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NASA will use video games to rekindle our love of space travel

The Kerbal Space Program folks teaming with NASA was pretty cool, right? Well, it wasn't an accident. The US aeronautics outfit is embracing the space-travel sim as a means to get the public interested in leaving our planet once again -- much like the televised Apollo launches were for generations prior. Thanks to NASA, the development team has even started a collaboration with educators to create a classroom-focused version of Kerbal, where teachers can assign specific tasks to their students for homework.

The development team's efforts as a whole have been a success, and there's proof that the player-base is much more than a handful of space-geeks and Lockheed Martin employees too. The team said that in a recent survey a staggering number of their players (some 92 percent) weren't involved in the space industry at all, and an even higher amount (97 percent) became more interested in science and space as a direct result of playing. Even better, almost as many said they learned something about astrophysics or rocket science after starting the game. See Dad? Video games aren't melting brains after all.

[Image credit: Getty Images, XKCD]