OpenStack, the open source cloud platform backed by Rackspace and NASA, is “battle-tested and ready to go,” Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer and president of cloud for Rackspace, said today at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

(We’re live-streaming the CloudBeat conference, so you don’t have to miss a thing.)

140 companies have joined the project and are working to improve the OpenStack code base, Moorman said in a fireside chat with VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall.

Moorman also disclosed that NASA and Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibra.com are just two of many large organizations already using the private beta OpenStack infrastructure. Sony and PayPal have committed to substantial deployments as well.

OpenStack, now 18 months-old, is available as open-source code and applications that are free to download from the OpenStack website. But until recently there were few applications available from commercial vendors that used the infrastructure.

“We made the decision to make this platform and help the world have a standard,” Moorman said. “We’re getting it ready to be the replacement of our compute fabric … we’re proud of the state that it’s in, but it still needs adjustments for scale.”

So we’ll have to settle for the generic “coming soon” answer for now, but Moorman did add that we should see an “amazing number” of OpenStack deployments in the next six months.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that OpenStack was not available to the public. We regret the error.

Cloud-infrastructure startup Nebula envisions a day when every company will be able to implement cloud computing as easily as plugging into a an electrical utility.

By taking advantage of open source technologies, the company hopes to create hardware appliances with all of the necessary software for companies to create their own low-cost data center computers.

It fits with the revolution happening in big data, where the amount of data generated by applications such as Facebook is far exceeding the processing and storage capacities of most companies. Analyzing this massive set of data yields big insights for companies that can process the feedback and improve what they offer to consumers. But this “big data analytics” needs cloud computing infrastructure that can expand or contract, like a utility where you can dial up or dial down your electrical usage.

If it succeeds, Nebula could commoditize the major hardware makers and possibly any company that gets big margins out of data center computing. It will allow small companies to deploy data centers much like those run by the likes of huge companies such as Facebook or Google.

That may sound pretty ambitious, but the little startup already has a lot of firepower. The company was founded by Chris Kemp (pictured), the former chief technology officer at NASA, and other team members come from NASA, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It has backing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners, as well as early Google investors Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram. The funding amount wasn’t disclosed.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is coming out of stealth mode today in a speech at OSCON, an open source conference in Portland, Ore. The appliances are based on OpenStack, a technology that Kemp created at NASA to basically create an “infrastructure in a box.”

“I’m pulling together the team that built that,” Kemp said. “We are powering the cloud for the rest of the planet. Anyone who wants to deploy a cloud can use our little black box.”

Nebula is creating a turnkey system, a box you plug it to create a private computing cloud. As such, Kemp said in an interview this technology can shift the fundamental economics of computing by allowing businesses to easily, securely and inexpensively deploy their own personalized data centers from thousands of inexpensive computers with minimal effort.

“Until today, this computing power has only been accessible to organizations like NASA and a small number of elite Silicon Valley companies,” said Kemp, who is CEO of Nebula, in a press release. “We intend to share it with the rest of the world.”

John Doerr, the well-known partner at Kleiner Perkins, said in the PR release, “Nebula will disrupt and democratize cloud computing.”

The whole point of OpenStack is to assemble standard technologies from open source software that can be combined into simple, scalable, fast and low-cost computers. It should benefit a wide array of potential customers, from makers of social networks to gene sequencers or manufacturing supply chains.

Big server vendors such as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others are selling servers as they seek to provide management layers for the infrastructure. While the underlying hardware is a commodity, the software that ties it all together and the service that goes with it can turn the cloud into a very expensive endeavor.

But Kemp said customers need a cheaper solution. Nebula seeks to level the playing field by delivering a large-scale computing platform with a turnkey appliance that can configure a private cloud in minutes. It relies on OpenStack software, which Bechtolsheim compares to the Berkeley version of the UNIX operating system that debuted in the 1980s.

“Nebula embracing OpenStack today is similar to Sun embracing Berkeley UNIX in the 1980s,” said Bechtolsheim. “Proprietary systems did not have a chance against open platforms. I see Nebula as the company that will bring OpenStack to the private enterprise cloud.”

Nebula will support standard commodity servers from the big server vendors. And it will also support Facebook’s Open Compute platform, which Facebook launched earlier this year with the goal of building efficient and inexpensive enterprise infrastructure.  Frank Frankovsky, head of the Open Compute Project, said the goal of releasing technologies into the open is to enable the whole industry to take advantage of and improve upon them.

Nebula is contributing to the Open Compute Project and building an appliance that can run OpenStack services. Product trials will begin in the fourth quarter with energy, finance, biotech and media companies. Nebula will certify reference architectures as Open Compute compliant. Each appliance is a cheap server that can control 20 compute and storage nodes. The design is a lot like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

“You buy 10 or 100 of our boxes and plug a whole rack of servers into our boxes,” Kemp said. “It is data center infrastructure, offered as a service. This is the kind of shift that has to happen if the data center revolution is going to proceed.”

Besides Kemp, Nebula’s co-founders include Steve O’Hara and Devin Carlin. The created the company in April and named the company after a project that Kemp started at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Yesterday, Expedition 25 Commander Douglas H. Wheelock checked in to Foursquare 220 miles above Earth from space (see image). The astronaut checked in from the International Space Station and unlocked the new NASA Explorer Badge, according to Foursquare’s blog. Check-in services allow users to give their location via a smartphone in real-time and share with their social networks.

Similar to Gowalla, Foursquare worked with Jess3, a creative agency, for the project’s visual and social media components. Jess3 explains the project on its website, noting that astronaut Wheelock checked in at 11:09 am EST and that the agency created the visual header for the NASA Foursquare page and did the animation wrap for the NASA TV official coverage (see video below).

When I asked Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley last week about working with government agencies, such as NASA, he told me, “Maybe we’ll do something like that someday.” Who would have thought he meant it was just a week away. Or perhaps we sparked his interest so much that he decided he wanted is own astronaut.

The money, to be doled out over the next five years, is a 62 percent increase in the administration’s Earth Science budget — one of the initiatives that was pruned back during the Bush presidency. NASA will use the infusion to measure ocean and atmospheric temperatures over different regions, track ice cap size, and gauge the amount of carbon dioxide in the air at different altitudes — and where it came from. Ten new missions will be launched in all.

There are already 13 satellites dedicated to climate change research orbiting the Earth — but many of these are antiquated and badly need to be replaced. The only way the data collected will be valuable is if consistent and reliable measurements are taken at constant intervals. There’s very little room for error, considering last December’s controversy over fudged climate research and the backlash it inspired. The current equipment would not be capable of this level of accuracy.

In addition to replacing and fixing up existing satellites, NASA will launch five new ones, including an extension to the International Space Station (pictured above) that will continually monitor the ozone. Considering this new functionality, the Obama administration wants to extend the station’s lifespan by five years — it was originally intended to end in 2015 due to budget cuts.

The budget increases have faced some tough opposition in Congress. Not only are many of the members unenthusiastic about dedicating more resources to climate change study, they are also concerned that funds are being diverted from NASA’s Constellation program, which focuses on improving traditional spaceflight. The Obama administration has been instrumental in promoting private spaceflight companies to take over in this area, an idea that hasn’t won many fans.

Accomplice of criminal VC William “Boots” Del Biaggio gets five years in prison for $100 million fraud — Boots had backed ShopNow.com and VerticalNet before co-founding San Jose’s Heritage Bank. He invested in the San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators hockey teams. But he also forged documents to get $100 in loans. Stockbroker David Cacchione, his accomplice, was sentenced to five years and will need to pay back $50 million in restitution. Business Insider has a good roll-up post.

FCC investigates Google Voice as Google bashes long-distance rates — The Federal Communications Commission is performing a thorough audit of how Google Voice works, in response to charges by AT&T that Google wasn’t playing by the same rules as everyone else. The one concrete item so far is that Google has blocked calls to some rural areas to avoid paying what Google’s public policy head called “exorbitant rates” charged to connect by phone companies serving those areas.

Mainframes are still 10% of the world’s $53 billion server market – And in mainframes, IBM stands out as the longtime leader in sales and services. The Wall Street Journal looks under the hood of IBM’s mainframe business.

Twitter continues to build its brand as the Internet’s best mistake-generating service — Security researcher Miiko H. Hyppönen, chief researcher for the well-known anti-virus firm F-Secure, was surprised to find that Twitter had banned his account without notice. Hyppönen had entered the address of a phishing site. Twitter’s defense systems took it as an attack.

YouTube video spam is mostly notable for its absence — Anti-virus maker Kaspersky Lab says a recent spamming by a Russian real estate company is the first known case of an email link that promised to play a YouTube video actually doing so.

NASA proves it can hit the Moon dead-on when it really wants to — One component of the LCROSS satellite deliberately zinged into Earth’s oldest companion at 5,600 miles per hour, which seems like it would burrow deeper than the 13 feet it penetrated beneath the surface. The New York Times has a long report with a video. LCROSS was cheap by going-to-the-Moon standards, costing only $79 million for the entire mission.

Red Planet Capital, the venture arm of NASA that has recently come under political pressure, and is likely to be scrapped (quick spend the money while you can!), and buyout firm Hellman & Friedman co-led the round.

The two-year old company’s product is mainly for those people who have trouble supporting themselves with their own legs.
Alter-G’s products allow natural movement, but control the amount of impact experienced by their users — reducing body weight by three to 80 percent.

The company first made a prototype product for Nike in August 2005, based on technology developed by Robert Whalen, a researcher at NASA and the National Institutes of Health.

The products may also be good for injured athletes, or those who simply want to take a break from all the pounding — because they apparently let you keep your natural form, unlike resistance harnesses or practicing in swimming pools, which alter your form. With NASA’s backing, you might think it would be used for astronauts. However, the company doesn’t talk much about this in its materials.

It is still too early to tell whether the product is getting any traction. The company now says it is going after the medical market. This is an odd investment, for both NASA and H&F, which is a buyout firm, and typically likes to make much larger investments.