dark-matter galaxy (16:13)
• Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla on the Phobos-Grunt endgame (and her space craft projects) (23:09)
• Astronomy Cast's Pamela Gay on the quest to take a picture of a black hole (28:41)
• Questions from the audience (36:00)

This week's Hangout panel also included Discovery News' Nicole Gugliucci (the Noisy Astronomer) and Universe Today's Jon Voisey (the Angry Astronomer), with Universe Today's Fraser Cain as host, organizer and moderator. Tune in at 1 p.m. ET Thursday for the next installment of the Weekly Space Hangout, and check out these archived vidcasts:

• Jan. 12: Planets, dark matter, "Trek" tricorders and more
• Jan. 5: NASA's moon probes, the hype over 2012 and more
• Dec. 20: All about Kepler's alien worlds

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Even the astronomers on the science team for NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission are marveling at the new worlds they're finding.

There's certainly a lot to marvel at: Just this week, Kepler astronomers announced the discovery of not just one, but two binary-star systems that have at least one planet each, reviving visions of the double sunset on Luke Skywalker's home world in the "Star Wars" saga. Another group of scientists drew on data from Kepler to detect the three smallest exoplanets yet discovered, including one just about the size of Mars.

The revelations at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Austin, Texas, demonstrated that the number and diversity of the planets being found beyond our own solar system is growing by leaps and bounds. An august group of space commentators, including yours truly, celebrated the diversity during today's Weekly Space Hangout. And astronomers were celebrating in Austin as well.

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"Any kind of system you can think of, if it doesn't violate the laws of nature, it probably exists somewhere out there," Virginia Trimble, an astronomer at the University of California at Irvine, told reporters. "So as long as people think up new techniques, they will also find new types of planets. There will surely be lots of new, neat stuff in the coming years."

In an email, Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, who has been in on the planet quest for 20 years and is a member of the Kepler science team, went positively gushy over the latest findings ... but also pointed out that the quest has really just begun:

"The NASA Kepler space telescope has discovered well over 2,000 strong candidate planets around other stars.  No exoplanet survey is even close to this coverage and statistical integrity.

"For each of those exoplanets Kepler finds, we have detailed knowledge of the planet's orbital period and the planet's orbital distance from its host star. More impressively, we know the planet's size (diameter) quite accurately. For some of the planets, we have also measured their mass and density, with some planets found to be definitively solid.

"With this wealth of information about over 2,000 planets, we continue to study the occurrence of planets around other stars. This work gives us a census of planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The 2,000 exoplanets is still too few to give an accurate answer. A useful census of humans on Earth requires that well over 2,000 people be surveyed. So it is with planets in the Milky Way galaxy. A useful census requires that thousands be sampled, and with accuracy. We desire integrity in our surveys of planets and people.

"Three weeks ago, the Kepler team announced the first two Earth-size planets. Only Kepler has sensitivity to Earth-size planets. [Now we have announced] the first Mars-size planet around another star. ... These discoveries by Kepler will mark an historic moment in the history of science, approaching the trans-oceanic voyages of the 15th century and the first steps on the moon.   Kepler is indeed finding new worlds."

The Kepler mission identifies potential new worlds by looking for the telltale dips of starlight that occur when a planet passes over the disk of its parent sun. Other methods are used to confirm the mass of alien planets, including a method that checks for a characteristic gravitational wobble in stars that have planets. And yet another method, called microlensing, was used in another study released this week that estimated there could be 160 billion planets in the Milky Way. There's a chance that estimate will turn out to be too high. There's a better chance it'll turn out to be too low. But in either case, astronomers now recognize there could be tens of billions of new worlds out there.

Some of those worlds no doubt will have the conditions conducive to life as we know it. Studying such planets could help us one of the deepest questions we have about the universe: Are we alone?

But in order to do that, the quest has to continue. Right now, funding for the $600 million Kepler mission is due to run out in November, and discussions about an extension are under way. Theoretically, Kepler could gather enough data by November to detect Earth-size planets in Earth-scale orbits around sunlike stars, but an extension would provide scientists with more confidence about their existing candidates — and also give them the chance to cast a wider net.

Chances are the mission will be extended. "It would seem to me just nuts to have it out there and turn it off," one astronomer, Greg Laughlin of the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Space.com. But the success of Kepler (and its European counterpart, COROT) should get people talking about what to do for an encore. So brace yourself for an alphabet soup of exoplanet-mission acronyms ranging from EChO to MPF to PLATO to WFIRST.

Odds and ends from the week in space:

• Hey, kids! Want to keep up with the lengthening list of exoplanets? Check out Hanno Rein's free Exoplanet app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. There are planet catalogs for other mobile platforms as well, such as Exoplanet Catalog for Android and the Astronomy app for Windows Phone. Got more apps? Add your recommendations in a comment below.
• Speaking of apps, Powellware's newly released Mars Images app is getting some good reviews. The app for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/Android delivers the latest images from NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars.
• Remember the big radio-telescope array that Jodie Foster was plugged into when she heard the alien transmissions in the movie "Contact"? The real-life telescope complex in New Mexico where those scenes were filmed has been known as the Very Large Array, but during the AAS meeting, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced that it'll be renamed the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array to honor Karl Jansky, the founder of radio astronomy. The name was selected from among 23,331 suggestions submitted by 17,023 people from more than 65 countries, the NRAO said. The new moniker will no doubt be shortened to the Jansky VLA, or the Jansky Array.
• If you've got an hour to spare, watch the Weekly Space Hangout video above, in which I and other Web-based worthies hold forth on a variety of out-of-this-world topics. And if you've got another hour to spare, perhaps while you're exercising at the gym, listen to last week's "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast, featuring my chat with Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams. And stay tuned for the Feb. 1 installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," when we'll be talking about science policy and politics.

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.