Space Travel

Artist Kenny Scharf's hilltop garden in Culver City is no Monet masterpiece. It is more like a Georgia O'Keeffe -- rocks and concrete pavers set among colorful succulents and exotic cactuses that look like stones and desiccated brains. At one end of this primitive landscape, two sun-bleached imitation-Saarinen dinette chairs stand in a bed of gravel sprinkled with colored glass, beckoning visitors to sit and contemplate the 1988 Scharf bronze "Space Travel." The juxtaposition of "Jetsons"-style furniture and statuary in a "Flintstones" setting is particularly apt for Scharf.

On Friday, only days after NASA tested its next big-ticket rocket, a ragtag group of space junkies in the Mojave Desert flew a bargain-basement rocket ship that could be the real future of spaceflight in the 21st century. Masten Space Systems sent its 10-foot-tall Xoie (pronounced Zoey) rocket soaring over a patch of scrub desert that stood in for the moon, a move that appeared to vault the company into the lead in the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The contest is sponsored by NASA as part of its long-range effort to give a boost to private companies in the hope that they will someday take on such routine space tasks as delivering cargo to the International Space Station.

James May begins his new documentary, "James May on the Moon" (BBC America, 8 p.m. Tuesday), where he belongs: in a car, on the ground. He's a host of "Top Gear," the cheeky British automobile variety show, and on that show, he passes for unambitious, the lumbering turtle up against Jeremy Clarkson's fox and Richard Hammond's rabbit. But May, it turns out, wants to go faster than any "Top Gear" segment could allow. A space enthusiast, he's used his bully pulpit to film "James May on the Moon," about the Apollo moon landings and his fascination with Earth's satellite, where -- spoiler alert -- he does not in fact end up. This extravagant hourlong program is actually three documentaries in one, leaving what must certainly be a tremendous amount of footage unused.