PlanetSpace / Lockheed Martin / ATK

An artist's conception shows a Lockheed Martin-built Orbital Transfer Vehicle being maneuvered at the international space station by a robotic arm.

The competition to build spaceships for NASA can lead to alliances as strange as anything seen on a "Survivor" episode, as illustrated by PlanetSpace's new partnership with two space heavyweights. Lockheed Martin and ATK are the leading players in NASA's effort to build the multibillion-dollar successor to the space shuttle - but at the same time, they're the junior partners in a bid to build a low-cost alternative to that successor, taking directions from a prime contractor that's never launched anything into outer space.

Chirinjeev Kathuria, the chairman of Chicago-based PlanetSpace, said the deal announced last week was the result of months of talks.

"We look at it as a huge win for everyone," he told me.

Al Simpson, director of advanced programs for human spaceflight at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, agreed: "If you think about this, it's a very natural fit ... where everybody benefits."

The consortium is one of several that is going after $174.7 million in NASA backing for the development of private-sector spaceships capable of resupplying the international space station. That money was left over from an initial round of budgeting for NASA's $500 million Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS, when the space agency terminated its agreement with Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler last month.

The application deadline passed last week, and now NASA has until next February to decide who will get the money. NASA's hope is that a little financial push now will lead to low-cost launches later - to help bridge the gap between the shuttle fleet's scheduled retirement in 2010 and the debut of the Orion-Ares launch system in 2013 or later. Even after that point, NASA might stick with private companies for space station resupply, and save the expensive Orion missions for its back-to-the-moon effort. 

The PlanetSpace-led consortium is vying with several other companies for the COTS leftovers, including:

• California-based SpaceDev, which is offering its Dream Chaser space plane as a potential cargo carrier. The Dream Chaser, modeled on the HL-20 mini-shuttle design that NASA drew up in the 1980s, could be launched on an Atlas 5 or NASA's next-generation Ares 1 rocket.
• Texas-based Spacehab, which is proposing to launch its ARCTUS cargo spacecraft on an Atlas 5 or a Delta 4 launch vehicle.
• Virginia-based Transformational Space, which has been working on a cargo-capable capsule that could be launched by an air-dropped rocket.

Like PlanetSpace, all three of those companies have been developing spaceships with NASA guidance - but without NASA money. They're all hoping for a piece of a more lucrative pie once NASA starts buying flights in the post-shuttle era.

Yet another company, California-based SpaceX, was the other co-winner in the original COTS competition, along with Rocketplane Kistler. The company is already in line to reap $278 million if it hits all of NASA's milestones - and so far, SpaceX says it's on track to conduct the three specified unmanned launch demonstrations by the end of 2009.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk told me his company is seeking a share of newly offered COTS money to demonstrate crew transfer capability. Musk proposed doing a manned demonstration launch in 2010 - say, by sending one test pilot or even a crew of sensor-equipped crash-test dummies to the space station and back. If the demonstration succeeds, operational flights could begin in 2011, he said.

All this ambition and competition just goes to show that PlanetSpace's bid won't be a slam-dunk, even with Lockheed Martin and ATK on its side.

Suborbital vs. orbital
Over the past few months, PlanetSpace has been working with NASA on a concept that involves a hypersonic glider called the Silver Dart and a booster equipped with Alchemy rocket engines based on the tried and true V-2 design. Kathuria told me today that PlanetSpace has hit the first five milestones in its agreement with NASA, and is in "a good position" to fly the suborbital Silver Dart with its Alchemy-powered booster from a Nova Scotia spaceport starting in late 2009 or early 2010.

PlanetSpace / Lockheed Martin / ATK

An artist's conception shows the ATK launch vehicle that would be developed for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services.

"They're going to be used for suborbital, which is cargo express, point-to-point travel and space tourism," Kathuria said.

But the Silver Dart won't be used for the orbital project, he said.

Instead, the plan calls for ATK to develop the launch vehicle and ground processing systems for the COTS project. ATK, which manufactures the solid rocket boosters for the space shuttle and is working on NASA's Ares 1 rocket, has a rich assortment of rocket motors and components to choose from.

"What we're doing is taking products that we already produce and combining them," ATK spokesman George Torres told me today. "We can mix and match for almost any requirements."

Lockheed Martin would develop the cargo capsule, which is based on the Orbital Transfer Vehicle design that has been kicking around for years. Simpson said the modular cargo carrier would be capable of delivering supplies to the station and returning them to Earth.

"This will be a low-cost, very reliable vehicle because it's based on heritage design," Simpson said.

PlanetSpace in the pilot's seat
PlanetSpace would take on the role of prime contractor, managing the overall effort - and, not incidentally, rounding up funding for the venture. BMO Capital Markets would assist PlanetSpace as financial adviser for acquisitions as well as debt and equity deals.

Kathuria, an Indian-American physician who made his fortune in the telecommunication and medical-instrument industries, first became involved in space finance seven years ago when he provided millions of dollars to support Russia's Mir space station in its final days. Two and a half years ago, he joined forces with Canadian Arrow rocketeer Geoff Sheering to form PlanetSpace.

Even though PlanetSpace hasn't gone beyond designing and testing spacecraft components on the ground, Lockheed Martin's Simpson said the fledgling company would be the key partner in the venture.

"They want to be in the business, which is what NASA's looking for," Simpson said. "PlanetSpace's access to the private equity world, that's what makes them so critical to the business."

The upside for Lockheed Martin and ATK is that they could enter a low-cost launch market they don't currently service.

The supporting players on PlanetSpace's team include Space Florida, United Launch Alliance, Wyle Laboratories, Paragon Space and MEHTA Engineering. If the consortium wins COTS funding, the first demonstration launch would lift off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in late 2010, Kathuria said.

Some of PlanetSpace's employees would be based in Ohio, where Kathuria is working on a multimillion-dollar development deal involving Columbus' Rickenbacker International Airport. But the bulk of the orbital work would be done in Florida, Kathuria said.

He projected that an average of 300 or more high-tech aerospace jobs could be created in Florida on an annual basis, including more than 150 jobs at PlanetSpace. A multiuse facility would provide space for business offices as well as clean-room assembly and testing.

Looking longer-term, Kathuria said PlanetSpace orbital launches could continue from Florida - or shift to the Nova Scotia facility, which would become Canada's first orbital spaceport.

That's all assuming that PlanetSpace's bid goes through, of course. Will NASA go for a plan where the aerospace industry's usual suspects take on decidedly unusual roles? Stay tuned for the answer in a couple of months.

Other New Space tidbits
In the meantime, here are some of the other developments in space entrepreneurship - or "New Space," if you prefer:

• Odyssey Moon is the first team to complete registration for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, and more details about the international consortium will be coming out next week at the Space Investment Summit in San Jose, Calif. Space.com's Leonard David first reported on Odyssey Moon's status. It certainly won't be the only team in the running: About 350 inquiries about the prize have come in from all over the world, the X Prize Foundation's Will Pomerantz reports.

• Over at RLV and Space Transport News, Clark Lindsey points to a report in Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine about Bigelow Aerospace's big plans for spaceflight. Founder Robert Bigelow is quoted as saying that he's investing in the development of a capsule capable of lofting cargo and passengers to Bigelow's future space stations.

• Australian news media have reported that financial trader/adviser/"thrillionaire" Nik Halik has been selected as the backup trainee for video-game guru Richard Garriott's trip to the international space station next year. Space Adventures spokeswoman Stacey Tearne, however, told me such reports are premature. Halik is one of the candidates for the $3 million training spot, but the selection won't be made until late this year or early next year. Training, for Garriott as well as his wingman, is due to begin in January, Tearne said. (She told Personal Spaceflight blogger Jeff Foust pretty much the same thing.)

• Amazon.com's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos is much more talkative about his new Kindle e-book than about his secretive rocket venture, Blue Origin. But he did open up a bit during a recent interview with Charlie Rose - saying that the company's second rocket prototype is in development. Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides provides a synopsis of Bezos' space snippets at Wired Science.

• Nature: Splitting the quark
• The Economist: The germ of an idea
• Slashdot: Scientists create zombie cockroach
• Telegraph: Are we shortening the universe's life? (via Daily Grail)

While some people are still finishing up the Thanksgiving turkey leftovers, the Hubble Heritage Team has already sent out its holiday card for this year: a spiral galaxy festooned with stars like a Christmas wreath. NASA's other "Great Observatories" have also delivered some colorful views this week - and if you're still working on your season's greetings, you'll find some out-of-this-world suggestions on the Web.

NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage

The Hubble Space Telescope's view of the spiral galaxy M74 looks like a festive holiday wreath. Click on the image for a bigger version.

Today's picture from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy M74, also known as NGC 628, which is pointed nearly face-on toward Earth, 32 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. Astronomers estimate that the galaxy has about 100 billion stars, making it slightly smaller than our own Milky Way.

Hubble's image is based on data collected in 2003 and 2004 using the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Additional data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope was used to fill in a gap in the Hubble view.

The image is more sparkly than you might see in person, because the colors have been chosen to reflect infrared as well as visible-light wavelengths. The ornaments on the galactic wreath are clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen. Lanes of dust and stars swirl out from the galaxy's bright center.

M74's picture-perfect spiral was first spotted back in 1780 and has been a popular target for astronomers ever since - this 2001 picture from the Gemini Observatory provides yet another stunning perspective.

The beauty of Hubble is that it's so easy to share them with others. HubbleSite's Astronomy Printshop makes it easy for you to produce high-quality prints of the space telescope's greatest hits.

If you head on over to the European Space Agency's Hubble Web site, you'll find a selection of preformatted postcards suitable for printing. Just scrawl your holiday greeting on the back and you're good to go. There are also files for posters and calendars (although 2008 hasn't been posted yet). The site even has an online store (although the goods will have to be shipped from Germany).

NASA / CXC / Middlebury / NOAO

The large picture shows a wide-field view of the Puppis A supernova remnant in X-ray and optical wavelengths, with a close-up image from Chandra at right, showing the position of the neutron star RX J0822-4300 in 1999 and 2005.

The scientists behind the Chandra X-Ray Telescope haven't exactly sent a card, but the "cosmic cannonball" shown in their latest offering could serve as a virtual holiday ornament. The cannonball is actually a neutron star called RX J0822-4300 that was ejected by a supernova explosion about 3,700 years earlier.

When scientists compared Chandra imagery from 1999 and 2005, they determined that the star was moving more than 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) an hour, making it one of the fastest-moving stars ever observed. "At this rate, RX J0822-4300 is destined to escape from the Milky Way after millions of years, even though it has only traveled about 20 light-years so far," the Chandra team said in Wednesday's image advisory.

Looking at the big picture, astronomers found that most of the oxygen-rich debris from the supernova blast was moving toward the left, while the cannonball was moving toward the right. "The oxygen clumps are believed to be massive enough so that momentum is conserved in the aftermath of the explosion, as required by fundamental physics," the Chandra team said.

For more ornaments from the Chandra Web site, check out this gallery of e-cards specially designed for the season's holidays. You'll also find a variety of printable materials, including puzzles, posters and pictures.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UIUC

The picture at left shows the area around the developing sunlike star L1157 in visible light. At right, the Spitzer infrared image looks within the haze to see jets of gas streaming outward from the star, which itself is still shrouded in dust.

Today's image from NASA's third Great Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, shows a solar system's "baby picture" in reddish and greenish Christmas hues. Those colors reflect different wavelengths of infrared light emitted by giant jets of gas streaming out from the star. The green and white areas are the warmest (about 212 degrees Fahrenheit, or 100 degrees Celsius), while the red and orange streaks represent cooler material, in the range of zero degrees on both temperature scales.

The dark streak running through the center of the picture is thought to be a hazy envelope of dust surrounding the infant star. The researchers speculate that our own solar system might have looked much like this in its early days.

"Some theories had predicted that envelopes flatten as they collapse onto their stars and surrounding planet-forming disks, but we hadn't seen any evidence of this until now," Leslie Looney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said in a university news release.

Looney is the lead author of a report about the observations appearing in the Dec. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Other authors include John Tobin of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Woojin Kwan of the University of Illinois.

The Spitzer Web site offers a variety of printable materials suitable for geeks bearing gifts, including a 2008 calendar. And you can graze through Spitzer's image gallery for do-it-yourself holiday e-cards. Don't forget to send me one!

• Short Sharp Science: Is beauty in the brain of the beholder?
• The Guardian: Nanobots could help us live forever
• Oddee: Ten people with real-life superpowers
• The New Yorker: Darwin's surprise

DaimlerChrysler file

Daimler's NECAR 5 prototype gets a methanol fill-up during a cross-country test drive in 2002. The methanol powered a hydrogen fuel cell on the experimental vehicle.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to free America from the grip of high-priced oil imports. Or does it?

Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin lays out the case for an alcohol-based fuel economy in a new book titled "Energy Victory" – and although ethanol is the best-known alcohol replacement for gasoline, Zubrin focuses on a different brew called methanol, also known as wood alcohol.

The concept behind "Energy Victory" is to go after energy independence as a means to cut off the flow of money through the Middle East to terrorists – and that concept surfaced just a few days ago in the presidential campaign, courtesy of GOP hopeful Mike Huckabee.

"Every time we put our credit card in the gas pump, we're paying so that the Saudis get rich - filthy, obscenely rich, and that money then ends up going to funding madrassas" - religious schools "that train the terrorists," Huckabee said last weekend on CNN.

As a result, American money ends up financing both sides in the war on terror, Huckabee argued - and that's why he says it's imperative to move to energy independence within the next decade.

That argument gets a thorough airing in "Energy Victory."

"The world economy is currently running on a resource that is controlled by our enemies," Zubrin declares on the first page. "This threatens to leave us prostrate. It must change - and the good news is that it can change, quickly."

I'm inclined to jump over the politics of the argument for a couple of reasons: First, the calculus involved in Middle East relations is incredibly complex, as evidenced by today's news about a Saudi anti-terror crackdown and progress on the peace front. Second, you don't have to use fighting words to convince me that energy independence and alternative fuels are very good things. But how easily and how quickly can things change?

Here's where the rocket-scientist background plays a part.

"I was actually a nuclear engineer before I became a rocket scientist, and was well-acquainted with energy policy" said Zubrin, who's best-known nowadays as the president of the Mars Society. "And furthermore, the work that I did relating to Mars taught me a lot about fuel synthesis. It became apparent to me that the Bush administration's hydrogen policy was completely unworkable, but the easiest liquid fuel to make would be methanol."

Methanol? Wasn't ethanol supposed to be the fuel of the future?

After the ethanol euphoria
Last year, ethanol fuel - alcohol that can be made from corn, sugar cane or other plants - was touted as the answer for what ails America's energy economy. With the price of oil rising, ethanol blends have become much more economical.

However, the ethanol boom has turned into something of a bust over the past year, as detailed today in The Wall Street Journal. Because corn is the primary U.S. crop for ethanol production, rising grain prices have sparked fears about a "food vs. fuel" dilemma. There are also environmental concerns, about stoking up air pollution as well as draining water supplies.  

To address the food-vs.-fuel issue, and boost the amount of biomass available for ethanol production, researchers are working on innovative processes that could convert plant cellulose into ethanol - with federal funding, of course.

Cellulosic ethanol production is currently the major research focus, but the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory is taking a long-term look at other fuels as well, including methanol.

Adding methanol blends to the mix would help close the gap, Zubrin said. "Methanol can be made from any kind of biomass without exception," ranging from raw plant cellulose to paper waste. It can also be made from stranded natural gas or coal, turning not-so-portable fossil fuels into liquid energy that could power a car or an airplane. In fact, methanol-powered cars passed technical tests at Ford 20 years ago, and at Daimler five years ago.

The current price equation is favorable to methanol as well, Zubrin said. "Methanol at 93 cents a gallon is like gasoline at $1.70," he said.

Switching to methanol, ethanol, biodiesel and other alternative fuels would make energy markets more competitive - and even though there's widespread worry about the effect of higher grain prices on the Third World, Zubrin argues that many developing nations would benefit as well.

"If we go to the alcohol economy, not only will we stop the current price rise and reverse the coming one, but we'll be able to shift a lot of money from OPEC to the world's agricultural economies," he said.

There are drawbacks, of course. Otherwise, we'd be driving alcohol-fueled cars already, right?

Problems and solutions
Unlike ethanol, methanol is toxic, which complicates handling (although Zubrin maintains that "people can handle that the way they handle gasoline"). It's also more corrosive than gasoline, which means fuel lines would have to be made of sterner stuff. What's more, methanol packs only half the punch per gallon that gasoline does, meaning that cars running purely on methanol would have to fuel up twice as often.

For these reasons, the Department of Energy's alternative-fuel database notes that methanol is currently "not commonly used or easily available." There would have to be a powerful incentive to gear up the production and distribution of methanol fuels.

Yet another factor to consider would be how oil exporters might respond to a substantial shift toward alternative fuels.  If such fuels start to take hold, oil prices could well start dropping - which would appear to be a good thing, but would also stall the momentum for embracing the alternatives and getting closer to energy independence. That's what happened in the United States after the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Courtesy Robert Zubrin

Robert Zubrin says methanol, ethanol and flex-fuel cars can get America closer to energy independence.

There's a simple solution to many of these drawbacks, Zubrin said: Require automakers to produce flexible-fuel cars capable of running on any blend of methanol, ethanol or gasoline. That could add hundreds of dollars to the cost of a car, but Zubrin said it'd be worth it.

The requirement should apply to BMW and Toyota as well as Ford and GM, he said. "The key policy here is mandating that all new cars sold, not made, in the United States would be flex-fueled," he said.

Zubrin's not the only one taking this stand: A coalition called Set America Free is working to get the alcohol economy, flex-fuel and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the political agenda as an international security issues as well as an economic and environmental issue.

So what about those plug-ins? If it takes electricity to turn biomass into alcohol fuels, why not focus completely on developing plug-in cars with super-duper-batteries?

Zubrin argues that the energy economy cannot live by plug-in hybrids alone. Even if we're able to wean ourselves off oil, liquid fuels will play a role into the foreseeable future, he said. And if you believe that energy independence is fundamental to winning the war on terror - as Zubrin, Huckabee and many others do - then alcohol fuels are the closest answers at hand.

"If I were writing a science-fiction novel about this, I could give everybody plug-in hybrids and nuclear power plants," he said. "If we're talking about taking this world right now and changing it to something else in a way that breaks the power of the oil cartel, this is the only way to do that."

Update for 5:15 p.m. ET Nov. 29: Rather than focusing on methanol, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are studying how to make ethanol out of a wider variety of materials - through new twists in biochemistry means as well as the gasification process that produces methanol.

That's the word from Richard Bain, principal research supervisor at NREL in Colorado. Bain's been at the lab for 18 years and is familiar with the latest trends in alternative fuels. For now, at least, methanol isn't one of those trends.

"I've been in the business long enough that I know ultimately the market will decide," he told me today. Gasification (of coal as well as biomass) is an up-and-coming technology that is well-settled for making methanol, and is currently being fine-tuned for making ethanol.

"You have a choice of which one the market wants to use," Bain said. "You can make both, but the automobile industry has accepted ethanol rather than methanol."

The fact that methanol is more corrosive than gasoline is a stumbling block, because as some commenters have already noted, a lot of components would have to be made of stronger materials. That goes not only for the vehicle itself, but for the plumbing that would deliver the methanol to your fuel tank.

"If you've designed for ethanol, you'd have to redesign for methanol. ... There is a cost associated with any fuel that doesn't fit in the normal distribution infrastructure," Bain said.

The good news is that more people are catching on to gasification as a means for producing not only methanol and ethanol, but other products with energy applications as well, such as butanol.

So Zubrin's basic message still holds: Flex-fuel cars are key to keeping our energy options open. And if they're plug-in hybrid electric flex-fuel vehicles (PHEFFVs?), so much the better. How does 250 miles per gallon sound? That's what Congress called for in Section 706 of the energy bill that was signed into law a couple of years ago - a section that sets aside money for research into HEFFVs and PHEFFVs.

Some have estimated that PHEFFVs could cut liquid-fuel consumption for transportation (as well as carbon-dioxide emissions) by more than half. What do you think?

Where do you stand on the energy equation? What roles do you see for biofuels, conservation, wind power, nuclear power, solar power, microbial hydrogen, algal oil and even more efficient fossil-fuel use? Add your comments below.

• Autoblog Green: Company can turn used plastic bags into diesel
• Wired Danger Room: How high tech almost lost the war
• Technology Review: Prosthetic limbs that can feel
• BBC: NASA outlines Mars vision for 2031

Landsat 7, the satellite behind the best orbital survey of Antarctica ever conducted, has documented other wonders around the world over the past eight years. You might even call it a Hubble Space Telescope for planet Earth, pointing downward at land and sea instead of upward at planets and stars.

In an eerie echo of the past debate over fixing Hubble, policy analysts have worried about losing Landsat 7 before its replacement can be launched in 2011.

More generally, a report prepared last year under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences said budget cuts were putting America's Earth-observing program at "substantial risk" of collapse.

To address those concerns, a multiagency team was formed by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy to focus on the nation's satellite needs, said Ray Byrnes, liaison for satellite missions at the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Fortunately, they were able to release a plan in August of 2007 that called for long-term commitments by the U.S. to fly future satellites like Landsat," Byrnes told reporters today during a briefing at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

If the Earth-observing satellite system ever did start sinking, we'd lose out on more than pretty pictures: Satellites monitor natural phenomena that could have an impact on hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. Today's global web of satellites, for remote imaging as well as communications, is arguably the greatest legacy of the 50 years since Sputnik.

Looking on the bright side, NASA alone has 14 satellites keeping an eye on our planet from above. One of those satellites, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, marks its 10th birthday today. And despite the worries voiced in the academy report, new eyes in the sky are continually being added - including the commercial WorldView 1 satellite (which just became fully operational this week) and the Italian-built COSMO-SkyMed constellation (with a satellite due for launch next week).

Here's just a taste of the satellite marvels you can find on the Web:

• Earth as Art: Feast your eyes and your ears on our audio slide show of Landsat 7 imagery, which draws heavily on the Landsat program's gallery of artistic observations. (The audio slide show can be a bit balky because of the format changes that have been made since it was created - you might have to back up and try again occasionally.)

• EarthNow! This Java-based viewer gives you a Landsat's-eye view of the terrain passing beneath the satellite's camera, replayed from recent orbital passes.

• Earth Observatory: NASA's premier Web site for Earth imagery blends satellite views with vistas captured from the international space station.

• MODIS: The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometers aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites cover the entire globe every one to two days, and serve as a robotic rapid-response team for natural phenomena. MODIS' gallery highlights the satellites' fresh goodies.

• Envisat: The European Space Agency's "Observing the Earth" portal page provides oodles of cool views, with the Envisat satellite playing the starring role.

• GeoEye: This commercial imagery company serves up a gallery of great shots from the Ikonos  and OrbView satellites, and soon the GeoEye 1 spacecraft will be joining the constellation. Don't miss the must-see collection of images from ancient observatories.

• DigitalGlobe: More jaw-dropping views are provided by the commercial QuickBird satellite, and now some brand-new treats have been added: the first images from the recently launched WorldView 1 spacecraft. 

• Space Shots: We always include what we think are the best Earth images in our twice-monthly slide show of out-of-this-world pictures. But just in case we're missing some good ones, feel free to point us to more cool views in the comment section below.

• Popular Science: Diagnosis 2.0
• Popular Mechanics: Stem cells 2.0
• Discovery.com: Venus flytrap inspires snapping lens
• Discover Magazine: The last unexplored place on Earth
• CMU: Million Book Project hits 1.5 million mark | Read 'em

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's education policy is causing a stir … but not all in a good way. Advocates for space exploration are noting with dismay that he'd take billions of dollars from NASA to pay for the educational programs he'd like to expand.

The shift from exploration to education came last week when Obama talked up his $18 billion education plan during a New Hampshire campaign swing. Actually, the reference to NASA comes at the end of a 15-page document laying out the details behind the plan (PDF file):

"The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years, using purchase cards and the negotiating power of the government to reduce costs of standardized procurement, auctioning surplus federal property, and reducing the erroneous payments identified by the Government Accountability Office, and closing the CEO pay deductibility loophole. ..."

The Constellation Program is NASA's $104 billion effort to send astronauts back to the moon in the 2018-2020 time frame, as an initial step toward wider space exploration and settlement. Although the policy paper doesn't lay out the figures, our own First Read political blog said Obama would keep Constellation on a $500 million-per-year maintenance diet during the five-year delay - with the implication that the timeline would be shifted to 2023-2025 for the first 21st-century moon landing.

The first years of an Obama administration would be particularly critical for NASA, because that's the time frame during which the shuttle fleet is due to retire. The schedule already calls for the space agency to hitch rides into orbit on other people's spaceships for up to four years, and if Obama follows through that gap could go for years longer - even assuming that Constellation goes into hurry-up mode if and when the budgetary spigots are opened wider.

USA Today quoted the Illinois senator as defending his plan to put NASA's vision on hold: "We're not going to have the engineers and the scientists to continue space exploration if we don't have kids who are able to read, write and compute," he said.

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, space activists have had a lot of time to chew over Obama's views - and as you might expect, it's not to their taste.

"That would be very destructive," rocket scientist Robert Zubrin, the president of the Mars Society, told me today. "There's so much more we could do for education by having a visionary space program than by just throwing it away into the educational bureaucracy."

If anything, the focus of the Constellation Program should be shifted to a more ambitious goal of Martian exploration, Zubrin said. (What else would you expect?)

"That would send a message to every young person, saying 'learn your math and science, and you can be part of this important new challenge,'" he said.

My space-blogging brethren took a similar tack:

• Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings: "NASA's money is not well spent, but I'd rather see a policy debate on how it could be spent to get better results in terms of NASA's charter, than whether or not they should have it."
• Clark Lindsey's RLV and Space Transport News: "I would prefer that a President Obama offer a smarter manned program rather [than] a minimized manned program."
• Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides at Wired Science: "Such a delay would result in a loss of capability as the workforce with the knowledge to build spacecraft will not be around when you want to hire them in 2020, and there will be few to train any students coming out of the education pipeline."
• Ferris Valyn at the Daily Kos: "Project Constellation ... is full of problems, so much so that I would seriously recommend starting over with a new plan (ideally one that embraces the New Space industry). And that may be the senator's position, but he hasn't yet fully fleshed it out. The other alternative is that perhaps he is actively trying to get rid of manned spaceflight."

Jeff Foust's Space Politics blog rounds up reaction from various quarters of the political spectrum - and even better, notes the other presidential candidates' positions on space policy (or lack thereof). So far, Hillary Clinton has said the most on the subject, and is generally supportive of the current approach to human spaceflight (for good or ill). Other candidates have made less specific statements of support, leaving Obama standing apart as the only candidate to take a shot at NASA's budget.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? In the comments section below, tell me which candidate will do the right thing when it comes to space policy, on the military side as well as the civilian side (and even the UFO side).

• Sky & Telescope: Mars is here!
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Pocahontas Revealed'
• Science News: Bad vibrations
• BBC: 'Super' scanner shows amazing detail

For President Bush and other opponents of human embryonic stem cell research, this week's news that ordinary cells that can be reprogrammed to act like the most versatile stem cells couldn't have come at a better time. And although the news is also welcome to the proponents of embryonic research, who include some Republicans as well as lots of Democrats, they're suddenly facing a more complicated political challenge.

The shift in the political landscape is evident in the statements issued soon after Tuesday's announcement about the cell reprogramming technique. Take this statement from Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., an erstwhile presidential candidate who is among the most vocal opponents of embryonic stem cell research:

"This exciting breakthrough means that we can conduct embryonic-type stem cell research without destroying human life, and I call on supporters of embryonic stem cell research to recognize that we have no realistic need to destroy embryos. I congratulate the research teams led by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University and James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin for pioneering a route away from questionable science that is destructive to human life."

Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who's also a physician, issued a statement in a similar vein:

"This breakthrough provides further evidence that the most promising avenues of stem cell research are also the most ethical. Politicians should note that the scientific community is moving rapidly without the assistance of laws requiring the taxpayer-funded destruction of human life."

Both statements have a strong "we told you so" quality to them. They downplay the fact that the newly reported research couldn't have been done without embryonic stem cells, that further research with embryonic stem cells will be required to move the work forward, and that both of the scientists congratulated so warmly by Brownback insist embryonic research is essential for developing future therapies.

Thomson and most other researchers hope that they'll eventually be able to distill the secret of embryonic stem cells - that is, their ability to become virtually every kind of tissue in the body - without actually using the embryonic cells themselves. This week's revelations represent a major step toward that goal. But there are still years of work ahead before scientists can reach that point.

Defensiveness from defenders of research
On the other side of the issue, the proponents of embryonic research delivered their own congratulations - with a bit of defensiveness as well. A case in point is the statement from Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., a principal sponsor of vetoed legislation that would have loosened restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell studies:

"While today's scientific breakthroughs are exciting, this research is still in its early stages. It is not a substitute for embryonic stem cell research, which is the most promising research to date. The broad, bipartisan majority of Congress that supports embryonic stem cell research remains committed to supporting all forms of ethical stem cell research.

"These scientific breakthroughs also highlight the need for the creation of a strict ethical framework – including firm guidelines and strong oversight by the National Institutes of Health. Politicians should not be cherry-picking the preferred method of stem cell research; the soundness of the science should be dictating the form of research under strict ethical guidelines."

Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that deals with health spending, had this to say:

"These scientists have performed truly groundbreaking and historic accomplishments. Still, our top researchers recognize that this new development does not mean that we should discontinue studying embryonic stem cells – as Dr. Thomson has said – scientists may yet find that embryonic stem cells are more powerful. We need to continue to pursue all alternatives as we search for treatments for diabetes, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injuries."

DeGette, Harkin and their colleagues have been hopeful that the hunger for cures will drive up the support for wider embryonic stem cell funding - generating support for Democrats in the process. But the new strains of genetically modified cells promise to provide an alternate route to the same cures, without the moral and ethical baggage. So although embryo-based research is still necessary for further progress on the technology, there's no question that the stem cell spotlight is shifting.

Good news for the president
That's good news for President Bush, who has taken a lot of heat for his serial vetoes of DeGette's bill. The White House said Bush was "very pleased" by this week's developments.

"By avoiding techniques that destroy life, while vigorously supporting alternative approaches, President Bush is encouraging scientific advancement within ethical boundaries," the White House statement said.

"We should all give credit to President Bush for challenging our nation to find a solution," said William Hurlbut, a physician and consulting professor at Stanford University Medical Center who serves on Bush's bioethics panel.

Sen. Coburn took a similar tack, saying that the new research "helps vindicate President Bush's policy and his vetoes of Congress' short-sighted and outdated approach to stem cell research."

It's also good news for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is currently on the conservative end of the spectrum when it comes to stem cell research. Hurlbut noted that Romney consulted with him three years ago on stem cell policy. "He's the one guy on this issue who was ahead of the curve all the way," Hurlbut told me.

Worrisome for stem cell pioneer
Suddenly, it's the embryonic stem cell proponents who are being cast as the scientifically backward fuddy-duddies. And that's extremely worrisome to Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer for Advanced Cell Technology. Lanza has been working with human embryonic stem cells for years.

"We have cells right now, human cells, that could prevent heart attacks or repair the damage, or restore the flow of blood to limbs that might otherwise be amputated," he told me.

He can't promise exactly when those cells will be turned into approved therapies - but the first human clinical trials involving embryonic stem cells could come as early as next year.

Lanza has even bigger ideas for an embryonic cell bank that would do for tissue regeneration what blood banks have done for transfusions.

"One hundred tissue types will give you a complete match for 50 percent of the population," he said. "We could literally in a few months, using somatic cell nuclear transfer [also known as therapeutic cloning], create these embryonic stem cell lines. ... I'd really hate to see all this get wiped out like a tidal wave."

Lanza is the first to acknowledge that the newly published research holds great promise in the long term. He's the guy who has been comparing the research to the Wright brothers' first airplane flights or the alchemists' dream of turning lead into gold.

But he's also wary about shifting the focus to an unproven approach that won't be available to patients until years from now. After all, human embryonic stem cells were first isolated nine years ago, and researchers are just now at the point where they are beginning to test potential therapies. 

"We've been fooled many times before," he said. "A delay of 10 years would mean writing off half a generation. ... Just a few years makes an incredible difference."

At this point, it's hard to predict exactly when the first treatments will be available to the public, using either embryonic stem cells or these newly developed pluripotent cells. But Lanza's larger point is this: If embryo-based research is somehow stopped in its tracks - as some would like to do - diseases that could soon be treatable using embryonic stem cells would have to wait until pluripotent cell therapies go through their entire development cycle. And patients who already have been waiting for years would be in for an even longer wait. 

Pluripotent perspectives
Is it more ethical to hold back on the use of embryonic stem cells, even though that might slow the progress toward future cures? Or is it more ethical to move forward with embryo-based research as well as the alternatives, in the hope of accelerating that progress? Although the political landscape has shifted, the fundamental dividing line is still pretty much where it's always been.

For additional perspectives on the politicization of pluripotent cells, check out this Associated Press report from our politics section, this analysis from The New York Times, and this one from The Washington Post, as well as these e-mails:

Jim Hassinger: "I'm all for not using embryonic stem cells, if this or another method works. But that can only be established by decades of research. Is  there something unique about embryonic cells? Are they by nature more potent? Or is there some trapdoor about using this or other methods? I think science writers should make it a little more clear that 'may' is not 'does.'"

Margie Taulbee, Tennessee: "This would be a wonder. I would gladly donate my skin to regrow my husband's depleted heart cells. It is hard to find the help he needs because we live in a state that does not support (very little) stem cell usage. Vanderbilt Medical does do research for children who have cancer. I do understand not taking baby embryos, but adult cell to adult cell is a breakthrough for many diseases."

Cathy Titchenal, Klickitat, Wash.: "It seems to me that I wrote to you once before about a year or two back about this chimera and embryonic stem cell experimentation stuff, and the possibility/probability that mankind could really cause their own extinction with experimentation along these lines, not to mention the ethical/moral dilemmas involved with embryonic stem cell research, chimera creation, IVF techniques, etc.

"So this news today, hopefully true and workable for medical treatments and cures for diseases and injuries, is indeed a welcome respite.  I am one of those who thinks that men should not really be playing God with human biology and when the choices involve sacrificing one human life (no matter how young) to serve another's desires, needs or whatever, that we should all take a step back and consider the consequences to all the human lives involved and stick to the Hippocratic oath of 'first do no harm.'

"God, in His infinite wisdom, has again opened a door to our salvation and redemption from going down the wrong path.  You have to really appreciate the way He keeps prodding us in the right direction, not always the easy way, but always the right way.  Apparently, some scientists have been doing their own moral battles along these lines and have made a breakthrough that will allow us to preserve our best ethical values and still solve the problems that need solving. ..."

Dan Spano, Kent, Ohio: "Your article on stem cell research is very promising. It would be great to silence the critics on the ethical side of stem cells and embryonic cells.

"My problem is one sentence that I seem to read over and over. It is: 'In their current state, the recipes are too risky for disease treatment, and even the scientists behind the latest studies cautioned that therapies are still years away.' Some people, like me for instance, don't have years. I'm 51 years old and have been a spinal cord injury patient since I was 24. How many more years is this going to take?

"The FDA is very quick about approving drugs like Celebrex and Vioxx and even Viagra, but when it comes to something that could save lives or turn lives around they take forever. It might as well be forever for me, because I'm not going to live to be 70 years old or however long it will take the scientists to even start clinical trials on patients, or even primates for that matter."

Glenn: "If they're looking for a volunteer for something...I suffer from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (with complications), and the pain will eventually kill me. ('Pain isn't fatal.' I know. There are variations on the recipe.) The only solution to the problem looks to be injecting something that will grow into cartilage between vertebrae ... and what the 'something' has to be looks to be fairly obvious.

John: "Non-embryonic stem cells are the only type that has actually been used in real applications. Your article is good news – that non-embryonic cells from skin are very useful for this, but is it really news that embryonic stem cells are even useful at this point, not to mention they come from a person who had no choice in the matter of his or her death?

"This is not even a religious opinion. It is a product of honest observation of man and his abilities – in a different category from other animals. Man writes books and articles in accord with his nature – a human nature, not just the law of nature found in irrational things. Our culture is now worshiping before an empirical science that can't even understand the true cause of even the most rudimentary laws of nature – like gravity. Is that where our limited reason has led us?"

Feel free to add your own pluripotent perspective as a comment below.

I'll be taking American Thanksgiving and Black Friday off - but in keeping with the season, here are a couple of links to chew on during the long holiday weekend:

• For Thanksgiving, from How Stuff Works: Is there really something in that turkey that makes you sleepy?
• For Black Friday, from Ad Age: Is the day after Thanksgiving really that good of an economic indicator?

Regular postings to the log will resume on Cyber Monday (which is a myth, by the way).

• Scientific American: Are aliens among us?
• Cracked: The 10 most insane medical practices
• Oddee: 7 incredible natural phenomena you've never seen
• ONN: Man lives thanks to heart stolen from dead man

If things turn out the way stem cell pioneer James Thomson thinks they will, embryonic stem cells won't turn out to be the therapeutic marvels many expect them to be.

Instead, there will be a different kind of marvel: You'll give the doctor a sampling of your own cells - perhaps scraped from your skin - and science will transform them into microscopic factories for your own replacement tissue.

Jeff Miller / UW-Madison

James Thomson looks at a stem cell culture in his lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

That vision is still years away, but today the vision came a little closer with the publication of research conducted by Thomson and his colleagues, as well as a similar study done in Japan. The research focuses not so much on embryonic stem cells per se, but on genetically modified skin cells that have been dubbed induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells for short. You can read all about it in this report.

Thomson, a biologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the research released today stands as one of the "bookends" in his decade-long stem cell quest.

The first bookend came in 1998, when Thomson led a team that first isolated human embryonic stem cells. These cells can transform into virtually any of the body's cellular types - an ability known as pluripotency.

The latest research indicates that with the right genetic and chemical prodding, ordinary skin cells could become pluripotent once again. Thomson cautioned that the process has to be studied further to make sure it works as well as it seems to, with no ill effects. The technique has to be modified to eliminate some of the riskier steps - such as injecting genetic material using a lentivirus. That type of virus is widely used in gene therapy for all sorts of benign purposes, but the same class of virus is implicated in AIDS.

If those hurdles can be overcome, IPS cells could become the "panacea" cells for a wide variety of illnesses, according to bioethicist (and msnbc.com columnist) Art Caplan. The ethical debates over human cloning and the fate of frozen embryos could become moot.

The way Thomson sees it, this research reflects the paradigm shift that occurred a decade ago, when Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut and his colleagues created the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep. Dolly demonstrated that there was something in the egg that could reverse the cell's "strong arrow of time," Thomson said.

"It was only a matter of time between cloning Dolly and finding out what it was," Thomson told me.

Thomson said he never believed that cloning itself would produce new therapies - and not just because of the moral and ethical qualms about human cloning. "Mainly, it's just hugely inefficient and terribly expensive," he said. Rather, Dolly the sheep - and the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells - pointed to potential treatments that could go beyond cloning, and beyond those precious embryonic cells.

Thomson usually prefers to keep a low profile about his work, but this week he agreed to an interview not just once, but twice (due to a balky audio recorder the first time around). Here's an edited transcript that focuses on some of the bigger questions raised by the new research:

Q: The last time we talked, you mentioned how your work with stem cells was aimed at addressing the mystery raised by Dolly the sheep. …

A: … Or taking advantage of the possibilities that Dolly presented …

Q: … So how do these new findings fit into this larger quest?

A: Dolly showed that that there are things in the oocyte [egg cell] that can mediate cell programming to the embryonic state. We initiated a search to find out what's there – because once you know what's there, you don't need the oocyte anymore. We decided to do that with genes that were specific to embryonic stem cells.

Q: That's how you identified the genes that you wanted to pursue. But you didn't start out with just four genes…

A: No, we started out with a very large pool, and we narrowed it down little by little. We cloned over 100 genes that were specific to embryonic stem cells, relative to the cell we were trying to reprogram, and pooled them. We got lucky because the first pool of 14 worked. It worked quite a while ago, but it took us all this time to narrow down which genes were important.

Q: What is the function of these genes in normal cells?

A: Oct4, Sox2, Nanog are the genes we ended up with, and these have been known for a while now to be the key regulators of this pluripotent state. [Another gene, Lin28, appears to play an important supporting role.] It would have made sense if we just tried them to start with, but we were just sitting in disbelief that it could be that simple.

These are the genes that control the expression of other genes. They're the master control genes of the pluripotent state.

Q: I'm sure a lot of people will be wondering whether this research makes therapeutic cloning a moot issue. Cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut has said that he felt like abandoning the cloning approach and using this approach instead.

A: Yeah, my feeling is that somatic cell nuclear transfer was an experimental technique, and it could have led to a mechanistic understanding of how reprogramming could occur. But I was skeptical that it could ever enter the clinic because of practical reasons.

This may not be the end of the story. These pluripotent cells may not be perfectly like embryonic stem cells. We don't know yet. But I do think this is the path that people are going to follow now.

Q: How do you think this will affect the political debate over stem cell research?

A: Well, what I hope will not happen is that everybody says, 'See? We don't have to do embryonic stem cell research now.'

Just like Dolly was our inspiration to do the screening in the first place, we could not have successfully done the screening without the existence of human embryonic stem cells. The Japanese group, Dr. Yamanaka's group, used four genetic factors in mice. They had tried the same [mouse] embryonic stem cell culture with human material and it didn't work. Then they used human embryonic stem cell conditions that had been developed at my lab and other labs.

In our research, we actually used human embryonic stem cells as part of the screening process. So the research itself on human embryonic stem cells led to the next finding about pluripotent cells.

Even though they look just like embryonic stem cells, it could be a couple of years before we find out if there are any significant differences. And the only way we're going to know that is to compare them with embryonic stem cells.

Q: Do you feel as if you're going to be following this particular line of research, reprogramming cells, and moving away from working on new embryonic stem cell lines? Or will you still be pursuing new embryonic stem cell lines?

A: Well, we might in a limited way. But we derived five stem cell lines almost 10 years ago now, and we've maintained them ever since. We haven't actually derived a lot of cell lines. We're just using them for an experimental model. … There might be some limited reasons why we'd want to derive more, but we don't anticipate deriving a lot of them.

Q: Do you expect we'll be seeing new cures in the next two years or so because of this research?

A: No, this basically brings us back to an embryonic stem cell state. You know, most of the challenges that were facing us for transplantation therapies have to do with using stem cells as a base. We still have to make the cell type we want, and we still have to get the cell type we want into the body.

One thing it does solve is the issue of rejection. These cells should be perfectly matched with the patient, so the immune system should not attack it. But most of the other challenges are intact.

Q: Would we see these cells initially in applications such as drug testing?

A: Yes, drug testing is one application that embryonic stem cells are already good at, and people are starting to test drugs on embryonic stem cell lines. The important difference is you can get cell lines from specific individuals with a specific genetic background. The existence of a wide diversity of cell lines means you can match the ethnic diversity of a population like the United States. Because drugs act differently on different people from different backgrounds, it's very important to test drugs early in the process to see if they have different effects on specific groups.

These cells allow you to do that in a much easier way than the embryonic stem cell lines – in particular, the presidentially approved embryonic stem cell lines have very limited genetic diversity.

Q: Looking back, you mentioned that it's almost been a decade since you first isolated human embryonic stem cells. How do you see this work as opposed to the work that got you started going down this road?

A: In the same way that Dolly initiated the search for reprogramming factors, embryonic stem cells allowed us to accomplish it. I think over time, we probably will drift away from embryonic stem cells. We'll continue to look upon those cell lines as the gold standard, but it is very satisfying to actually help bring in what I think will replace embryonic stem cells one day.

• New Scientist: Don't flame me, bro'
• Discovery.com: Bed-ridden can still stay fit, says NASA
• N.Y. Times: Denial makes the world go round 
• Science News: Shadow world

Paramount Pictures Classics

Al Gore for science adviser? He has a great resume, but the job might call for something other than advocacy.

As experts issue their latest assessment of global warming, and President Bush's science adviser finds himself in hot water over the topic, policy wonks are starting to think about how climate change and other scientific issues could be handled better in the next administration.

What would Al Gore do?

The former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel laureate hasn't made any noises about getting back into politics … yet. Nevertheless, the idea of having Gore as the country's science czar is a good way to spark a discussion over mixing science and politics.

Should science and politics mix? Some people say they should be separated - with scientists refraining from making policy recommendations, and politicians quietly absorbing the dispassionate dictums of designated eggheads.

"I think that's exactly the wrong thing to do," said Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. Rather, Pielke writes in this week's issue of the journal Nature, the scientific community should foster "more sophisticated ways to integrate science with the needs of policymakers."

Pielke interviewed seven of the 14 men who have served as White House science adviser - a position that President Eisenhower created 50 years ago in the wake of Moscow's Sputnik shocker. Those interviews served as raw material for his Nature commentary as well as a new book titled "The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics."

An options czar, not a science czar
For Pielke, the bottom line is that no one person - not even Al Gore - can hope to be the president's scientific sage. There are just too many viewpoints to manage, and too many issues nowadays that cry out for scientific expertise. We're not just talking about climate change and energy policy here - this also involves matters of life and death (in the form of embryonic stem cells and gene therapy) as well as war and peace (in the form of yellowcake uranium, Iraq's aluminum tubes and Iran's centrifuges).

Pielke prefers to think of the modern-day science adviser as an "options czar": someone who doesn't make (or necessarily defend) the political decisions, but rather manages the flow of information that goes into those decisions. That could avoid the perception that the science adviser is little more than an apologist for White House policies - an image that has dogged the current adviser, physicist John Marburger.

"It's to the advantage of the president, whatever party they happen to be from, to try to preserve the integrity of that office," Pielke told me. "One way of doing that is to ask the adviser for advice, but don't involve them in the nitty-gritty of politics."

This idea of science adviser as options czar - or as the head of an in-house think tank that sifts through political possibilities - originated with social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, who sees the concept as a way of bridging the gap between science and public policy.

There's plenty of precedent for this role, although unfortunately a lot of that precedent has fallen by the wayside in recent years. Pielke said a reformed science office could look much like the congressional Office of Technology Assessment  - which was axed in 1995, soon after the Republicans took charge of Congress. As further examples, he pointed to the British government's "Foresight" process and Germany's enquete commissions.

Climate (policy) change?
We may well see some new blends of science and politics in the next few weeks: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report is sure to warm up the political debate over climate change, and Congress is due to take up the issue next month. Also next month, Gore himself is organizing a forum on energy and climate change for presidential candidates, as part of a bipartisan effort also involving California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The outcome could set the stage for a dramatic new response to the challenges posed by a warming world. During his congressional testimony in March, Gore compared the scientific choices to those that a doctor faces when confronted with a feverish child. "If the crib is on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame-retardant," Gore said. "You take action."

In contrast, Pielke argues that the response will have to be more nuanced - befitting the role of a science adviser as an options czar rather than a policy advocate.

"I would say the IPCC isn't the last word in the climate debate," he told me. "It gets us into the space where we say, 'OK, what are the options out there?' The fact that action hasn't been taken in terms of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions suggests to me that we just haven't been creative enough in coming up with options that are technically feasible and practically doable."

He delves into this concept - and the contrast with Gore's usual approach - in an op-ed piece that's available as a PDF file.

The political road ahead
Not everyone agrees with Pielke, as demonstrated by this PDF file from an earlier issue of Nature. Pielke has long been involved in rhetorical run-ins with the scientists behind the widely respected Real Climate blog, for instance. But Chris Mooney, the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, likes the idea of turning White House science advisers into options czars rather than policy apologists.

"I absolutely agree that that's how they should engage," Mooney told me. "But you've got to get the position back to some sort of stature before you get to that point."

Mooney has addressed the politics of science in a couple of books - starting with "The Republican War on Science" and continuing with "Storm World" - and he takes the issue head-on in a Seed article headlined "Dr. President." 

The way Mooney sees it, Marburger's tenure marks a low point for the status of the White House science adviser - although it's not all his fault.

"He wasn't given the Cabinet-level rank that previous advisers had, and he wasn't appointed on time, so people immediately had questions. His influence was weakened in that sense," Mooney said. "And then he became known as the defender of the administration's actions on controversial issues."

He said the next science adviser should fit a different profile.

"The attributes you need are a good relationship with the president, or at least trust," Mooney said. "You need credibility in the science community, but that's no good if you don't have any managerial experience. ... In addition, this person ought to know how to communicate science."

Almost every science adviser since Eisenhower's time has been a physicist - which Mooney said was understandable during the Cold War, when "everyone was worried about space and bombs."

"Now it's climate change and stem cells, and frankly a lot of other things as well," he said. That would argue in favor a non-physicist - someone who is respected either in climate science or biomedicine.

Who's next?
So if a Democrat is elected president, would that make Gore a shoo-in for science adviser? Although Gore may have some impressive medals and statuettes sitting on his shelf, Mooney still thinks this would be a job for an honest-to-goodness scientist rather than a politician.

The first person he mentioned was Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. "He's got the ability to speak to Christian America, and he's got the biomedical bona fides and the managerial experience," Mooney said.

Other prospects on the list include E.O. Wilson (celebrity biologist) and John Holdren (climate change expert).

But even if the next science adviser turns out to be a climatologist, the global-warming issue will require some extra political attention, Mooney added. "You might want the next administration to have a global-warming czar," he said. "Someone who's appointed as an international negotiator."

Hmm. Maybe there's a czardom waiting for Al Gore after all.

What do you think? Feel free to add your comments below.

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Master of the Killer Ants'
• Scientific American: The great cosmic roller-coaster ride
• National Geographic: Maya rituals caused big-game decline
• The Economist: Testing virtual nukes

A. Dyer / Alberta, Canada

Comet Holmes appears in all its fuzzy glory with a faint tail trailing off to lower right in a picture taken by Canadian amateur astronomer Alan Dyer on Nov. 1.

Comet Holmes is turning into the star of the night sky, thanks to a huge cloud of dust that makes it look more like a cosmic fuzzball than a dirty snowball. But all that dust has obscured the things you usually expect to see in a comet, such as a tail and a bright nucleus. Now the Hubble Space Telescope has cut through the clouds to make out the structure of the comet's dusty heart.

The comet was a run-of-the-mill celestial traveler until Oct. 23, when the object suddenly flashed to a million times its previous brightness. Scientists assumed that a chunk of the nucleus - the "dirty snowball" at the heart of every comet - had broken off and disintegrated. (Check out this mini-graphic to learn more about the anatomy of a comet.)

The debris from the breakup spread out to become a hazy cloud surrounding the nucleus, and astronomers say the sunlight scattered by all that ice and dust is responsible for Comet Holmes' fuzzy brightness.

Over the past three weeks, Comet Holmes' cloud of haze has spread out to a diameter of 900,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers), which is wider than the diameter of the sun, astronomers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy noted this week. That's not unprecedented for a comet, but this cloud has such a spherical shape that it's easy to imagine the comet as an insubstantial, ghostly star haunting the constellation Perseus.

H. Weaver / JHU-APL / NASA / ESA

CLICK FOR DETAIL This Hubble view shows a bow-tie structure in the cloud surrounding Comet Holmes' nucleus. Click on the picture to see Hubble's view in a wider context.

Hubble has been periodically checking in with Comet Holmes, and its latest picture - taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on Nov. 4 and released just today - shows an intriguing bow-tie shape at the core of the dust cloud. "We may finally be starting to detect the emergence of the nucleus itself," Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who led the Hubble investigation, said in today's news release.

The bow tie indicates that about twice as much dust lies along the east-west direction as along the north-south direction - hinting at the genesis of the breakup. In Hubble's Oct. 29 image, astronomers could see three spurs of dust emanating from the center, and an Oct. 31 image revealed an outburst of dust just west of the nucleus.

Ground-based imagery reveals that Comet Holmes' cloud is offset somewhat from the nucleus. That serves as an additional hint that a large piece broke off and disintegrated after moving some distance away.

Although the comet doesn't yet have a well-defined tail, you can see one forming to the lower right of the nucleus in an image captured by Canadian amateur astronomer Alan Dyer. In fact, comets can have two tails - one composed of dust, the other of ionized gas. This picture of Comet Hale-Bopp provides another classic view of the double-tail effect.

For additional perspectives on today's Hubble picture, click on over to the European Space Agency's Hubble site as well as Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory.

Comet Holmes is now 149 million miles (238 million kilometers) from Earth, and that means Hubble should be able to spot features as small as 33 miles (54 kilometers) across. Even that resolution won't be fine enough to resolve details of the nucleus itself. But there are other ways to unlock the secrets of a comet's heart.

Before last month's brightening, astronomers estimated that the nucleus was just 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) across, based on its brightness. Once the dust clears a bit more, they should be able to get a fix on how much of the nucleus is still left - and fill out the story behind the breakup.

In the meantime, Comet Holmes should be visible to the naked eye for weeks longer. It helps to get away from city lights and peer into clear skies. Bring along a pair of binoculars or a small telescope if you can. This weekend, the annual Leonid meteor shower reaches its peak - and seeing the comet in all its fuzzy glory provides just one more reason for getting out and looking up.

Update for 7:45 p.m. ET: JHU's Hal Weaver added some new angles to the tale of Comet Holmes during an interview with Reuters. He said astronomers suspect that volatile ices within the nucleus heated up during the comet's swing around the sun, building up pressure that was released months later by an explosion.

The explosion might have sheared off a pancake-shaped slab of the nucleus that crumbled to dust and created the bright cloud of debris.

Weaver noted that Comet Holmes went through a similar outburst in 1892. Astronomers thought that earlier display might have been caused by a collision with another celestial object - perhaps another comet, or a small asteroid. The collision was thought to have sliced off a piece of Holmes' nucleus that slammed back onto the main body, throwing up a spray of dust.

"Now we step forward to 2007, and the same thing is happening again," Weaver told Reuters. "It indicates that the [earlier] hypothesis is incorrect."

Every year, the publishers of the journal Science recognize the cream of the crop in science journalism - and this year's cream covers a wide stream of scientific subjects, ranging from the TV tale of an African-American researcher who overcame discrimination in the mid-20th century to the 21st-century effects of climate change on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

The winners of the year's Science Journalism Awards were announced today by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It's been five years since I won one of the awards for a personal piece on genetic genealogy, and the honor still ranks among my top career highlights. This year's winners will receive their $3,000 prizes (plus the award plaque) at the AAAS annual meeting next February in Boston.

Here are the winning entries for 2007:

• Newspapers with circulation of 100,000 or more: Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling of the Los Angeles Times, for "Altered Oceans," a series that describes how industrial society has been ruining the world's oceans by pushing out carbon dioxide, plastic wastes and microbe-promoting nutrients. The series also won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society Award.
• Newspapers with circulation of less than 100,000: Jennifer Frazer of the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle for a series titled "Getting to the Bottom of Mysterious Elk Deaths." The series explains how scientists determined that a poisonous lichen was behind a rash of elk deaths in 2004, and what authorities are doing about it.
• Magazines: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman of New York magazine for "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," a cover story that delved into parenting and the psychology of helping children do well.
• Television: Llewellyn Smith and Stephen Lyons of WGBH/"Nova" for "Forgotten Genius," the story of African-American industrial chemist Percy Julian. Check out my review of the show for the full story behind "Forgotten Genius."
• Radio: Keith Seinfeld of KPLU-FM in Seattle/Tacoma for "The Electric Brain." This radio series describes the electrical properties of our brains and the ways those properties can be used for new treatments.
• Online: Katie Alvord of KeweenaNow.com for "Lake Superior Basin Climate Change." This series describes the potential impacts of global warming on a local community in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
• Children's science news: Mona Chiang of Scholastic Science World for "A Whale of a Mystery." The story traces how scientists investigated the puzzling death of a North Atlantic right whale that was spotted drifting off the coast of Nova Scotia - leading them to the conclusion that a large, blunt object had hit the whale on one side. Runner-up Sina Loeschke of GEOlino won a special certificate of merit for a story about sea slugs.

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USGS This chart shows the 118 earthquakes reported worldwide over the past week, with Wednesday's Chile earthquake highlighted in red. Many of the quakes occurred along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Click on the image for a larger chart.

In some parts of the world, a magnitude-7.7 earthquake like the one experienced today in Chile would be a shatteringly rare occurrence - but not for the home of the most powerful quake ever recorded. "This is a normal earthquake for this part of the world," observed John Bellini, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center.

In fact, the No. 1 quake on USGS'  list of most powerful shakers is a magnitude-9.5 monster that hit southern Chile in 1960. About 1,655 were killed in the region, and a resulting tsunami killed scores more when the waves swept over Hawaii and the Philippines.

Because quakes are rated on a logarithmic scale, that 1960 quake was almost 100 times as strong as today's event - and there's no sign so far that the loss of life will come close to that earlier toll. Nevertheless, today's quake demonstrates how location is everything when it comes to powerful quakes.

Chile has a front-row seat on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a seismic zone that encircles the Pacific Ocean and is responsible for the spate of strong quakes experienced in Indonesia. Bellini said Chile is in a particularly active seismic zone because that's where the Nazca crustal plate is diving beneath the South American contintental plate. This chart shows how the plates play out, and this backgrounder from USGS explains the process that resulted in today's quake.

The clash of plates is what made the region what it is today: The upthrust of the South American plate created the Andes, and the high plateau on the west side of the mountains rates as one of the driest places on Earth. In fact, Chile's Atacama Desert is so dry that it serves as a good scientific stand-in for Mars.

The depth of today's epicenter - nearly 37 miles, or 60 kilometers - means that the quake should be widely felt but not as catastrophic as a shallower quake. As another example, an even stronger and deeper quake in a nearby region of Bolivia in 1994 (magnitude 8.3; depth 397 miles, or 636 kilometers) was felt as far away as Minnesota but caused no major damage.

So how big a deal is a 7.7 quake? Bellini notes that there are about 18 seismic events that go higher than magnitude 7 every year, and the USGS' comprehensive list of historic worldwide earthquakes points up plenty of big quakes that barely made a dent in history.

If anything, today's event demonstrates that you can't judge a quake completely on the basis of one number.

For more information about the science of earthquakes, check out our interactive graphic. If you ever experience a rumble yourself, feel free to let the USGS know. And if it's a biggie, let us know as well.

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NOVA / PBS

U.S. District Judge John Jones III is portrayed by Jay Benedict in this courtroom re-enactment from the documentary "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial."

Two years after a trial over the teaching of intelligent design, a public-TV documentary retells the courtroom drama in a style that the judge in the case says is "almost like a whodunit, with a science angle and a sprinkling of the law besides." But unlike "Law and Order," the story didn't end when U.S. District Judge John Jones III issued his withering 139-page ruling equating intelligent design with religion. Instead, Darwinism's detractors are back with a vengeance.

"Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," premiering tonight, isn't your typical "Nova" science documentary: The two-hour show combines archived video, up-to-date interviews and courtroom re-enactments to flesh out the story behind Kitzmiller v. Dover. Along the way, "Judgment Day" examines the decades-old cultural roots of the conflict as well as the contemporary findings behind modern-day evolutionary theory.

The way "Nova" tells it, the tale began at Pennsylvania's Dover Area High School with the mysterious disappearance and burning of a student-painted mural tracing human origins. Soon afterward, school board members started asking questions about how evolution was being taught.

Eventually, the board required school staffers to tell their biology students about intelligent design - the claim that some characteristics of living organisms are so complex that they're best explained as the handiwork of an intelligent agent (God? aliens?). Some of the teachers bristled at this, so much so that they filed suit against the district.

"Judgment Day" traces the courtroom arguments for each side, with biologist Ken Miller as a star witness for the pro-Darwin plaintiffs and biologist Michael Behe leading the anti-Darwin witness list. (The judge and the witnesses are generally played by actors in the re-enactment.) Because scientific findings were so central to the case, we learn about some key lines of evidence such as the fusion that resulted in human chromosome 2, the transitional fossil fish known as Tiktaalik, the rise of the bacterial flagellum and other phenomena. 

The show also reveals how the trial divided the Dover community outside the courtroom. For example, husband-and-wife biology teachers were labeled as "godless" even though they were leaders at their local church. Another rift, between local newspaper reporter Lauri Lebo and her fundamentalist Christian father, never had a chance to heal.

After the six-week trial ended, Judge Jones (a Bush II appointee) surprised observers by issuing a strong rebuke to intelligent design's supporters. Jones wrote that the concept was "a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory." Because the pro-ID school board members were voted out en masse in an election the previous month, there was no appeal.

TODAY

CLICK FOR VIDEO  Judge John Jones III  looks back at "Judgment  Day" on NBC's TODAY  show. Click on the image  to watch the video.

"It was a case for our times," Jones told NBC's TODAY show today. But as "Judgment Day" makes clear, the case did not end the controversy. Intelligent design's backers - led by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute - are continuing the fight using fresh strategies.

One strategy is to look back in anger, branding Jones' decision as an outrageous case of distortion and "judicial activism." That's the tack taken in "Traipsing Into Evolution," a Discovery-published tract that runs to almost as many pages as the decision itself.

Another strategy is to go back to basics and focus on Darwinian theory as the root of evils such as eugenics, lobotomies, sterilizations and sexual excess. That comes through loud and clear in the advance notices for "Darwin Day in America," written by Discovery senior fellow John West. In this, West appears to hark back to the "Wedge Document," which saw attacks on scientific materialism as the first step in a cultural rollback to a more God-fearing society.

And yet another strategy is simply to keep up the pro-ID drumbeat through a proliferating succession of blogs and podcasts. As "Judgment Day" makes its premiere, intelligent design's proponents are taking aim at the show - and even at its teaching guide.

Ironically, the Discovery Institute's Robert Crowther accuses PBS of encouraging public-school teachers to violate the Constitution by telling their students that evolutionary theory isn't necessarily inconsistent with religious belief. Crowther argues that merely making such an observation would itself be a religious statement.

It all goes to show that the Jones' judgment didn't put an end to the intelligent-design debate - but of course, we all knew that two years ago.

To get the updated picture from Darwin's defenders, you can click on over to the National Center for Science Education, as well as the Pharyngula blog and Panda's Thumb. For a status report on the creationist battle for the "hearts and minds of America's teachers," check out this article from Discover magazine.   Consult our Dover trial archive to take a walk down memory lane - and feel free to add your comments below.

P.S.: The best thing about "Judgment Day" is that the entire two-hour documentary will be freely available for watching online later this week.

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