Richard Wiseman / Univ. of Hertfordshire

POP QUIZ: These views are from Mary King's Close in Edinburgh, Scotland. One room is said to be haunted, the other is not. Which is which? Click on the image to take the quiz and find out if you chose the purportedly haunted room.

When things go bump in the night, is it actually our brain that's bumping? Or is there something truly spooky behind some of those Halloween ghost stories?

In a recent poll, more than a third of those surveyed said they believed in ghosts - and almost a quarter said they had been in the presence of a ghost. Our unscientific Live Vote is even more gung-ho on ghosts.

Scientists have enlisted the tools of their trade - ranging from brain scanners and electrodes to virtual reality - to unravel the neurological roots of such phenomena. Some of the weird stuff we perceive is merely the result of our propensity for pattern recognition, they say. If we're in the right setting for a scare, it doesn't take much to set off our perception of the paranormal. (Our pop quiz serves as one simple example you can try for yourself.)

Other phenomena are weirder, but still of natural rather than supernatural origin. One research group used electrical stimulation to create that creepy feeling of being haunted. Other experimenters simulated an out-of-body experience. Still other scientists have linked near-death experiences and sleep disorders, or concluded that alien-abduction experiences are related to sleep paralysis.

Will all our spooky experiences be reduced to neural flashes inside our brains? Some of those who cover the paranormal beat say that's the way we're heading - but others say there are some things that just can't be explained away with a brain scan.

"The brain stuff is very, very limited," said British psychologist Richard Wiseman, who investigated (and ultimately debunked) the case of the Hampton Court haunting. "Basically you've got your head in a scanner. ... The interesting work is being done out there in the real world, as it were, rather than the artificial world of the brain scanner."

Deborah Blum, the author of "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death," finds herself caught right in the middle. She points to the research into the simulation of a spooky "shadow person" as an example.

"It's a classic example of two ways of seeing the world," Blum told me. "If you're a neuroscientist and you look at that, you say, 'Duh, I've now solved the mystery of ghosts.' But if you're someone who believes in the supernatural, you say, 'Duh, everyone knows that spirits communicate through telepathic transmission. You're just duplicating what a ghost does.'"

The science of spooks is an exceedingly slippery thing, as scientists discovered more than a century ago. Blum documents how William James and other notables such as pioneer evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace tried to find whatever scientific truth lay behind the spiritualism of those times.

Their efforts ultimately fizzled out, draining their credibility in the process - and Blum wonders whether the outcome proved that "science isn't a good match to study this stuff." Scientists can replicate electrical jolts and dopamine rushes - and if they're given enough time, they can suss out the hoaxes and the media-driven misperceptions that give rise to most paranormal reports. But some cases still remain resistant to the scientific method.

"You can't do it with these kind of phenomena, if they exist," Blum said. "Either they're not real, or you can't measure them."

Some continue to try nevertheless. Among the best-known contemporary efforts are the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies and the California-based Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Blum is particularly intrigued by a phenomenon known as crisis apparations - a sense that you're on the receiving end of a psychic communication from a loved one in peril.

"What I think is, there's no compelling case that we're communicating with the dead," she said. "There's a lot of interesting evidence, which we don't understand, that we communicate with each other on a subconscious level. So I think we're at this great point of being able to sort some of this out, but none of it so far says to me that we've solved all the mysteries of the universe."

Whether or not we finally solve those mysteries, ghostly tales have been part of the human psyche since - well, since the earliest records of the human psyche. And for Blum, that's one of the most interesting mysteries out there.

"Why have we seen ghosts since forever? The Egyptians reported seeing them. We report seeing them. Why?" she asked. "I do think that part of figuring out what we perceive as the supernatural is figuring out who we are."

In that spirit (heh, heh), feel free to chime in with your own Halloween ghost stories - or, for that matter, stories of how you debunked ghostly claims. To get you in the mood, here are some of the Cosmic Log tales from previous years:

• 2002: Ghostly mysteries solved
• 2003: Why we seek out an eek
• 2004: Sharing your scares
• 2005: Ghosts on the rise
• 2006: Bring me your ghost stories!

• N.Y. Times: Why we have nightmares
• LiveScience: The 10 most famous ghosts
• Planetary Society: Look for real aliens on the Web 
• How Stuff Works: Has science explained life after death?

NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA

A stellar tendril from the galaxy NGC 3808, at right, twists around the smaller galaxy NGC3808A in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

If galaxies were people, the latest image from the Hubble Space Telescope might be rated for mature audiences only. A stream of stars twists seductively from one galaxy to encircle its smaller companion, illustrating how gravitational attraction can set the stellar sparks flying.

The galaxy pair, known as Arp 87, lies 300 million light-years away in the constellation Leo and was cataloged in the 1960s by astronomer Halton Arp in his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. NGC 3808 is the nearly face-on spiral galaxy seen at right, and the smaller edge-on galaxy at left is NGC 3808A.

Gravitational interaction between such galaxies spark some of the highest star formation rates in the universe - and in this case, a corkscrew of stars, gas and dust is being pulled from the larger galaxy to form a corkscrewing "polar ring" that encircles NGC 3808A in a direction perpendicular to the galaxy's plane. Kinky! 

The dancing galaxies were observed in February by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The Hubble Heritage Team combined visible-light and infrared views to produce today's masterpiece. For a cool zoom-in video and additional goodies, check in with Hubble's European Web site.

Hubble has looked at several "peculiar galaxies" before, including Arp 297 and Arp 220, and there's a whole gallery of interacting galaxies at the University of Alabama. If you're into this sort of thing, you'll definitely want to revisit Hubble's imagery of "the Mice" and a grazing galactic encounter between NGC 2207 and IC 2163. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has a color-coded view of that same encounter that's suitable for a Halloween mask.

Visit our space gallery for further twists on extraterrestrial imagery.

• Technology Review: Making games physical
• Times of London: Don't blame me, blame my brain
• The New Yorker: Does the 'car of the future' have a future? 
• Danger Room tracks DARPA's robo-car rally  

Chris Jonas

Armadillo Aerospace's Mod lunar lander prototype goes up in flames Sunday during a final launch attempt at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. This photograph was taken from almost a mile away.

Armadillo Aerospace's yearlong quest to win a NASA-backed prize ended today in a blaze - not exactly a blaze of glory, but a fire that caught the attention of the thousands attending the X Prize Cup air and rocket show here at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The blast marked the second year in a row that the Texas-based Armadillo team and its popular leader, millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack, fell just short of snaring $350,000 of NASA's money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

No injuries were reported, and Brett Alexander, the X Prize Foundation's executive director for space prizes, said Armadillo's spindly Mod rocket craft did not appear to be totally destroyed. Nevertheless, the fiery end came as a deep disappointment to the Armadillo rocketeers, who thought they were virtually assured of winning something at this year's X Prize Cup.

"Today is officially a bad day," Alexander quoted Carmack as saying.

The Lunar Lander Challenge, which is backed by a total of $2 million in potential prizes from NASA's Centennial Challenges program, is aimed at encouraging innovations that could lead to more efficient landers for exploring the moon and other planets. By that measure, this weekend's event was a success, Alexander argued, because of the money spent by Armadillo and its competitors to develop new rocket technologies.

"It's many, many times the $2 million already, and they [NASA officials] haven't spent a dime," he said.

The challenge calls for rocket-powered craft to lift off from one launch pad, rise to a height of at least 50 meters, move over to another pad 100 meters away, land and refuel, then retrace its steps back to the beginning - all in 150 minutes or less. The Level 1 challenge requires 90 seconds of rocket-powered hang time, and offers a $350,000 top prize. The Level 2 challenge raises the bar to 180 seconds of flight, with a landing on a rugged, moonlike surface.

Seven seconds away from victory
Nine teams signed up for the challenge this year, but Armadillo was the only one to have its vehicle ready for the contest. In fact, Armadillo had two vehicles registered - the Mod (short for modular rocket) for Level 1 and another rocket craft called Pixel for Level 2.

Armadillo got to fly only the Mod this weekend. The team made four attempts to win the prize over the past two days: The first launch was aborted before it started, due to concerns about a balky ignitor. During the second and third tries, the Mod rocket made the first leg of its required round trip successfully, but was not able to complete the return trip. In both cases, the engine suffered a "hard start" and was fatally damaged during flight.

Carmack came the closest to victory during attempt No. 2, when he kept flying the vehicle by remote control despite the engine damage. The Mod was within seven seconds of satisfying the 90-second flight requirement, but the engine gave out and the craft fell to the ground.

The fiery end
For the fourth and final attempt, Armadillo team members cannibalized the rocket engine from Pixel, installed it on the Mod and revised their procedures in hopes of avoiding engine damage. The plan was take more time to flush out the fuel lines and engine chamber at the halfway point. But Armadillo never got that far.

Just seconds after the countdown ticked down to zero, the area around the Mod erupted in flames. "On ignition, they obviously had an explosion or something in the engine," Alexander said.

"The engine blew up. We had a hard start. ... It actually tore the engine loose," Armadillo team member Russ Blink told me later.

The Armadillo team evacuated the scene and declared an emergency. However, the blaze burned itself out within minutes - even before the fire crews arrived, Alexander said.

Blink said the team was still tracking down the root cause of the hard start. "There's some little gremlin that got us, and we need to get it out," he said. It could be a combination of factors: Some rocketeers suggested that the atmospheric conditions in New Mexico, which is arguably drier and dustier than Texas, might play a role.

"This weekend, we've had more problems that we've had in the last six months. We know what went wrong, but not why," Neil Milburn, Armadillo's vice president, said in a statement from the X Prize Foundation

Alexander said Carmack and the Armadillo team could have installed a spare engine on Pixel and made an attempt Sunday night to win the Lunar Lander Challenge's $1 million prize. "John elected not to go," Alexander said.

Blink said team members decided against another attempt in part because they feared the same engine problem might just crop up again.

There's always next year
The $2 million in prizes will roll over to next year, Alexander said. That would give new hope to other rocketeers, who widely expected Armadillo to walk away with at least one prize this year.

"I would expect that next year there will be more than one team competing," Alexander said. He noted that two or three of Armadillo's rivals "got very close" to being ready to launch this year.

Although the NASA money is still waiting from them, the other entrants in the Lunar Lander Challenge took no joy from Armadillo's loss.

"It's painful, even for us other competitors, to see that," said Dave Masten, president and chief executive officer of California-based Masten Space Systems.

Paul T. Breed, the senior partner in the father-and-son team at Unreasonable Rocket, was distraught when launch commentators asked him to react to the Mod's fiery end. "I know how hard they worked," he said.

Paul A. Breed, the 20-year-old junior partner, said Armadillo "definitely deserved to win." As he reflected on the day's events, the younger Breed referred to Murphy's Law - the observation that if anything can go wrong, it will.

"Things go wrong," Breed said. "Murphy loves rockets."

Other tidbits from the X Prize Cup:

• The X Prize organizers joined forces with Holloman Air Force Base this year to produce a show that was, if anything, dominated by military aerial displays rather than rocket demonstrations. The precision aerobatics, ear-shattering flyovers and choreographed parachute maneuvers were clearly the biggest crowd-pleasers - and at times the effect reminded me of a show put on jointly by the math club and the varsity football team. But the turnout appeared to please both sides: This weekend's attendance amounted to 85,000, including 6,000 students who came out for Friday's education day, said Brig. Gen. David Goldfein, commander of the 45th Fighter Wing at Holloman. Representatives of the air base as well as the X Prize Foundation said they'd be interested in putting on the same sort of event next year.

• The sponsorships for next year's event will likely have a different look, however: Alexander noted that that Wirefly, the telecommunications company that had been the cup's title sponsor, was enmeshed in financial difficulties and did not end up contributing to the event. Northrop Grumman's agreement to sponsor the Lunar Lander Challenge runs out this year - and it remains to be seen whether that sponsorship will continue. The challenge itself, however, will be offered through 2010 under the terms of NASA's Centennial Challenges program.

• The Pete Conrad Spirit of Innovation Award, named after the late Apollo 12 astronaut, recognizes concepts devised by high-school students to accelerate the personal spaceflight industry. This year's first-place winner was Michael & Talia of Los Angeles, a team that proposed a concept for sunglasses that can monitor vital signs in space. Those team members received a $5,000 grant from NASA and a spaceship trophy by artist/aviator Erik Lindbergh. Second place (and a $2,500 NASA grant) went to GADastro of Northbrook, Ill., which conceptualized a self-healing material to maintain safety in space. Third place (and a $1,500 NASA grant) was given to PenguinED of Friendswood, Texas, which conceptualized a company to work with schools on space education.

Last updated at 7:20 a.m. ET Oct. 29

The 150-minute clock has started ticking on Armadillo Aerospace's fourth attempt to win $350,000 in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The past attempts to get the Mod rocket craft from Point A to Point B and back, as required to win the prize, have been plagued by rocket engine problems. But Armadillo has come up with yet another twist to address the problems.

"We changed our procedure a little bit to flush out the system," said Armadillo team member Russ Blink. Armadillo has had good luck getting the Mod to Point B - it's the return trip that's been difficult. This time around, the team will take more time to clear residual fuel out of the engine system by letting pressurized helium squirt through the main valves.

Blink thinks that's what led to the damaging hard start during the morning run.

"I looked up in there, and the engine was wet," he told me.

Unfortunately, that engine couldn't be repaired in time, but Armadillo took the same type of rocket engine from its Pixel craft and installed it on the Mod. Will all this do the trick? We'll know in two and a half hours.

Armadillo Aerospace wants to take every opportunity to win $350,000 of NASA's money, even if they have to fly their Mod rocket craft in the dark, according to Brett Alexander, the X Prize Foundation's executive director for space prizes and the X Prize Cup.

Alexander also noted that Armadillo has been having persistent problems with "hard starts" - that is, having too much propellant in the chamber when the rocket engine lights up. That makes for a rough liftoff and puts stress on the engine. The hard starts occurred each time the rocket took off from the halfway point of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

Will the problem still persist now that the engine from Armadillo's Pixel craft has been installed in the Mod? We'll find out when Armadillo makes today's second attempt to win the Level 1 prize in the Lunar Lander Challenge. The 150-minute clock starts ticking around 12:45 p.m. MT.

"They are determined to keep trying" for the $350,000 prize, Alexander said, rather than turning their attention to the $1 million prize for a more ambitious Level 2 flight - which would require putting the engine back in Pixel.

Team members, contest organizers, the Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration are discussing the options for yet another run at the prize in case this afternoon's attempt fails. Among the options: trying again after the official close of the X Prize air and rocket show, or scheduling an attempt on Monday.

Neither of those options are that attractive. If it's tonight, "it would probably necessitate flying in the dark," Alexander said. If it's Monday, that would require adjusting schedules at the home base for this year's cup, Holloman Air Force Base.

While officials discuss the options, Armadillo is getting ready for this afternoon's crucial launch - which may or may not be its last gasp for this year's challenge.

The Armadillo Aerospace team is cannibalizing the engine from its last functional rocket, Pixel, to put into the Mod for this afternoon's attempt to win the $350,000 Level 1 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, according to the X Prize Foundation's Will Pomerantz.

To give Armadillo every possible chance, the organizers of the challenge are also talking about scheduling yet another attempt if the next one falls short, according to Pomerantz and Ken Davidian, the program manager for NASA's Centennial Challenges.

NASA is putting up the money for the Level 1 contest as well as the $1 million first-prize purse for a more difficult Level 2 contest. Because Pixel is Armadillo's entry in Level 2, it can't be switched over to the Level 1 task - but it can contribute parts to the Mod, Armadillo's official entry in Level 1.

If the Mod wins Level 1 this afternoon, the engine could conceivably be switched back to Pixel for a Level 2 attempt late today. But the prospects for that scenario are fuzzy at best.

To refresh your memory, Level 1 requires the lunar lander prototype to lift off from one pad and rise to at least 50 meters, hover for 90 seconds, touch down on another pad 100 meters away, then reverse those steps to complete the round trip. The whole circuit has to be done in 150 minutes.

Level 2 calls for a 180-second hover, and the landing area is uneven and rock-strewn, just as a typical lunar landing site might be. After all, the whole point of this is to develop technologies that could someday be used for more efficient, more capable interplanetary landers. By that measure, Armadillo and its fellow competitors are already winners.

The next attempt is due to begin at 12:45 p.m. MT.

Armadillo Aerospace's Mod rocket craft tried to lift off on its return flight, but the flight failed. During its launch on the first leg of the flight, some observers had remarked about a pop that might have signaled a "hard start," and that may have figured in the failure.

The X Prize Foundation's Will Pomerantz reported from the field that during its prelaunch checks, Armadillo found that "there was some fuel somwhere where there wasn't meant to be fuel," but decided to go ahead with the attempt anyway.

When the rocket started to rise from its pad for the return flight, the folks at the launch site knew right away that something was wrong. "Standing from here, we could heatr some anomalous pops," Pomerantz said.

The ascent was aborted, and the Mod fell back to the ground. Pomerantz reported that the engine chamber was cracked, and as a result the rocket is "not flightworthy." There was not enough time to make repairs and try another launch during this morning's time frame.

"The mood here is a little somber, but still exciting," launch commentator Patrick Beatty said. At least one more opportunity remains for Armadillo to go after the $350,000 prize in Level 1 of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge - and Transterrestrial Musing's Rand Simberg reports that there could be two more attempts.

It doesn't sound as if Armadillo will try for the more difficult Level 2 contest, which carries a $1 million prize.

Last updated 12:17 p.m. ET

Armadillo Aerospace's Mod rocket craft has completed the first leg of a round-trip flight that could win the Texas-based team $350,000. Mod was in the air for 91 or 92 seconds.

Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace is set to launch its Mod rocket craft on the launch pad this morning, in its third attempt to win $350,000 of NASA's money here at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico. This time, they're equipped with an extra advantage, thanks to fellow rocketeers from a competing team.

On Saturday, Armadillo was bedeviled by a problem with contamination in the fuel line - a glitch that forced them to abort their first launch try, and ultimately ruined the second attempt as well. During that second effort, the Mod's engine suffered fatal damage and gave out just seconds away from winning the Level 1 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

When the rocketeers from Unreasonable Rocket, another competitor in the Lunar Lander Challenge, heard about Armadillo's problems, they had an idea. It turned out that they had struggled with the same grit-in-the-line glitch early in their development effort, and they crafted a nifty little filter to take care of the problem.

Unreasonable Rocket offered the filter to Armadillo - and now it's installed on the Mod, along with a new engine, actuator and other parts.

Twenty-year-old Paul A. Breed, the junior member of Unreasonable Rocket's father-and-son team, said skeptics have asked him whether this was actually a scheme to sabotage a competitor.

"No one seems to get it," he told me as Armadillo was setting up on its starting pad, almost a mile (1.4 kilometers) away on Holloman Air Force Base. "We're not out to get each other."

Although the other challenge teams certainly wish they were in a position to go for the $350,000 Level 1 prize - or the more ambitious $1 million Level 2 prize - they also wish Armadillo well. That came through loud and clear Saturday night when rocketeers reviewed the day's events.

Armadillo's team, meanwhile, fixed up the Mod and got some rest.

"The guys are eager, fresh-faced and smiling," Will Pomerantz, who is overseeing the challenge for the X Prize Foundation, reported this morning.

This morning's task is the same as it was Saturday: Lift off, rise at least 50 meters in the air, move over to another launch pad 100 meters away, land, then reverse course back to the start - all in 150 minutes.

Chris Jonas

Armadillo Aerospace's Mod rocket craft rises from its pad at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., during an attempt to win $350,000 in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

Armadillo Aerospace provided a fresh demonstration of how alluring rocket science is - and how damnably difficult it can be - on the first day of this year's X Prize Cup at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The alluring part came when the thousands who thronged to the base watched Armadillo's alien-looking "Mod" rocket ship rise into the crisp desert sky on a tongue of flame.

The difficulty was brought home when the Mod tumbled to the ground, missing out on a $350,000 NASA prize by just a few seconds. The prize is one of the goodies up for grabs in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, being run for the second year in a row at the X Prize Cup.

The good news for Armadillo is that the Mod can be overhauled overnight, and that there will be at least two more chances to win NASA's money on Sunday, the second and final day of the X Prize Cup air and rocket expo.

Fuel-line glitch
Even before today's tragic tumble, Armadillo had been struggling with a fuel-line clog - a glitch that bedeviled them in the morning as well as the afternoon. Led by video-game whiz John Carmack, the team tinkered with the fuel system - at one point reportedly using a bent paper clip to clear the blockage.

The problem cropped up again during the final leg of what Carmack hoped would be a prize-winning round trip. The rocket engine was running rough, but Carmack was able to keep the remote-controlled Mod going for 83 seconds into the flight. At that point, the engine gave up the ghost and the Mod fell from its hovering position just a few meters above the launch pad.

Until the very end, the spindly Mod had hit every mark on the checklist for winning the $350,000 Level 1 prize: It lifted off from its starting pad, rose to at least 50 meters in altitude, eased back down and across to another pad 100 meters away and touched down safely, staying in the air for 90 seconds. All Armadillo had to do was to guide the Mod back the way it came - and bring the machine back to its starting gate before time elapsed on a 150-minute window.

If the engine could have kept going for seven more seconds, Armadillo might well have won the money. As Transterrestrial Musings' Rand Simberg pointed out to me, no one would have cared about a rough-running or even a broken engine after a successful touchdown.

But this year's tumble - like Armadillo's tumble at last year's Lunar Lander Challenge - just goes to show why rocket science is the quintessential difficult thing to do, and why space entrepreneurs are notoriously bad at predicting when their snazzy spaceships will be good to go.

Tiffany Trojca / U.S. Air Force

An F-22, F-117, F-15 and F-4 perform the Holloman Legacy Flight during Saturday's air show and rocket fest at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M. The Legacy Flight showcases the aircraft that have been and will be a part of Holloman's mission.

Airplanes and rockets
The contrast between the world of airplanes and the world of future spaceships was brought home also by this year's blend of private-sector rocketeering and military air-show acrobatics. The space-related launches and exhibits focused on what might be available in a couple of years, while the jet flyovers and parachute drops highlighted years and years of training and aerospace history.

Brig. Gen. David Goldfein, commander of the 49th Fighter Wing here at Holloman, alluded to the unpredictability of aerospace in a catchphrase I heard repeated several times today by our Air Force hosts: "Airplanes and rockets - what could possibly go wrong?"

Airplanes can certainly be dangerous things to have around, but the technology behind them has been so ironed out that we usually don't give a second thought about being around all those thundering jets. Rockets, on the other hand, are often unpredictable as well as dangerous. That's why Armadillo's launches took place so far away from the crowd that the best way to see them was to look up at the Jumbotron display.

On Sunday, we'll be watching the Jumbotron again, to see whether Armadillo can banish the glitches once and for all. If the Mod's morning run succeeds, Armadillo will go after the Lunar Lander Challenge's big $1 million prize with its wide-stance Pixel rocket craft. To hit the jackpot, Pixel would have to hang in the air for 180 seconds going each way, and land on a rougher, moonlike terrain.

Those factors make the Level 2 challenge much tougher than the Level 1 challenge that the Mod had so much trouble with. Carmack rates the chances of Pixel's success at less than even.

Pixel's twin, nicknamed Texel, blew up in August during testing. On the positive side, Pixel itself ran the complete Level 2 course during tests a week later, and Armadillo has had the benefit of several more weeks' worth of fine tuning.

So what could possibly go wrong? Will enough things go right for Armadillo to come away with the biggest single prize ever paid out by NASA? Come back on Sunday to find out how this year's Lunar Lander Challenge cliffhanger ends.

Several of my blogging brethren are slaving away beside me at the X Prize Cup this weekend. Check out the reports from:

• Leonard David at Space.com / LiveScience
• Clark Lindsey at RLV and Space Transport News
• Jeff Foust at Personal Spaceflight
• David Shiga at New Scientist Space Blog 
• Jason Silverman at Wired Science
• Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings

Are you blogging too? Feel free to add links to other X Prize Cup reports as comments below.

Armadillo Aerospace missed winning $350,000 of NASA's money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge this afternoon, most likely because of the same fuel-line problem that cropped up in the morning, according to one of the Armadillo team's members.

In the morning, Armadillo's first attempt to launch its spindly Module 1 rocket craft was spoiled because there was "some crap" in a fuel line, blocking the flow of ethanol, said Armadillo's Neil Milburn.

The team called off that launch attempt to clear the line, and tried again in the afternoon. The "Mod" made a virtually perfect flight from its starting pad to another pad 100 meters away. But while the craft was being prepared for the required return trip, engineers found that the line was clogged again - and took on another cleaning job.

They thought the job did the trick, but Milburn said "it obviously wasn't perfect."

During the return hop, the Mod went through the flight plan that was laid out for it - rising to the required height of 50 meters, moving back over to the starting pad, then hanging just a few meters over the pad to run out the 90-second clock. The Mod itself was obscured by the dust its rocket blast kicked up.

At the 83-second mark, something went wrong.

"It moved over, dust kicked up, you couldn't see anything - and whoa!" said Joseph Boyle, the space boss for the Lunar Lander Challenge.

When the dust settled, the Mod was lying on its side.

Boyle said the craft had been swaying from side to side just before the crash landing. Milburn explained that the fuel line must have been obstructed, and the liquid oxygen burned too hot. That ruined the engine, he said.

"We had a cracked chamber," Milburn told me.

All is not lost for Armadillo, however. The team plans to replace the engine and make other repairs overnight, then go again for the $350,000 with the Mod in the morning, Milburn said.

The $1 million prize for a longer, potentially rockier flight is still out there as well, and there's still a chance that Milburn, team leader John Carmack and the rest of the Armadillo crew would try snaring that purse with the other lunar lander prototype they brought to Holloman for the X Prize Cup.

The Module 1 craft came down to the ground, but then tipped over and crashed. That means the Armadillo Aerospace team missed out on the $350,000 NASA prize in its second and last attempt of the day.

Ken Davidian, program manager for NASA's Centennial Challenges, said Module 1 was in the air for 83 seconds - seven seconds short of the required hang time. Also, I'm sure it didn't help that the spindly rocket craft fell on its side when it touched down. However, it doesn't look as if the "Mod" suffered a mortal blow.

Davidian said Armadillo team leader John Carmack has opted for starting fresh on Sunday rather than scrambling to try again today. Will they try for the $350,000 with a repaired Mod, or will they go for the $1 million with its wider, more stable Pixel craft? Stay tuned.

Last updated 4:45 p.m. ET

Armadillo Aerospace's Module 1 rocket prototype is taking off for the second leg of its round trip at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico. If it completes a 90-second hop from its current launch pad to the pad it started from - and gets back to its specified finish line in time - the Texas-based team wins $350,000 of NASA's money in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

Launch commentator Miles O'Brien reports that "the problem has been fixed," the fuel line has been cleared, and liquid oxygen is being loaded onto the Module 1 craft in preparation for a 90-second rocket flight that could be worth $350,000 for the Armadillo Aerospace team at the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

The timing could be tight: Armadillo has benefited from some time-outs for air traffic, because this year's X Prize Cup is an air show as well as a rocket show. Nevertheless, even if Module 1 completes the flight successfully, the rocket will have to shut down and be carried back to the official finish line on the runway - probably with just minutes to spare on the 150-minute clock.

The Armadillo team has gotten halfway through the course for the $350,000 Level 1 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, and the Module 1 lunar lander is now being prepared for the return trip. If it makes that trip back and fulfills all the conditions for the competition, the prize is theirs.

Right now, the team is fueling up and checking out the lines. If everything looks OK, the second launch could come within just a few minutes.

The X Prize Cup commentators here at Holloman Air Force Base have been chatting about the newly announced Teachers in Space program and other topics.

Update: Launch commentator Miles O'Brien quotes space boss Joseph Boyle (no relation to me) as saying that the Armadillo team is checking out a "little problem" with the fuel line - similar to the problem encountered this morning.

Armadillo Aerospace's team took off right on time for the launch pad, with its Module 1 rocket ship (and, by the way, its wide-stance Pixel craft) on the back of a flatbed truck. That sets another 150-minute countdown going: In the space of two and a half hours, Armadillo could lay claim to a $350,000 prize from NASA if Module 1 can complete a rocket-powered round trip.

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, being run today and Sunday at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico, is offering a total of $2 million in prizes backed by NASA's Centennial Challenges program. Because Armadillo is the only contestant, it's eligible only for the $350,000 prize in Level 1, and the $1 million prize in Level 2.

Today, the task at hand is Level 1: The Module 1 will have to blast off vertically from one launch pad, hover for 90 seconds, rise to a minimum height of 50 meters, and touch down at another pad 100 meters away. Then it will have to run the same course back to the start, under the same conditions.

Level 2 is even harder, with 180 seconds of hang time required. But that's a task (and a reward) that will have to wait until Sunday.

Orbital Outfitters today unveiled the first-ever pressure suit made for commercial suborbital spaceflight, after keeping the design under wraps for months. The IS³C suit would be worn by the pilot once XCOR Aerospace gets its two-seater spacecraft working - and Orbital Outfitters' chief executive officer, Jeff Feige, is hoping to sell a lot more.

"We're building suits custom-built for this industry," he told onlookers who watched the impromptu fashion show at Orbital Outfitters' X Prize Cup booth.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Klaatu barada nikto? Orbital Outfitters' Jeff Feige, at left, points out features in the suborbital spacesuit modeled by Chris Gilman at the X Prize Cup.

The company says the suit uses special materials that let the "sweat" out while maintaining a pressurized environment. Once the market gets going in high-frontier haberdashery, suits can be produced in different colors, festooned with logos like a NASCAR driver's togs.

Feige emphasized that the suit modeled by Chris Gilman today isn't what the passengers would wear. He said it was too early to determine what those suits would look like, but Rick Tumlinson, Orbital Outfitters' chairman, has said passengers might wear a lightweight suit with a flight-suitlike shell they could take home with them.

The suit isn't ready for prime time, and neither is XCOR's suborbital craft. The California-based rocket company hasn't announced its timetable for development, but it's a safe bet the craft won't be in service before 2010.

By that time, the IS³C (Industrial Suborbital Space Suit / Crew) should be ready to fly.

"We have already successfully tested this IS³C suit well above the pressure at which NASA operates its own spacesuits," Tumlinson said in a written statement. "While we still have a good deal of testing ahead of us, the suit we are unveiling here today is a working, first-generation prototype version of an emergency crew suit."

Other suborbital space companies are trying to decide whether to follow Orbital Outfitters' lead. Virgin Galactic, for example, isn't sure whether customers will need a pressurized suit in the event of rapid decompression aboard its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane. After all, airplane passengers aren't required to use one. Rather, those well-known oxygen masks simply drop down from the ceiling.

Rocketplane Global, another player in the suborbital market, favors more lightweight clothing for spaceflight. In fact, the word is that a trim-looking flight suit, with just a few fashion accents, is being designed for Rocketplane's first scheduled passenger, Reda Anderson.

Armadillo Aerospace is planning a rerun of this morning's effort to win the $350,000 Level 1 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Armadillo team member Neil Milburn said he pulled the plug on the attempt because of problems with the Module 1 rocket's ignitor.

"We were not getting good fuel flow to the ignitor," Milburn said, and the fix couldn't be made on the pad. The 150-minute clock for the second attempt is due to start at 12:45 p.m. MT, and after the preparations at the pad, the rocket could take off on the first leg of its trip around 1:44 p.m.

One piece of good news: The weather here at Holloman Air Force Base in southern New Mexico is spectacular. Not a cloud in the sky, and nothing that would keep Armadillo's craft from launching.

"The wind is really light out there. ... It was a zephyr breeze out there," Milburn said.

If Armadillo wins the $350,000 NASA-backed prize this afternoon, it would go on to try for an even bigger payoff on Sunday. The Level 1 competition requires Armadillo's craft to hang in the air for only 90 seconds. The million-dollar Level 2 prize calls for 180 seconds of hang time - and the landing would be on a more rugged surface.

Armadillo has groomed its more stable Pixel rocket prototype to go for Level 2.

Armadillo Aerospace says it has scrubbed this morning's attempt to win the Level 1 prize, due to problems with ignition (or actually, the lack thereof). They'll try again with the Module 1 craft at 12:45 p.m. MT. That means that Armadillo's bid for the big $1 million Level 2 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, using its Pixel lunar lander prototype, will likely have to wait until Sunday. I'll work on a posting that gives more of the background in just a bit.

My earlier information on the timing for the afternoon Lunar Lander Challenge was incorrect, but I've made a fix ... just as the Armadillo team hopes to do.

Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace has kicked off its first attempt to win $350,000 in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. It's the first big event at the X Prize Cup, here at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Armadillo would win that money if it can set up its Mod-1 lunar lander prototype, get it to launch vertically from its pad to rise to a height of 50 meters, hover for 90 seconds, touch down on another pad 100 meters away, then reverse its course to come back to the starting point.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? Well, you have to do all that within 150 minutes, and so you have to fix anything that goes wrong during that time. And in fact, the first time Armadillo tried to launch, nothing happened. The team had to track down the glitch, recycle its countdown and repressurize the Mod-1's propellant tanks for another go.  

Launch commentator David Livingston, host of the Space Show, noted that such launch delays come all too frequently when you're working with rockets.

"None of us like 'em," Livingston said.

Check back for updates as the 150-minute timer ticks down.

Space activists took one small step toward bringing more teachers to the final frontier today, by opening up the application process for a privately backed "Teachers in Space" project. Organizers plan to award seats on a suborbital spacecraft to one science/tech teacher and another teacher in any subject area.

Speaking amid the buildup to this weekend's X Prize Cup air and rocket expo, project manager Edward Wright noted that schoolteachers were among the first on the frontier during America's infancy. "We believe that teachers have the right stuff for opening the space frontier and playing the same role today," he told reporters at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Details of the program, organized jointly by the Space Frontier Foundation and Wright's United States Rocket Academy, are still being nailed down. For example, no deadline has been specified for getting the application in - or for selecting the first two "pathfinder" teacher-astronauts.

"We aren't sure what to expect. ... We would like to announce a winner probably next year, but it depends on how the teachers respond," Wright told me.

It also depends on which suborbital space companies are ready to fly passengers in what time frame. Five companies - Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Planetspace, Rocketplane Global and XCOR Aerospace - have donated at least one seat each to the program. Wright said XCOR has offered seats in the "double digits," although he declined to cite a specific number. The current conventional wisdom is that those companies will be open for spaceflight business no earlier than 2010.

Teachers in Space builds on the two-decade-old promise of NASA's program to put educators in orbit. The first such space mission ended tragically in 1986 when elementary-school teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with her six fellow fliers in the Challenger tragedy. McAuliffe's backup, Idaho schoolteacher Barbara Morgan, flew on a shuttle mission just this August. Two more educator-astronauts are due to go into space next year.

Wright, however, gave a failing grade to NASA's educator-astronaut program. He noted that during the August flight, agency administrator Mike Griffin insisted that Morgan was not an educator-astronaut, but an astronaut who used to be an educator. The same would likely go for other teachers who joined NASA's astronaut corps, Wright said.

"Unfortunately, these educator-astronauts will never return to the classrooms from which they came," he said.

That outcome runs counter to the spirit of a true educator-astronaut program - and sends the wrong message to the next generation of spacefliers, Wright said. To back up his argument, he displayed a viewgraph showing the annual recruitment levels for astronauts and severall categories of professional athletes. The bar for astronauts was woefully short in comparison.

Wright's statement on the Teachers in Space Web site laid out the lesson behind the viewgraph:

"Since the beginning of the Space Age, 50 years ago, students have been told that if they studied math and science, they could grow up to become astronauts and go into space.

"Unfortunately, that was a false promise. Even at the height of the shuttle program, a student had a better chance of becoming an NBA basketball player than a NASA astronaut. No wonder today's students show more interest in athletics than math and science.

"What if we could turn that around and show students that they have a real chance for a future in space?

"Imagine thousands of astronaut teachers, in schools all across the country, sharing their spaceflight knowledge and experiences with millions of students. This vision could become a reality within the next 10 years."

Ideally, the first two pathfinder astronauts would encourage the federal government or private donors to support a steady stream of space teachers, Wright said. In addition, the application process itself would produce a lasting legacy.

Wright said applicants would be required to submit proposed microgravity experments (for teachers in science, technology, engineering and math) or space-related curriculum plans (for the broader educational categories). Those documents would be made freely available through a Wiki database that will soon be set up, Wright said.

The Teachers in Space program got a gold star from Armadillo Aerospace team member Neil Milburn, whose full-time job is teaching high-school physics. Once upon a time, Milburn recalled, half the kids in a classroom would put up their hands when the teacher asked them how many wanted to go into space. Nowadays, he counts himself lucky if 2 or 3 percent raised their hands. Programs like Teachers in Space - and increased interest in commercial spaceflight - could make a difference, he said.

"I think I can see it start to change the corner again," Milburn said.

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