Did you hear the one about the astronaut who threw up in his spacesuit? Or about the cosmonaut who had to get medical treatment in space after walking into a floating glob of antifreeze? Or the astronaut who became so despondent after his orbital experiment failed that his colleagues feared he would blow the hatch on the space shuttle?

Former NASA flight surgeon Jon Clark has heard them all, and he says the adverse experiences from nearly a half-century of spaceflight hold lessons for a new generation of private-sector space fliers.

Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon, set out an overview of virtually everything that could go wrong healthwise in space this week during the International Space Development Conference in Dallas. Although he no longer works for the space agency, he's the space medicine liaison for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and serves as an adviser for a number of space ventures, including Orbital Outfitters.

When it comes to those space ventures, Clark's bottom line is that going to space is by no means a walk in the park. "Even in well-funded government programs, where they pay a ton of money in, stuff happens," he said. (Clark knows all too well the worst that could happen: His wife, Laurel Clark, was one of the astronauts who died in the Columbia tragedy - but that's another story.)

Clark laid out a long list of "stuff" that could happen in space, with copious examples from the U.S. and Russian space programs. Only a few names were dropped, however, because Clark said many of the astronauts told their stories in confidence, either in the course of doctor-patient conferences or social conversations.  "I generally don't attribute those kinds of comments unless they specifically tell me to," Clark told me.

The wrong stuff in space includes some out-of-this-world health trends, such as a seemingly higher incidence of urinary infections ("In space, there's no gravity to help you pee," Clark explained) and kidney stones (which may have to do with calcium loss in zero-G).

There are also some weird hazards you could face only in space. For instance, during the latter years of Russia's Mir space station, a leak developed in the thermal control system, and globs of ethylene glycol liquid (yes, antifreeze) would occasionally blurp out and float around the cabin. One cosmonaut ran right into one of the globs, developing a bad case of contact dermatitis as a result. Fortunately, NASA physician/astronaut Norman Thagard was on board and could treat the cosmonaut with steroids.

The isolation and insularity of life on a spaceship brings psychological hazards as well: Clark remembered the case of a shuttle payload specialist who became so distraught over the failure of his experiment that his colleagues "thought he was going to blow the hatch." (He didn't.) Clark said the commander on Thagard's Mir mission, Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Dezhurov, went into a funk for several days when he learned that his mother had died while he was in orbit. (Russian controllers had tried to hide the truth from him for several weeks.)

You're not likely to face those kinds of problems during a suborbital spaceflight, which would last just a couple of hours at most. But Clark said even short space jaunts could bring heightened hazards. The big concern is space sickness - the type of nausea that two-thirds of astronauts feel during spaceflight. One case was so bad that an astronaut vomited right in the spacesuit, Clark said.

"It's really the G-transitions that get to you," Clark said. For suborbital flights, passengers may experience 3 G's of acceleration going up and as many as 5 G's coming down, contributing to that sinking feeling. Even a quick up-and-down could leave you vulnerable to Earth readaptation syndrome, the sense that you've lost your "land legs."

"After short-duration flights, it's not unexpected for people to be unable to get out" of their spaceship, Clark said.

Even if you don't get literally sick to your stomach, you may feel a less dramatic motion-sickness effect known as sopite syndrome, characterized by lethargy, mental dullness and disorientation. Many astronauts have noticed this effect - which they call "mental viscosity" or "the space stupids." (Sopite syndrome is also thought to be what's behind rocking a baby to sleep, as well as virtual-reality cybersickness and simulator syndrome.)

"This sopite syndrome could occur in suborbital flights," Clark said. And that would be a bummer for people who have paid $200,000 or more for what they hoped would be the ride of a lifetime.

When those paying passengers line up for spaceflights, they'll have to sign an informed-consent form required by the Federal Aviation Administration. To be truly informed, they'll have to know a little something about spaceflight in general as well as about the safety record of the particular spaceship they're boarding, Clark said. And that means a half-century of spaceflight medical study - including the wrong stuff - will have to be compressed into a digestible form. 

"I don't think people truly have an understanding of the risks involved," Clark said.

So how do you prepare for a spaceflight? How do you know how the ups-and-downs will feel? Virgin Galactic, the suborbital space tourism venture backed by British billionaire Richard Branson, is already setting up a medical information and screening system to get its first fliers ready to launch.

Virgin Galactic is on the verge of offering centrifuge spins to its customers as a way of acclimating them to the accelerations they'll face during spaceflight (and finding out whether they can actually take the G's). During the ISDC meeting, the company's vice president of operations, Alex Tai, told me he wasn't quite ready to reveal where the centrifuge sessions would be offered - but he said the space medical services would be handled through a collaboration.

It's worth noting that Virgin Galactic is already working on medical issues with Wyle Laboratories, which provides medical services for NASA and operates a commercial spaceflight training facility (including a centrifuge) in San Antonio. Coincidentally, Wyle just announced the establishment of a "collaborative space medicine program." Stay tuned. ...

Earlier posts from the ISDC: Mars drama takes new turns ... Space diving and other coming attractions in space ... Space tourism gets down-to-earth ... Dude, where's my spaceship?

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The wonders of Saturn and its rings may be the main event for the Cassini orbiter, but the planet's moons are far more than a sideshow. The imagery coming back from the three-ton, bus-sized probe is as varied as an honest-to-goodness three-ring circus.

Here's a small-scale sampling of the recent attractions, with links to larger pictures:

NASA / JPL / SSI

Cloud patterns swirl around Saturn's southern hemisphere. Click on image for a bigger version.

The planet's cloud patterns are featured in our first stop on the Saturnian magical mystery tour. In natural light, Saturn's clouds are the color of butterscotch, with only subtle variations in the cloud bands.

But this false-color view of the planet's southern hemisphere, snapped by Cassini's multispectral wide-angle camera in February, has been enhanced to bring out the differences and highlight all those sinuous whorls and ripples.

Such variations can be tracked over time, eventually turning Cassini's scientists into interplanetary meteorologists. They've already found weather phenomena seen nowhere else in the solar system, such as the eerie hexagon at Saturn's south pole.

NASA / JPL / SSI

Janus is just a speck against the backdrop of Saturn's clouds. Click on image for a bigger version.

The moon Janus looks like a pebble sailing over Saturn's clouds in a black-and-white image taken by Cassini's narrow-angle camera in April.

Janus is in the midrange of Saturn's 59 known moons, measuring just 113 miles across. It would fit handily between Seattle (my current metropolis) and Portland, Ore.

If you look closely at the full-resolution image, you can just make out the moon's craters. This earlier picture gives you an even closer view.

In the upper right corner of the April snapshot, you can see Saturn's (seemingly) pencil-thin F ring as well as a wedge of its A ring.

NASA / JPL / SSI

Light and dark features can be made out in this image of Titan. Click on image for a bigger version.

Titan is the mysterious star of the show when it comes to Saturn's moons. It's the only moon in the solar system to have an opaque atmosphere, which is composed of hydrocarbon smog.

Fortunately, Cassini is equipped with filters that can see through the smog to the surface below. The orbiter just completed a close flyby of Titan this week, and this view was one of the first raw images to be sent back afterward.

The light and dark areas point to variations in surface composition: Around the moon's equator, the light areas may be icy highlands, while the dark areas could represent sand dunes. Check out this archived article for more.

NASA / JPL / SSI

Fjords and islands can be made out along a Titanian coastline. Click on image for a bigger version.

Radar imagery of Titan is even more telling. This picture, from Cassini's radar mapper, shows a coastline and groups of islands that look as if they came from a map of Norway's fjords. In this case, the dark areas may well be seas of liquid methane or ethane, which scientists long suspected would exist on Titan. Cassini's scientists say the seas could be tens of yards (meters) deep. 

This image highlights the northern hydrocarbon seas as well as the equatorial "sand seas." For more on the northern seas, refer back to this report from March.

Has all this whetted your appetite for more? Add NASA's Cassini-Huygens Web site and the Internet home of the Cassini imaging team to your list of favorites - and don't miss our slide shows featuring Cassini highlights, accessible from the Space Gallery.

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NASA / ESA / STScI / AURA

The galaxy M81 looks much like our own Milky Way galaxy would from afar.

The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back the best view yet of a picture-perfect galaxy known as M81 or Bode's Galaxy, resolving single points of starlight as well as star clusters and glowing regions of fluorescent gas.

"The amazing detail in this image took our breath away," Andreas Zezas, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a news release unveiling the image. "We can see individual stars like tiny grains of sand."

M81, which lies 11.6 million light-years away in the northern constellation Ursa Major, is a popular target for astronomers and amateur stargazers. It can be seen in clear, dark skies with binoculars or a small telescope.(Check out the star chart on this Web page to find it.) Over the years, many space telescopes have taken turns looking at M81, ranging from the Astro-1 ultraviolet imager and Japan's Akari sky-surveying satellite to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

But Hubble's image, presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's spring meeting in Honolulu, is in a class of its own. It took the equivalent of two and a half days of observing time - parceled out over two years - for Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to collect the visible-light and infrared data that went into this picture.

Although the view is aesthetically stunning, there's also a higher scientific purpose behind the picture: Like our own Milky Way, M81 is a "grand design" galaxy, noted for its symmetrical, cyclonic shape. Only about 10 percent of the galaxies we see fit this category. What's more, M81 is in the midst of a surge in star formation, perhaps sparked hundreds of millions of years ago by a close encounter with M82, an irregular-shaped starburst galaxy nearby.

In an e-mail, Zezas told me that an up-close and personal look at M81 could tell astronomers a lot about how galaxies are put together:

"The goal of the project is to map the star-formation history of this galaxy. By this I mean, [to] learn when and where the different populations of stars were formed. Studies of this type on spiral galaxies are difficult because they require large amounts of observing time, and they usually tend to focus on individual regions. The advantage of these data is that we map with the maximum detail possible the whole galaxy so we can study individual stars over the whole of M81.

"We know from previous studies that M81 had  periods of enhanced star-formation in the past few hundred million years. The new data will show which regions of the galaxy were more active and will reveal new episodes of star formation.

"This work will tell us how spiral galaxies form and how galaxy interactions affect their stellar populations (M81 is in a group of interacting galaxies, which is the nearest analog of our own local group).

"Also, by comparing with observations in the X-ray band with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, we will study the populations of black holes and neutron stars, which will give us more information on stellar evolution and its endpoints. This in turn will help us to better understand the X-ray emission from more distant galaxies."

In the Hubble image, Zezas and his colleagues could track streams of bluish hot stars that formed in the past few million years, as well as somewhat older stars from an earlier episode of star formation. Lanes of dust wind their way down to M81's center. "The presence of dust lanes shows that star formation is happening all the way down to the nucleus," Zezas said.

Like our Milky Way, M81's nucleus appears to be anchored by a supermassive black hole - although at the equivalent of 70 million solar masses, M81's black hole is about 15 times as massive as the Milky Way's.

NASA / ESA / CfA / JPL-Caltech

This image of M81 combines data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer missions.

The Hubble project is part of a larger investigation of M81 that also draws upon the data from Spitzer and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. In fact, the most sparkling view of M81 is an image that combines the data from all three space telescopes.

"It's absolutely amazing to be able to study star formation in this galaxy with three superb space telescopes in ways we could never achieve from the ground," said John Huchra, another astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics who is working with Zezas on the survey.

The bottom line is that by studying a galaxy far, far away, we get a better understanding of galaxies like our own. In a way, M81 is holding up a mirror to our own celestial face.

"The view we have of M81 is similar to what an astronomer in Andromeda would see if they looked at the Milky Way," Zezas explained.

For closer looks at the mirror, including zoomable images and videos, check out the Space Telescope Science Institute's Hubblesite as well as the European Space Agency's Hubble Information Center. And for a cornucopia of celestial pictures, visit our own Space Gallery.

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More than three years into its mission on Mars, NASA's Opportunity rover is gearing up for what could be the journey's climax: a descent into 230-foot-deep Victoria Crater to read the pages of what the mission's top scientist calls "a geologic history book." The update from Cornell University astronomer Steven Squyres, principal investigator for NASA's Mars rover missions, was just one of several new turns in the saga of Red Planet exploration.

NASA / JPL

A photo from NASA's Opportunity rover looks back at its tracks on the rim of Victoria Crater.

During Saturday's awards banquet at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas, the National Space Society recognized Squyres' work with one of its highest honors, the Von Braun Award. The award takes its name from Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who helped lead NASA's effort to land humans on the moon in the 1960s. As he accepted the trophy, Squyres evoked the legacy of those earlier days, saying that the Mars rover project would rank along with Apollo as "one of NASA's finest hours."

"I take some comfort in the fact that the same agency that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon almost 40 years ago put Spirit and Opportunity on Mars less than four years ago," he told the audience. "That gives me a lot of hope for the future."

Squyres has a lot of hope for Opportunity's future as well. Not that long ago, he was saying that Opportunity was likely to end its mission by surveying the quarter-mile-wide Victoria Crater, then rolling down into the crater for a closer look at its bedrock cliffs. But on Saturday, he hinted that there might yet be life after Victoria.

He noted that the probe, which has spent the last couple of months making a clockwise trip around the crater's rim, has now reversed course and is heading back to the place where it started its survey: a breach in the rim called Duck Bay.

"Our adventure continues," he said. "We hope to travel to Duck Bay. If a careful safety review indicates that it's safe to go in, we're going to go in. We're going to do a lot of good science, and then we're going to come out again and keep going forward."

In the crater-pocked plains where Opportunity has been operating, much of the science has focused on the layers in the rock exposed by ancient impacts. Back in January 2004, the rover happened to land in a small crater within sight of layered bedrock - the first ever seen from the ground on Mars. A close analysis of the layers in that crater provided evidence that the planet once had enough liquid water to sustain life. Later, layered rock in a larger crater, dubbed Endurance, told a more complex story about Mars' past.

Victoria Crater is an even bigger geological laboratory, measuring a half-mile (800 meters) wide.  The layered rocks lining the walls of the crater are likely to yield deep insights about Mars' geologic ages, just as layered rocks on Earth reveal the epochs of our own planet's development.

JPL / NASA / Cornell

NASA's Opportunity rover gets a good look at the layered rock of Victoria Crater's Cape St. Mary.

During his talk, Squyres flashed a picture that was sent down just a day earlier, showing a promontory known as Cape St. Mary. Previous images have picked up fine layers in the cliff face, but the latest view shows the details in sharp relief.

"Absolutely spectacular geology," Squyres said. "If I told you this was the Navajo sandstone in Zion National Park, you'd probably believe me."

Fortunately, the Opportunity rover seems to be benefiting from solid spacecraft engineering - and a bit of luck as well. Just recently, a strong Martian wind swept the dust off the rover's solar panels, boosting its power-generating capability back to levels not seen for more than three years.

Opportunity isn't the only game in town, of course. On the other side of the planet, the Spirit rover is plugging away as well, more than 1,200 Martian days into a mission that was built with a 90-day duration in mind. Squyres touched upon last week's revelation that Spirit's dragging wheel turned up a patch of almost pure silica - one more line of evidence that Mars once had liquid water. Squyres joked that the area where Spirit found the paydirt has been nicknamed "Silica Valley."

He also pointed out that the rover readings are increasingly being supplemented by views from above, courtesy of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. MRO provided the overhead view of Victoria Crater that the rover team is using to map Opportunity's progress, and it's also watching Spirit's home base in Gusev Crater for coordinated observations of Martian dust devils.

"We're using these vehicles in tandem now," Squyres said.

With that in mind, here are a few additional nuggets from the International Space Development Conference, mostly playing off the twists and turns of Martian exploration:

• NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz.

  MRO's Martian black hole.

  This week MRO sent back a high-resolution look at one of the Martian black holes previously spotted by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. The latest view, like the earlier ones, hints that such holes were created when ground collapsed into underground caverns. "This is quite exciting," said the University of Arizona's Peter Smith, the principal investigator for NASA's upcoming Mars Phoenix mission. He speculated that the holes might even be venting water vapor from subsurface reservoirs. A future orbiter could check out that hypothesis, using a "smart" spectroscopic imager that was programmed to recognize and observe such holes, he said.

• Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, laid out his case for going to Mars directly rather than following NASA's vision of creating an outpost on the moon first. He said his updated Mars Direct concept could put people on the Red Planet by 2019 - assuming that the next president gave the go-ahead in 2009. Zubrin argued that using the moon as a staging ground for Mars missions would use up far more energy than the direct route - creating a "lunar tollbooth" to other destinations. But doesn't NASA need to prepare for Martian exploration by sending folks to live and work on the moon? "We can do that in the Arctic at one-thousandth of the cost," Zubrin said. Even now, the Mars Society is in the midst of a four-month-long Mars mission simulation in the Canadian Arctic.

• Former senator-astronaut Harrison Schmitt received the National Space Society's first-ever Gerard K. O'Neill Space Settlement Award at a Sunday night banquet, and took the opportunity to detail his own vision for developing the moon and bringing back lunar helium-3 as a future fuel for fusion reactors. Helium-3 is a big issue for Schmitt, a trained geologist who became the first scientist to walk on the moon during 1972's Apollo 17 mission. For more on helium-3, check out these archived articles or Schmitt's book, "Return to the Moon." He speculated that one day we'll "have another free society develop on the moon," and perhaps Mars as well - and that they eventually might declare independence from Mother Earth, a la Jefferson or Heinlein.

• Closer to home, a gaggle of space bloggers (including yours truly) assembled in Dallas for what was billed as a Saturday "summit." It was actually more of an informal sitdown with colleagues, topped off by a panel discussion. Some of our colleagues - including HobbySpace's Clark Lindsey and NASA Watch's Keith Cowing - were sorely missed. But to get a glimpse of the scene, check out Glenn Reynolds' report on Instapundit. Want to join the club? Check out SpaceBloggers.com. 

Earlier posts from the ISDC: Space diving and other coming attractions in space ... Space tourism gets down-to-earth ... Dude, where's my spaceship?

Update for 2:30 a.m. ET May 30: I neglected to mention the gratitude that Squyres heaped on the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for saving the rover missions at multiple do-or-die moments. Thanks to Roger Crowe for reminding me of JPL's contribution. It's worth noting that in the appendix of his book, "Roving Mars," Squyres lists the names of more than 4,000 people who contributed to the rover missions' success. Squyres is a class act, and the failure to recognize JPL in the original version of this item is my fault, not his.

When space entrepreneurs get together, rumblings of future announcements fill the air: about takers for multimillion-dollar flights to the international space station or around the moon, about the competitors for NASA's lunar lander contest, about what the operators of future spaceships are up to. Here's a quick preview of what's just over the horizon for private-sector spaceflight, based on what people have been talking about at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas:

• Armadillo Aerospace, the Texas-based volunteer venture headed by millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack, is gearing up for October's running of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Wirefly X Prize Cup in New Mexico. Last year, Armadillo came close to winning a $350,000 prize, and this year it's already flown its Pixel quad-engine prototype for longer than it would have to go to win the big $1 million prize. "It will take very bad luck for us not to win," Carmack said.

• Armadillo is also working on its next-generation launch concept, which involves building modular rocket engines that can be bolted together easily. Carmack will be entering a single-module rocket in the Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 1 concept, with the $350,000 prize at stake. But Armadillo won't be the only team in the hunt. The X Prize Cup has already accepted nine applications from would-be competitors, with a 10th team under consideration, said Marc Shulman, the X Prize Cup's vice president for partnerships and marketing. Not all those teams will make it to the October contest, but you can probably count on two or three to give Armadillo a run for its money.

• Looking beyond the Lunar Lander Challenge, Carmack said Armadillo already has received a military contract for rocket-powered vehicle development, and three major aerospace companies are interested in flying their sensor systems on Armadillo's rockets for testing. Next year, the modular rocket system could be used to fly a skydiver, equipped with a parachute as well as an Orbital Outfitters spacesuit, up to an altitude high enough to challenge a 47-year-old skydiving record. Such a feat could usher in a new breed of adventure dubbed space diving, Carmack said.

• Orbital Outfitters' Rick Tumlinson said the space diving venture would use Armadillo's rockets to send "adrenaline junkies" up to an altitude of about 120,000 feet, so they can jump into a freefall like no other. "We're going to be there before anybody else goes up into that domain," Tumlinson said. Expect to hear more in the weeks to come.

• Back to Armadillo: Looking even further ahead, Carmack said the modular rockets could be combined to create suborbital launch vehicles, and something even bigger. "I do think we've got a credible, legitimate path all the way up to orbit," he said. He said Armadillo just might start turning an operating profit in the next year, thus beginning to recoup the $3 million he's paid to keep the rocket effort going.

• Meanwhile, Jim Benson of Benson Space Company provided a few more details relating to his revamped Dream Chaser spaceship design. He said the bullet-shaped craft would be powered by six clustered hybrid rockets - the same type of engine that was used in the historic SpaceShipOne rocket plane. He cautioned that the design was still being evaluated by the engineers, and that he's not yet showing the "real" spaceship design because of concerns about competitors. "We don't want to give 'em any ideas," he said.

• Space Adventures' Eric Anderson showed off photos and videos from last month's flight of the world's first spacefaring billionaire, software executive Charles Simonyi. Anderson said the next client due for a $25 million ride to the international space station would be announced in the next few weeks. He declined to name names, but said the flier would be an American male - and "it'll be another first."

• Anderson said "we've made a lot of progress" on an even bigger venture, aimed at sending passengers around the moon in a beefed-up Soyuz craft. The fare for that ride is $100 million per seat. "I have a few people who are interested," he said, and over the next few months Space Adventures will be sifting through the prospects.

• Space Adventures' other big project - the development of a new suborbital spaceship in cooperation with the Russians - is moving ahead more slowly, Anderson said. "We are still working on it ... [but] everything costs more and takes longer," he said. One of the partners in the spaceship venture, Iranian-American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, told me last year that she was hoping the craft might make its debut sometime in the next two or three years. Anderson, however, declined to set any timetable.

When it comes to big ideas, there's much more to come this weekend at the International Space Development Conference. For the full details, check out the conference Web site.

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Spaceport Singapore

This is one concept for an integrated visitor center and spaceport in Singapore.

The most popular destinations for space tourism won't be in outer space itself, but right here on Earth. Already, an estimated 1.5 million people stream through Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex every year, and that rate is expected to tick upward after today's opening of the Shuttle Launch Experience, the center's virtual space ride.

In the years to come, a new generation of space-themed attractions could morph into working spaceports - where crowds of tourists can watch real-life space fliers as they train for the trip of a lifetime.

At least that was the vision set forth on Thursday by Michael Lyon, managing director of Spaceport and president of Lyon Capital Inc. Lyon gave a progress report on the plans for space centers in Singapore as well as the United Arab Emirates during the Space Venture Finance Symposium, a warmup for this week's International Space Development Conference in Dallas.

Spaceport has partnered with Virginia-based Space Adventures and other backers to develop actual launch facilities in Ras al-Khaimah, one of the emirates, and in the island nation of Singapore. Eventually, the spaceports would serve as the home bases for suborbital spaceships yet to be built - but even before the first liftoff, they could offer Earth-based activities that give visitors a feel for the final frontier.

This new breed of integrated space center would have spaceship simulators, interactive exhibits and displays of rocket replicas, just like today's space museums. But you could also take a ride on a zero-gravity airplane flight. If that isn't hard-core enough, you could go through a realistic space camp, complete with underwater training and circuits on a high-G centrifuge. And if that's too hard-core, you could simply take the tour, stopping off to look through the window while someone else goes around on the centrifuge.

Those types of experiences are something you just can't get at today's space museums, Lyon said. "There's no real place to see a centrifuge as a tourist," he noted. (That's not quite true: For the right price, you can get the Russians to show you around the centrifuge and underwater training tank at Star City.) 

Once the space center becomes a true spaceport, private-sector astronauts would be playing space camp for keeps. Tourists could catch glimpses of their preparations for flight, then sit in the stands to watch them take off, rise to space and return to Earth. Someday, some of those same tourists may well return for their own training and spaceflight.

Why are Lyon and his partners concentrating on Singapore and the Arab emirates? Lyon said both areas are interested in giving a boost to their tourism industry. Singapore, for example, has just opened the way for casinos to take root on its shores in 2009 or so - which is currently the same time frame for getting suborbital space tourism off the ground. Emirates such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, are getting into the resort business in a big way.

Wherever you find resorts or casinos, you'll find tourist attractions as well. Witness Las Vegas and Orlando. Because Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are anxious to add such attractions, those areas offer openings that you can't find in the United States, where the theme-park marketplace is more saturated, Lyon said.

Lyon emphasized, however, that the spaceports will be more than just fun and games. "We're not a theme park," he told me. "Everything we do is based on authenticity."

Building a space-themed center that can handle "everything under 40,000 feet" - that is, the visitor center plus a zero-gravity airplane operation - should cost about $60 million, Lyon said. Once the funds are available, it would take two years or so to get to the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Conducting actual spaceflights from the space center, or from a nearby launch facility, would take more time due to the regulatory and technical requirements. It would take more money as well: Last year, Space Adventures said the cost of building a full-fledged suborbital space operation was around $115 million for Singapore alone. The price tag for its global spaceport development plan was $265 million.

Even though Ras al-Khaimah's ruling family is willing to kick in millions of dollars toward the investment goal, Lyon said coming up with the rest of the capital is a challenge. "It's hard, because we are doing something for the first time," Lyon said.

Investors in Dubai and the rest of the emirates love to go in for the biggest and the best, whether you're talking about hotels or golf courses. But they don't love to go first, Lyon said. Instead, they typically they see how big projects succeed in other areas of the world, then super-size them. Because no one has yet built an integrated space center like the one Lyon is talking about, he can't show Arab investors a working example.

Singaporean investors tend to be similarly hard-headed when it comes to big projects, Lyon said. They won't take on a project just because it's fun. "They're going to do it to make money, or they're not going to do it," Lyon said.

That's not to say local investors aren't interested in the spaceport concept. Lyon said they're willing to participate, but on a "minority investor basis."

So, Lyon and his partners continue to work on the financial proposition as well as the regulatory and technological challenges - and expect that the next couple of years will tell the tale. Hmm ... come to think of it, that same outlook applies to private-sector spaceflight in the United States as well.

When it comes to private spaceflight, the future always seems to be two years away. In 1997, suborbital space trips were due to start in 1999. In 2005, it was 2007. Now 2009 (or maybe 2010) is the start date for commercial space tours. As space entrepreneurs converge on Dallas for the annual International Space Development Conference, here are the latest timetables offered by four players in the suborbital space tourism game:

• Virgin Galactic leads the list of suborbital space favorites, for a couple of reasons: On the technical side, the venture draws upon the expertise of the only folks to actually put a privately developed craft into outer space: California-based Scaled Composites, led by aerospace iconoclast Burt Rutan. On the financial and marketing side, Virgin is the progeny of Sir Richard Branson - a British billionaire with flair who was recently the subject of a New Yorker profile.

Although Rutan likes to work behind closed doors, Branson and his team have released a lot of information about their timetable: SpaceShipTwo is to be rolled out late this year, go into flight testing next year and begin commercial service in late 2009. First flights would be from California's Mojave Spaceport, with the main operation eventually relocating to New Mexico's Spaceport America.

That's the plan, anyway. Schedules have been known to slip, and last month, Virgin Galactic's Stephen Attenborough told me that "Burt's not going to hand this vehicle over to us until he would be happy to fly his children in it."

In the meantime, at least three other companies are angling to beat Virgin Galactic to the marketplace - even though they don't have quite as much clout as Branson and Rutan. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Benson Space Co.: Eight months ago, start-up veteran Jim Benson split off from SpaceDev, the company he himself founded back in 1997, and set up a new company to market suborbital trips on a spaceship built by his old company. Since then, Benson has been heavily involved in raising capital as well as reviewing the Dream Chaser design - which is based on a lifting-body concept pioneered in the 1980s.

SpaceDev has now completed that design review, which raised a few red flags. As a result, Benson's team is rethinking elements of the Dream Chaser concept. "We went back to the drawing board and looked at improvements since then," he told me.

For now, Benson is setting aside his long-term vision of orbital flight.

"We've decided that we really need to focus on the business at hand, and that's suborbital," he said. "We believe that we can still be first to market and provide the safest and best experience ... If we're successful at that, which we firmly believe we will be, then that success will give us the credit and the financing to look at orbital spaceflight when appropriate. I guess you could say we're simplifying the design and we're simplifying the business plan."

Benson said that, "as of today, we're still on schedule to meet our early 2009 commercial spaceflight initiation." He's still recruiting investors, and he hasn't yet decided where the spaceship will be launched from.

"We really want to nail down the financing and get started on the fabrication of the vehicle, and at that point, we'll still have a year and a half or maybe two years before we have to have a spaceport," Benson said.

It's a safe bet that he'll have more to announce at the Dallas conference this week.

• PlanetSpace: Indian-American entrepreneur Chirinjeev Kathuria joined forces with Canadian rocketeer Geoff Sheerin two years ago to build a suborbital spaceship based on the World War II-era V-2 design. Both partners had been involved previously in spaceflight ventures that fell short - Kathuria as a backer of MirCorp, the company that tried to keep Russia's Mir space station afloat, and Sheerin as an entrant in the space race for the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

If their venture had followed its planned trajectory, they would be flying tourists into space by now. But they've changed direction, and are now setting their sights on a spaceflight system that is something of a departure from the V-2 design - comprising a rocket that looks more like Russia's Soyuz and a space glider called the Silver Dart.

PlanetSpace's current plan calls for suborbital space flights to begin in mid-2009, with operations based at Rickenbacker International Airport in Columbus, Ohio. A few months ago, the state of Ohio offered PlanetSpace a package of financial incentives, and Kathuria said he expected a deal to be concluded by mid-July.

PlanetSpace is also working with NASA to develop an orbital-capable version of its Nova rocket that could be used with the Silver Dart to launch cargo to the international space station. Although NASA is not providing funding for PlanetSpace's effort, the schedule calls for an orbital demonstration flight by December 2009. Kathuria said that the effort was on track, and that PlanetSpace would soon follow up on an agreement with Nova Scotia by selecting an orbital launch site there.

But what about the money? Kathuria, who has run successful businesses in the telecommunications and medical-equipment industries, said he expected the company to draw upon financial backing to the tune of about $130 million. He declined to name the backers, but he did list the categories of investment. The sum would include roughly $30 million from PlanetSpace shareholders, $50 million in financing from Canadian and U.S. governmental entities, and a $50 million combination of equity and debt that "we're in the process of finalizing," he said..

"It's sufficient to complete the cargo demonstration and complete the suborbital vehicle," Kathuria said.

• Rocketplane Kistler: The Oklahoma-based company is working on two tracks: a suborbital spaceship called the Rocketplane XP, which is essentially a commercial jet that has been modified to have a rocket engine as well for the ascent to space; and an orbital launch vehicle called the Kistler K-1, which is being groomed for possible service as a carrier of cargo and crew to the space station.

At one time, Rocketplane was aiming to start suborbital passenger service this year. However, Chuck Lauer, the company's vice president of business development, says the current plan is for the Rocketplane XP will begin test flights in 2009. Tests of the vehicle's engine are scheduled for this summer. "That'll probably be the big dramatic TV moment of the summer," he told me.

Eventually, the plan calls for a "distributed fleet" of the XP rocket-jet hybrids to fly from spaceports not only in Oklahoma, but on Japan's Hokkaido Island and other locations, he said. That variety of locales will give repeat customers something different to look at.

Meanwhile, NASA has agreed to give Rocketplane Kistler as much as $207 million through 2010 for the development of the K-1 - with an orbital demonstration flight due late next year. The K-1 could enter commercial service in the 2010-2011 time frame.

These four companies have been the most forthcoming about their plans for suborbital tourist flights, at prices ranging from $150,000 to $300,000 per seat. But there are plenty of other companies in the commercial space race: Armadillo Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Da Vinci Project / DreamSpace, Interorbital Systems, Space Adventures, SpaceX, Starchaser Industries, t/Space and XCOR Aerospace, to name just a few.

T/Space, also known as Transformational Space, is among the companies focusing on piloted orbital spaceflight in hopes of winning NASA contracts for cargo and crew transport to the space station after the shuttles are retired in 2010. "We are hoping to do our demonstration flight at the end of 2010," David Gump, t/Space's president, told me today.

Like most other space ventures, t/Space is having to deal with the challenges of raising funds as well as creating a new spaceflight system. And like most other space entrepreneurs, Gump knows more than he's telling.

"There are good things happening that we can't talk about at the moment," he said. Maybe we'll hear more in the hallways at the Dallas conference.

For a detailed rundown on most of the commercial spaceflight ventures out there, check out our "New Space Race" section - and especially our guide to the new space landscape. And for updates, check back here for reports from the International Space Development Conference and beyond.

Update for 10:30 a.m. ET May 24: Lauer's comments were added to correct and expand what I had written about Rocketplane Kistler.

• Wired: Betting a fortune on going beyond orbit
• National Geographic: A passion for order
• The Guardian: Bravely mistaken, perhaps
• The Onion: Dog breeders issue massive recall of '07 Pugs

Is that a radiation shield in your shorts, or are you just glad to see me?

A Swiss clothing company has generated a buzz in the blogosphere by coming out with a line of underwear beefed up with silver threads to protect a guy's private parts from cellphone radiation.

This comes in the wake of controversial research reporting a correlation between higher cellphone usage and lower sperm counts. But don't be too quick to send your $24 to Switzerland: The researcher behind one of those studies says wearing radiation-proof undies is a rather silly idea.

Even ISA Bodywear's Andreas Sallmann, the guy who came up with the idea, admits that the scientific evidence linking cell phones to reduced male fertility is ambiguous at best. "But if a risk exists, I make it possible to avoid it," he told Le Matin, a French-language newspaper in Switzerland. That was the article that started setting the blogs abuzz.

Sallmann was moved to action by research from the University of Szeged in Hungary, which reported the cellphone/sperm count connection back in 2004. More recently, a study led by Cleveland Clinic's Ashok Agarwal found a similar connection: Men who spent more than four hours a day on cell phones had lower sperm counts, less active sperm and more irregular-shaped sperm.

However, Agarwal told me today that it's not yet clear what the cause and effect might be. Maybe it has to do with a cell phone's warmth - something that longjohns laced with lead wouldn't protect you from. "It could be direct action of electromagnetic waves, but we still don't know how far those waves travel from the cell phone to the testicles," Agarwal said. "It's a riddle. We don't know the answer."

One possibility is that heavy-duty cellphone use and wimpy sperm are both related to lifestyle factors: A guy who's on his cell several hours a day might be facing enough stress to depress his fertility, even if radiation isn't a factor at all. Or maybe he's just not getting his fruits and veggies.

Agarwal said he's conducting a follow-up study on the cell/sperm connection, but he's not certain whether even that study will resolve all the unknowns. In contrast, he is certain that there's no scientific basis for wearing metal-lined undies.

"I don't think it is anything serious," he said. "It seems to me to be something unrelated to the work that we are doing. I think it's more for generating publicity for their line of briefs, and trying to use this as a selling gimmick. I don't think there's any science behind it."

But you knew that already, didn't you?

On a related but more serious note, the BBC's "Panorama" TV program raised questions this week about the health risks posed by wireless Internet hotspots at British schools. The show reported that radio frequency radiation levels in some schools were up to three times as high as the level found around cellphone towers.

Panorama noted that the link between radio frequency radiation and health problems such as cancer is tenuous, and that the British government says there's no risk. But concerns about cellphone radiation have become so widespread that the fresh reports are sparking second thoughts about Wi-Fi as well.

"I am asking schools to consider very seriously whether they should be installing Wi-Fi networks now, and this will make them think twice or three times before they do it," Philip Parkin, the general secretary of Britain's Professional Association of Teachers, is quoted as saying..

I solicited some comments from Glenn Fleishman, the editor of Wi-Fi Networking News and a self-described "Unsolicited Pundit." Here's his e-mailed response:

"I hope I don't come across as believing there's no possibility of any risk. I just don't accept the studies to date - many of which I've read all or chunks of, if they're public - that purport to show risk really demonstrate something to worry about. I'm not a John Stossel fan, but when a study in a lab claims that a risk is elevated from 1 in 10 million to 2 in 10 million and the researcher trumpets that as significant, and yet we are not seeing any increase in the general population of specific cancers or in specific high-use groups, then it's hard to pay credence to that.

"There seem to be contradictory claims made by those who posit risk. One group says, prudence. Fine, but we have decades of experience with microwaves, and we generally know how they harm us. The level of exposure from Wi-Fi and even cellular phones appears to be below those thresholds. Another group posits actual harm today, but I can't see that they have any evidence to that extent except clinical research which I find unconvincing, and much of which isn't peer-reviewed, double-blind, etc.

"Yet another group says that long-term health risks will emerge, but clearly we don't have the epidemiological results that would back that up. People who used cell phones heavily 20 years ago should have significantly worse health today and in very specific industries and social segments, even for a 20-year problem (especially with older, higher-strength cell phones).

"Finally, there's the electrosensitivity crowd that claims they suffer today. I'm sure these folks have real illnesses, but the description of where and when they suffer doesn't match up with the saturation of wireless communication going on today. And at least one double-blind study showed self-identified electrosensitives, when placed into circumstances that mirror their claimed pattern of response, clearly had no response against a control group."

So for the time being, I think I'll stick with my plain-vanilla BVDs rather than switching to silver-threaded stretchwear from Switzerland - and set aside those Wi-Fi worries.

For more about the debate over cellphone radiation, check out this guide from HowStuffWorks. Curmudgeonly physicist Robert Park weighed in on the "phone in your pants" controversy in this installment of his What's New column. And TODAY's Janice Lieberman included the subject in this rundown of health realities and rumors. As always, feel free to contribute your own unsolicited punditry in the comment section below.

• Slashdot: A mighty number falls
• Scientific American: The traveler's dilemma
• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): Mysteries to behold in the dark deep
• Yoda vs. Darth? Vote for the supreme 'Star Wars' stamp

They weathered the worst that hackers could throw at them, and still kept their computer network running strong. Fueled by pizzas and pop, 19 teams of high-school students pulled an all-nighter over the weekend, during a computer security competition aimed at rewarding kids for being the good guys rather than the bad guys.

"The kids had a blast," said Doug Jacobson, director of the Iowa State University's Information Assurance Center and one of the organizers of the weekend's High School Cyber Defense Competition at the Ames campus.

The idea behind Iowa State's high-school contest - as well as its big brother, the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition - is to turn students into system administrators for their own computer networks. On the big night, the student "Blue Teams" are pitted against a "Red Team" of upper-class and professional security experts who try to hack those systems.

"It's like the real world," said Jessica Archer, project manager for the collegiate program.

The competitions run overnight, lasting 15 hours for the high schools and 24 hours for the colleges. During that time frame, the students are asked to change passwords, reconfigure Web sites, deal with sometimes-clueless network users and cope with anomalies ranging from hardware failures to mock fire drills. All the time, the Red Team members are trying to hack their way into the networks - and often succeeding.

"One of the things they love to do is put pictures of themselves on the kids' Web sites," Jacobson said.

During last weekend's competition, judges doled out demerits for system downtime, exploited network vulnerabilities and anomalies that aren't dealt with. The teams could have some demerits taken away by fixing the problems and explaining how they did it. At the end of the competition, the team with the fewest demerits won.

For the second year in a row, West Des Moines Valley High School took the weekend's top honors. Team adviser Dave Cochran credited the win to a high degree of preparation, with support from professional mentors at a local computer security firm. But team member Michael Flagg, a 17-year-old junior, said plain old vigilance played a role as well.

"How we won is that we watched our network activity like a hawk," he told me. "The purpose of my machine was for people to write code. The second they'd write, I would open that [code] up, and if I identified it as a threat, I would just delete it right beneath them, even before they could run it. We got a few points for that."

This might sound a lot like work and not much like play - but once the cat-and-mouse competition gets going, it's as gripping as a video game.

"Typically what we see is that none of the teams will take breaks," Archer told me. "They're so focused and so into it that they just sit in the room the whole time, working."

Archer was talking about college students, but the high schoolers clearly felt the same way. "I'm going to do this again next year," Flagg said. Here's what the other members of Valley High's team said:

• Ryan Tew, an 18-year-old senior and budding computer scientist, was the school's only returning Blue Team member. "This time, it was pretty much the same. There was a lot more activity throughout the night. ... The thing I learned the most about was how to use Active Directory to limit different users' activity on the computers."
• Jordan Shkolnick, a 17-year-old senior, was the team's only woman. She admitted that she sometimes found herself doing "girlie" jobs but for the most part was treated as one of the guys. And being a female computer whiz isn't all bad: "Basically, it gives you an advantage, because they don't think you know anything or can do anything - so you can take them by surprise."
• Joel Miller, a 16-year-old junior, said this weekend's contest was a huge learning experience: "Everything was a surprise. We just didn't know what was going to happen when we went into this, because they try to keep us on our toes. ... When you're working with other people, it makes it a lot more fun."
• Trevor Nelson, an 18-year-old senior, said his classmates thought it was "pretty cool" that he was on the Cyber Security team. "Some of them wish they knew about it before, because they wanted to join," he said.
• Joel Miller, a 16-year-old junior, said this weekend's contest was a huge learning experience: "Everything was a surprise. We just didn't know what was going to happen when we went into this, because they try to keep us on our toes. ... When you're working with other people, it makes it a lot more fun."
• David Turner, a 17-year-old junior, said that he had no experience with computer security issues before joining the team - and that his involvement has given him a new perspective on computer hacking. "I hadn't heard about the bright side of hacking," he said. "I never realized that this kind of stuff could be put to a good use."

Jacobson said that's a big take-home lesson for kids who run counter to the stereotype of a teenage hacker.

"It's not really complicated to get the hacking tools and go attack something," the professor told me. "What they realize is how challenging it is to defend. ... You have to win every confrontation, and the attacker has to win only one."

Of course, the Red Team gets to have their fun as well. "They look forward to the high school competition because they get to play on the other side," Jacobson said. "They get to be the bad people."

For high schoolers as well as college students, Cyber Defense marathons are much more than one night of geek glory: On the collegiate level, Texas A&M University won last month's nationwide competition and will be invited to the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Storm II security exercise next year. I have a feeling those kids won't have to worry too much about finding jobs when they graduate.

On the high school level, the schools that participated in the Iowa contest get to keep the computer equipment they were given during the buildup to this weekend's event - thanks to the project's sponsors. And Jacobson is already laying plans for a bigger, better "IT-Olympics" at Des Moines' Hilton Coliseum next April.

"We hope to have about 1,000 kids next year," Jacobson said.

• Science News: Our microbes, ourselves
• PhysOrg: New form of matter created (via Slashdot)
• Science at NASA: What if the equivalence principle is wrong?
• Nature: Rice with human proteins to take root in Kansas

As you click through "Cosmic Sightings," our regular roundup of the greatest hits in space imagery, you might be asking yourself where you can get bigger versions of those pictures to use as computer wallpaper or do-it-yourself wall posters. Well, you've come to the right place. Here are Web links for much of the freely available imagery that went into the latest batch of Cosmic Sightings:

• Galactic sparkler: Visit the HubbleSite or the European Space Agency's Hubble Information Center for eye-popping versions of the spiral galaxy NGC 1672.
• Billionaire spaceflight: We have several pictures from software billionaire Charles Simonyi's $25 million trip to the international space station in April. NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site has the evocative picture of the Soyuz capsule with Earth as a backdrop. The "Charles in Space" Web site is jam-packed with more photos and videos from the 14-day mission. Disclaimer: I wrote some of the background material for Simonyi's launch booklet but had nothing to do with the Web site.
• Celestial glow: SpaceWeather.com offers up a gallery of auroral views, including the picture of the northern lights as seen from Alaska.
• Wide-view Venice: Check out NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site for the top-down view of Venice and its canals.
• Martian layer cake: The archive for the HiRISE imaging team - the folks behind the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - serves up bigger portions of the layered terrain on the floor of Terby Crater.
• Global warming of a different color: The Planetary Photojournal at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory provides the original image showing how dust storms affect the Martian global warming. You'll also enjoy this spinning animation that draws upon the same imagery.
• Cosmic cloud: The Web site for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope displays the dust cloud BHR 71 in all its dark glory, plus the infrared view of jets shooting out from inside the cloud.
• Russian rumblings: Since this wide-angle view of Russia's Shiveluch Volcano was taken from the international space station, NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site is the place to go.
• Solar close-up: The Web site for NASA's STEREO mission provides more multicolored images of the sun - in 3-D, even!
• Red Square: Did you like this view of the symmetrical Red Square nebula? Check out Caltech's Palomar Observatory gallery for the big picture.
• Close encounter: The Web site for NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer provides more information about the seriously disturbed galaxy NGC 1512.
• Space marathoner: You'll find plenty of before and after views relating to astronaut Sunita Williams' marathon on the international space station.
• Saturn from below: The Planetary Photojournal at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has bigger versions of this extreme southern view of the ringed planet.

To keep up with the latest cool imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, sign up for the Space Telescope Science Institute's Inbox Astronomy service. As you can see from the latest assortment, Hubble isn't the only source for celestial gems, and it's hard to keep up with them all. But don't worry: We'll bring you the highlights twice a month in our Space Gallery.

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'The Great Robot Race'
• The Economist: The trees have eyes 
• National Geographic: Maya skeleton found in unusual location
• Wired: Annals of Improbable Research goes digital

UP Aerospace

The recovery crew kneels behind the UP Aerospace rocket's payload section at its New Mexico landing site. From left to right: Bobby Bixter (flight engineer), Roger Bodwell (pilot), Jerry Larson (president. UP Aerospace), Ed Levine (Merlin Systems), and Todd Miller (White Sands Missile Range).

The rocket payload containing samples of cremated remains from "Star Trek" actor James Doohan, pioneer astronaut Gordon Cooper and 200 other dearly departed has been found in a surprising place, more than two weeks after its rise to - and fall from - outer space.

Connecticut-based UP Aerospace, which launched the payload on its SpaceLoft XL rocket on April 28, had been looking for it in remote mountainous terrain within New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range. But it turned out that the payload actually came down in a flat area of the range, less than a mile from the rocket's aim point, said Jerry Larson, the company's president and a leader of the search team.

The intensive search in the mountains, two miles away from the actual landing site, ended up being little more than a "wild goose chase," Larson told me today.

He explained that the search got on the wrong track because the four tiny radio transmitters that were attached to the payload's parachute apparently had fallen off during the descent and landed in the mountains. It took a couple of days this week to find all the transmitters and recalibrate the search.

On Friday, searchers aboard an Army helicopter provided by the missile range carefully eyeballed the area around the aim point from the air. "We actually just found it by visual [observation]," Larson told me. Earlier aerial searches of the same area had missed the payload and its parachute because the survey was not as detailed, he said.

The payload consisted of the nose cone and the upper few feet of the SpaceLoft XL rocket. It included more than 200 capsules, each about the size of a lipstick tube. Each capsule contained a few grams of cremated human remains, flown into space as part of a $495 package offered by Texas-based Celestis. Doohan and Cooper were the best-known passengers on this "memorial spaceflight":

• Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott on the classic "Star Trek" TV show as well as spin-off movies, passed away in 2005.
• Cooper, who is best-known for his 1963 solo spaceflight on Mercury 9 and his Gemini 5 flight in 1965, died in 2004.

The payload contained other items as well, including more than 50 small scientific experiments from high-school and college students.

Larson said the payload appeared to be safe and sound, with just a few dings on the outside. "I have it with me right now, and it's heading back to Denver," he told me via cell phone. It will be opened up at UP Aerospace's Denver-area facility, and eventually the contents will be returned to the launch customers, he said.

Celestis, in turn, will send the capsules of ashes back to the families, along with mementos of the launch.

"We certainly felt a huge responsibility for getting this back to the customers," Larson said. "Everyone has been very supportive."

He said that includes Wende Doohan, the actor's widow, who sent Space Services (Celestis' parent company) more than one message of support during the search for the payload.

"She trusted us to fly it into space, which we did successfully, and she trusted us to find it," Larson said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Wende Doohan said her late husband "probably wished he could have stayed" in space.

James Doohan and Gordon Cooper are due to get at least one more posthumous ride to the final frontier: Additional samples of their cremated remains are to be included in another Celestis package that would fly as a secondary payload on SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket later this year. That would be an orbital trip, leaving the capsules in space until they make their fiery re-entry through the upper atmosphere.

Watch for updates on UP Aerospace's Web site - including photos and videos from the scene.

Correction for 10:45 p.m. May 21: Larson said the messages of support came via Space Services from Wende Doohan rather than Suzan Cooper (as I had originally written it). The error has been corrected. Sorry about that - somehow I had the wrong name in my notes.

Where did global scourges like AIDS, smallpox, cholera and the black plague come from? Most of them got their start in other animals, then made the cross-species jump to infect humans. If only we could have spotted the malicious microbes when they were just beginning to make that jump.... That's exactly what three prominent researchers are proposing we do, by establishing a global "early warning system" for infectious diseases.

The system would involve periodic testing of people who come in close contact with wild animals, ranging from zoo workers to hunters. One of the scientists says such a system could have changed the course of the global AIDS crisis ... if only it had been in place 40 years ago.

The proposal comes in an research review article written for the journal Nature by Nathan Wolfe, Claire Panosian Dunavan and Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles. Diamond is the most famous member of the trio, thanks to his best-selling books "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Wolfe and Panosian Dunavan are also well-known for their work in epidemiology.

Wolfe, the recipient of an NIH Director's Pioneer Award and a member of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10" for 2005, says that setting up a sentinel system for bad bugs is a "no-brainer."

"In 100 years, when people look back on this period of history, they will say that we worked very hard to control existing pandemics, but we did very little to try to prevent future pandemics," Wolfe told me today. "Global disease control today is like cardiology was in the '50s. Instead of preventing pandemics, we wait until the 'heart attack' occurs - of course, at which time it's often too late."

In this week's Nature article, Wolfe and his colleagues recap what we've found out about the emergence of infectious diseases over the centuries. They trace five stages leading from first  cross-species transmission to human pandemic:

• Pathogens found only in animals but not detected in humans under natural conditions - for example, most known malarial plasmodia.
• Pathogens that are transmitted from animals to humans but not generally among humans, such as anthrax, rabies and West Nile virus.
• Pathogens that jump from animals to humans, but appear to be transmitted among humans for only a few cycles before the outbreak dies out. The Ebola and Marburg viruses are examples.
• Pathogens that can be transmitted from animals to humans, and also from human to human in a long outbreak cycle. This category takes in cholera, influenza A, typhus, yellow fever and dengue fever.
• Pathogens that are passed exclusively from human to human, either because they go back to the beginnings of humanity or because the species-jumping microbe quickly evolved to become human-specific. Examples of the Stage 5 sicknesses include HIV-1 M, the virus that causes AIDS, as well as measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox and syphilis.

The researchers go on to note how infectious agents linked to animals have shaped history - for example, why indigenous Americans were vulnerable to European settlers' diseases but not vice versa (it has to do with domesticated animals, or the lack thereof).

They wind up their paper with the call to action, starting out with a proposal for an "origins initiative" to fill the gaps in our knowledge about the roots of a dozen major diseases: AIDS, cholera, dengue fever, falciparum malaria, hepatitis B, influenza A, measles, plague, rotavirus, smallpox, tuberculosis and typhoid. Pathogens from a wide range of wild and domesticated animals would be analyzed. Here's what the Nature authors say could result from such an effort:

"In addition to the historical and evolutionary significance of knowledge gained through such an origins initiative, it could yield other benefits such as: identifying the closest relatives of human pathogens; a better understanding of how diseases have emerged; new laboratory models for studying public health threats; and perhaps clues that could aid in predictions of future disease threats."

That dovetails nicely with the early warning system: 

"Most major human infectious diseases have animal origins, and we continue to be bombarded by novel animal pathogens. Yet there is no ongoing systematic global effort to monitor for pathogens emerging from animals to humans. Such an effort could help us to describe the diversity of microbial agents to which our species is exposed; to characterize animal pathogens that might threaten us in the future; and perhaps to detect and control a local human emergence before it has a chance to spread globally.

"In our view, monitoring should focus on people with high levels of exposure to wild animals, such as hunters, butchers of wild game, wildlife veterinarians, workers in the wildlife trade and zoo workers. Such people regularly become infected with animal viruses, and their infections can be monitored over time and traced to other people in contact with them."

Samples from the target groups would be analyzed for the telltale signs of emerging diseases - for example, retroviruses in the blood of bushmeat hunters. In the event of a future outbreak, public health experts could check the tissue repository to reconstruct the roots of the pathogen and come up with countermeasures.

The years-long battle against bird flu illustrates how difficult it is to fight an emerging disease - and how important the fight has become.

Eight years ago, Wolfe set up a pilot project to monitor "viral chatter" in Cameroon, by testing bushmeat hunters and their kills for blood pathogens. In the course of the project, he and his team came across three previously unknown retroviruses (that is, from the same family as HIV) and educated the hunters on safer practices for handling animals and meat.

Now Wolfe says he is "scrambling" to set up a bigger monitoring system in Cameroon as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, China, Madagascar and Paraguay, using his $2.5 million in seed money from the National Institutes of Health. "The idea is that we will move out to other bilateral partners," he told me.

Wolfe said such a system might have picked up on the HIV epidemic in its earliest stages, had it been around then.

"Had we caught HIV in the '60s ... we would have been way ahead of the game. Each extra month of early warning leads to massive lives saved and financial resources preserved. You don't have to hit a home run. If you get a base hit with one of these systems, you get a huge benefit," he said.

Wolfe emphasized that the focus of such a system would be on local health authorities, with government agencies and philanthropic institutions playing a supporting role.

"What this is about is local scientists stepping up and saying, 'Look, we've got major emerging infectious diseases in our country, and we'd like to play a part,'" he said.

Eventually, the system could evolve into something of an Interpol for infectious diseases - turning national public health databases into an international whole that's greater than the sum of its parts. "This takes advantage of global public health needs," Wolfe said.

For the full story on infectious diseases and the proposed early warning system, check out this report on SciDev.net, then follow the Web link at the bottom of the report for free access to the Nature paper itself. This UCLA news release and this Wired article provide additional insights.

Is such a system too troublesome and expensive to create - or is the cost of not creating it  too great? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

The launch of Bigelow Aerospace's second prototype for a future space station has been delayed again, from late this month to late June, due to continuing Russian qualms about the rocket that would be used for the launch.

An earlier version of the Russian-Ukrainian Dnepr rocket blew up last July, right on the heels of the successful liftoff of Bigelow's Genesis 1 inflatable space module. Since then, the Dnepr has gotten an upgrade - but making sure that the upgrade solves all the problems without creating new ones has taken longer than expected.

Bigelow had already delayed its Genesis 2 launch due to Russian concerns, and word of the additional delay came today in a memo from the Nevada-based company's billionaire founder, Robert Bigelow:

"Bigelow Aerospace has been informed by its launch provider ISC Kosmotras ('Kosmotras') that additional testing of the Dnepr rocket and its ground equipment is being required by Russian authorities.

"Due to last year's Dnepr failure, these new and additional tests have been requested to identify any remaining issues with the system and enhance the overall chances of achieving our primary objective of mission success. Unfortunately, these procedures will create an additional four-week delay. We now expect the launch of Genesis 2 to occur in late June.

"Again, no one likes launch delays and we wish the situation were otherwise. However, we experienced similar delays on the Genesis 1 campaign and, of course, were quite pleased with the end result. Moreover, since Genesis 2 contains a variety of important mementos, photos, and other personal items as part of our pilot 'Fly Your Stuff' program, both Kosmotras and Bigelow Aerospace are proceeding with great caution in order to safely and successfully deliver the spacecraft to orbit.

"The path to space has never been and will never be simple or easy. However, whether it's Genesis 2 or the ongoing work with our future spacecraft Galaxy and Sundancer, we at Bigelow Aerospace are dedicating ourselves to building the foundation for a brighter future, and we hope that all of you will continue to share in the adventure."

Genesis 1 is still providing valuable pictures from space, including a recent view of the wildfire on California's Santa Catalina Island. Putting an even more capable Genesis 2 into orbit successfully will be worth the additional wait. 

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After months of preparation, a venture that uses outer space to generate random numbers is finally in the midst of a soft launch. You might think that there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to picking lucky numbers. But Yuzoz, a British-based company, is using data from the sun and other celestial objects to add some out-of-this-world twists to the seemingly simple exercise.

The venture is the brainchild of Jeff Manber, who came to prominence eight years ago when he and some deep-pocketed business partners set up MirCorp to keep Russia's Mir space station in orbit as a commercial platform. They came close to setting up a TV deal, but the effort - and Mir itself - eventually went down in flames. A couple of years later, a project to put pop singer Lance Bass in space fizzled out as well.

"I got a little burnt by the space industry," Manber told me today, "and I feel that my skill is in connecting to people who dig space."

So after taking a couple of years off,  Manber cast about for an opportunity that would play off people's fascination with outer-space stuff - and hit upon the idea of harnessing the random patterns of space readings for random stuff on Earth.

Six months ago, Manber explained his business plan to me - but the idea still seems so random that it's worth a refresher. To be sure, any computer program can generate pseudo-random numbers, but researchers have found that the best foundations for true randomness are built on natural phenomena, such as atmospheric noise or radioactive decay.

Yuzoz draws upon computerized data sets from a variety of space probes that have been observing terrestrial weather, auroral displays, solar flares, the solar wind and even Venusian cloud movements. Manber is hoping that the outer-space angle will add a coolness factor to Yuzoz's random number generator - which, for what it's worth, has been certified by Technical Systems Testing.

"We're the first people to brand a random number generator," Manber said. "And the value that comes from that has to do with trust, transparency, honesty."

He envisions having Yuzoz-branded randomness incorporated into computer games (which relies quite a bit on random numbers), offered through cell phones for picking lottery numbers, plugged into computer-generated musical compositions and engineered into architectural lighting schemes.

"Yuzoz is in part an artistic project," Manber said. "You either get it or you don't. If you would enjoy walking into a cathedral and having the lighting patterns change based on space, you get it."

Manber said the Yuzoz brand could soon be incorporated into lucky-number jewelry. And in a throwback to another well-known type of augury, you could someday make choices based on real astronomical data emanating from sources in your astrological sign. Relationship advice from Virgo, for example. Or health tips from Cancer.

"There are a lot of revenue streams, all going back to the idea of making the connection to space useful and fun," Manber explained. "Yuzoz bridges that gap and really gives you the feeling that there's a connection."

The Yuzoz Web site may have just come out of beta testing, but Manber still hasn't put all the pieces of the business model together quite yet. Over the coming weeks, he and his Yuzoz colleagues plan to introduce customizable, randomizable "widgets" that can be placed on Web pages or desktops, and intend to provide more information about the precise sources of particular random numbers.

Right now Yuzoz is fiddling with a variety of space-based data feeds. But in the next month or so, Manber hopes to have the system organized so you can choose to have your lucky numbers generated by the northern lights, for example, by drawing upon data from the THEMIS space probes.

It so happens that some high numbers could be winging their way from space even as we speak, due to an uptick in solar activity. If you want to turn from random data to definitive observations, check out the SpaceWeather.com Web site for updated forecasts. You just might be able to spot the northern lights yourself, if you're in the right place at the right time. 

Is success in the stars for Yuzoz, or does the venture sound totally random? Feel free to register your prediction in the comments section below. 

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The latest additions to the Robot Hall of Fame don't fit the usual industrial mold for mechanical manipulators - and one of them would strongly object to being included in the club. Nevertheless, there he is: Lieutenant Commander Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," a fictional character who said, "I am an android, not a robot."

CBS Paramount

Commander Data was portrayed by Brent Spiner in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Photo courtesy of CBS Paramount Network Television, a division of CBS Studios.

The other inductees, announced today at the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition in Boston, include the Raibert Hopper, a one-legged research robot; the NavLab 5 self-steering minivan; and the LEGO Mindstorms robotic toy kit.

The four fictional and real-life creations join an august group ranging from R2-D2 and C-3PO of "Star Wars" to the Mars Pathfinder robot and Sony's Aibo robotic dog. The program was created at Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 and has continued with fresh inductees in 2004 and 2006.

Every addition to the Hall of Fame has sparked discussions over what exactly it means to be a robot. Is a robot any gizmo that can move things around? Do vacuum cleaners, computers and cars count? Could some machines become too humanlike to be called robots?

In today's news release, Matt Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, says this year's crop is notable because the real machines outnumber the fictional creations for the first time. "As much as we love fictional robots such as Data, those of us in the robotics field take heart when the real accomplishments of our colleagues get this well-deserved recognition," Mason said.

Not one of the real robots, however, conforms to the usual image of an assembly-line carmaker or even a life-size android:

• Leg Lab / Marc Raibert

  The Raibert Hopper, developed by roboticist Marc Raibert in the 1980s, was an experimental contraption that shed light on the mechanics of dynamic balance. Unlike your typical robot, the Hopper had to keep moving to stay upright - just like humans. "The Raibert Hopper was the visionary effort that set the entire field of robotic locomotion in motion," Mason said. Researchers are still working on robots that walk like humans, but the payoffs from the Raibert Hopper aren't just limited to the robotic tribe: Just last week, a former colleague of Raibert's announced the creation of the first powered robotic ankle, which could make life a whole lot easier for people with prosthetic legs.

• CMU

  NavLab 5 was one of a series of autonomous vehicles developed at Carnegie Mellon, and had its turn in the spotlight during the "No Hands Across America" cross-country tour in 1995. NavLab, a modified GM minivan, did 98 percent of the driving itself while the human driver sat idle. "This was the first time that any autonomous vehicle had traversed so much different terrain," said Hall of Fame juror Chuck Thorpe, a NavLab pioneer who is now dean of Carnegie Mellon's Qatar campus. NavLab's heirs include the autonomous vehicles that competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge and will compete in this fall's DARPA Urban Challenge. Just this week, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that it has narrowed down the Urban Challenge field to 53 teams (PDF file).

• LEGO

  LEGO Mindstorms kits first went on sale in 1998, and since then, legions of robot fans have geeked out by combining the LEGO bricks with motors, sensors and other structures. "This kit did more to take creative robotics to the masses than just about any other retail product," said juror Illah Nourbakhsh, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon. The next-generation LEGO Mindstorms NXT was released last year, complete with dovetailing curriculum packages. And just this week, some of the researchers who pioneered Mindstorms released a free software tool for kids, called Scratch, which aims to make multimedia programming as easy as playing with LEGO blocks.

Now, back to Data: Every time we've considered potential nominees to the Robot Hall of Fame, someone brings up the "Star Trek" character's famous "not a robot" quote. This year, the jurors felt that Data's robot-or-not dilemma was part of his (its?) appeal.

"The great robots of science fiction, such as Gort, have a powerful hold on people's imaginations, which is why we honor them and their creators," said Don Marinelli, executive producer of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. "It's precisely because Data was not confined by real-world limitations that he could address philosophical questions, such as whether a machine can have rights."

In fact, in the fictional "Star Trek" universe, Data won the legal right to self-determination and the freedom to veto his own disassembly. His long, Pinocchio-style struggle to indulge in human emotion,  humor (and even sex) was a running theme in the TV show and movies. Today, the issues that troubled the fictional Data still trouble real-life philosophers - in the form of the "zombie problem" and the debate over the roots of true consciousness.

Marinelli told me the Hall of Fame jurors didn't agonize too much over the "android vs. robot" distinction. "There is currently no Android Hall of Fame, so he's either going to get recognized in the Robot Hall of Fame or he's going to have to wait," he joked.

Speaking seriously, Marinelli felt Data richly deserved the honor because he "spurred on the philosophical dynamic of artificial life making us reflect upon what life is in general." And we're not just talking about science fiction. Marinelli pointed out that the effort to have an Austrian chimpanzee declared a person covers much of the same philosophical ground.

"That's a pretty damn good discussion to have. ... And if anything, Data led the way," Marinelli told me.

Even Brent Spiner, the actor who played Data, weighed in on the subject during a "Star Trek" chat:

[Question:] "What is your opinion on artificial consciousness? Is Data a robot, or is every human some kind of robot? Is consciousness something special ... or are we all robots with consciousness?"

Brent: "Uh, let me give that a sort of blanket yes."

Here's your chance to give a blanket yes or no to this year's additions to the Robot Hall of Fame. In the comments section, weigh in on the robot-or-not question - and feel free to discuss which contraptions should or shouldn't be on the list.

We've traditionally held a "People's Choice" contest to vote on the most deserving robot that hasn't yet entered the Hall of Fame - so be sure to add your nominations and your votes in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, the honorees already include the Mars Pathfinder robot, R2-D2 and C-3PO, HAL 9000, Unimate, Asimo, Shakey, Astro Boy, Robby the Robot, Gort, Aibo, SCARA, David (from "A.I.") and Maria (from "Metropolis").

I'll tally up the votes and ordain a "People's Choice" winner later this week.