Shock, awe and shazam!

YOU KNOW you’re lost in space, or at least lost in space thought, when you keep up with the Hubble Telescope’s version of March Madness.

Yes, there are now brackets supplied on the internet so folks can vote on the best images gathered-so far-by that eye-in-the-sky. Our favorite team going into the tournament was Galaxy Group Arp 274. What a dreary name for the blazing triplet of galaxies spinning around about 400 million or so light years from your breakfast table this morning. It doesn’t even sound like a name. More like a phone number.

These triplets are a dazzling blend of blue and yellow pinwheels, and two of them are what the experts call Star Nurseries-where stars are born. The real kind, not the Hollywood kind. And they’re only 400 million years away-that is, if you could travel at the speed of light. And now Man the Voyager has brought pictures of them home.And the best our scientists can do in the way of a name for these heavenly bodies is . . . Galaxy Group Arp 274. Is that a name or a Card Catalogue number?

One day, maybe NASA will hire a couple of poets to name the poetry it discovers. Preferably not the kind of “poets” who use only lower-case letters or royal-purple prose.

Scientists also believe they’ve found a vast ocean on a moon orbiting Saturn, which might indicate the existence of life, or at least life as we know it in our limited way. Voyager 1 is now flitting along the boundaries of interstellar space, the first man-made object to get that far, but surely not the last.

Next week, overnight Monday into Tuesday morning, you can watch a total lunar eclipse. The first of two in 2014.

It’s all enough to make a dad seriously consider a trip to another dark and mysterious world, the attic, to see if the kids’ telescope is still up there and serviceable.

Also this week, NASA released a series of photographs taken from one of our rovers on Mars. The pictures showed a strange light off in the distance-what appears to be artificial light. Could be anything. Could be a reflection. Could be a meteor. Could be something on the camera lens. Could be the beginning of a sci-fi novella. To the untrained eye, it looks eerily like a burst of light from an opening, a portal, a doorway, and it brightened the Marscape for a brief moment.

“We think it’s either a vent-hole light leak . . . or a glinty rock,” says Justin Maki, an engineer working the slow but well named rover Curiosity.

Here’s an idea. Let’s find out what the glinty rock looks like up close. And in person. As in, let’s go back to the moon, and then . . . . on to Mars! To new worlds and beyond. One day, somebody is going to pick up ol’ Voyager 1 and bring it home to Planet No. 3 for display in a museum. We’d bet that somebody will be homo faber, man the toolmaker, and the museum will be right here on this small, blue planet.

The first of man’s steps on our moon were taken July 20, 1969. A giant leap, as the pioneering astronaut put it. The last steps were taken in 1972. So when will we take the next steps?

ALAS, IT seems this country, this country of pioneers and explorers and just plain wanderers, isn’t planning on taking any next steps in space, but just marking time and viewing from afar. And marking time is no way to win a race. What ever happened to our search for the Next Frontier?

This country’s remaining space shuttles were hauled off to museums a few years ago-in 2011-and Americans are now hitching rides to the International Space Station on Russian rockets. And according to Forbes, Tsar Vladimir may put an end to that arrangement, irked that Washington would express even the mild perturbation it has at the new tsar’s aggressive ways.

Meanwhile, other countries aren’t standing still. One of the remaining Communist ones, and a big one at that, still Red China, is planning to put a lunar lander on the moon this winter. Beijing is talking about making footprints there by 2020.

Just this month, the aforesaid Russians unveiled an elaborate plan for sending three spacecraft to the moon by the end of this decade.

Meanwhile, the White House proposes . . . cutting NASA’s budget by $185 million in 2015. That still leaves the space agency with a budget of $17.5 billion, but that may not be enough to get our space program back in gear. While other countries are making big plans, America counts time in place. Like a platoon of soldiers moving their legs up and down, up and down, but going nowhere. Because the platoon leader has taken a break after announcing Mark Time, March!

That light on Mars. That vent-hole or glinty rock, whatever it is. Will we ever find out what it was, or just sit back and go on marking time? It’s not just money this administration can’t find for such a venture. It also seems short of what used to be an American staple: scientific curiosity.