How did we miss this earlier! The floating tool bag, the set of tools lost by Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper during a spacewalk to repair a part of the international space station last week has been spotted in the night sky over Ontario, Canada.

Kevin Fetter video taped the bag through a high-powered telescope, and naturally the footage has made its way online.

NASA told reporters that they’d like to retrieve the bag, but are mostly concerned at the moment that it might end up slamming into one of the solar panels on the international space station.

Unfortunately there has been no sign of the missing spider yet.

Footage as follows. It’s not terribly exciting, but we are looking at a tool bag in the sky, which is somewhat amazing in itself.

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Brin is one of six people slated to be on the first Space Adventures tourist trip to the International Space Station, according to an announcement made this morning. Brin evidently made a $5 million investment in the company, which likely helped land him the hard-to-secure spot. A normal ticket would be in the ballpark of $20-30 million.

Space Adventures is planning to use a Soyuz — a Russian spacecraft designed, oddly enough, by another guy named Sergey — to take paying customers on its own private missions to the ISS. So far, five space cowboys have dropped big dough on out-of-this-world journeys, but they’ve all been traveling with NASA. Brin’s trip would be the first private launch. He has mentioned the year 2011 as a target date.

In an interesting twist, NASA is apparently looking at using some seats on the Soyuz in the future as well — which could put Brin in an awkward position, given his company’s relationship with the space agency.

ZDNet’s Larry Dignan has some perspective into other potential problems that could arise, too, raising the question of whether Brin needs a “risk-limiting clause” in his Google contract.

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