NCsoft

Richard Garriott floats during a zero-gravity flight publicizing his new video game.

The next millionaire space passenger, announced just today by Virginia-based Space Adventures, could be a pioneer on three counts: A year from now, Richard Garriott would be the first video-game superstar to go into space, thanks to his role in developing the Ultima game series and a new game to be released next month. He would also be the first son of an American astronaut to go into space himself.

Last but not necessarily least, Garriott could break new ground in terms of getting his trip sponsored as a commercial venture. "The fundamental goal is to make sure we're demonstrating that this is and can be much more than a personal lark, and really can return more value than the expense," he told me today.

Garriott is the 46-year-old son of Skylab and shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott, and has long been a fan of spaceflight as well as other extreme-adventure pursuits. Known as "Lord British" in the gaming world, he gained fame and financial profit from the Ultima franchise, then went on to develop more titles for the NCsoft gaming outfit.

It takes a while to save up enough money for a trip to the international space station aboard a Russian-launched Soyuz spacecraft, even if you're a game god with your own castle in Texas. Back in 2002, he told an interviewer, "I have to have 15 or 20 million dollars to make that a reality, and that's going to be a while."

Since then, the price tag for a Soyuz flight has gone up to $30 million, but Garriott is counting on a little help from his dad's biotech company and other sponsors. ExtremoZyme, a company co-founded by Owen Garriott, aims to commercialize products found in microbes living in extreme environments - and Richard Garriott said his mission would include protein-crystal experiments that may help ExtremoZyme develop new types of drugs.

The younger Garriott said he was involved in talks with other companies that may participate in the space science mission. "The reason we're announcing it a year ahead of time is really because we have such a commercial focus for this," he told me.

Garriott said he's wanted to go into space ever since he was a kid. "As the son of an astronaut, I think it lingers a bit more," he said. Following up on his video-game success, Garriott invested some of the proceeds in Space Adventures as well as Zero Gravity Corp., and provided financial backing for a Space Adventures study that resulted in the Russians taking on private passengers.

"I funded the study personally, with the intention of being the first private orbital space client," Garriott said. However, when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, "that evaporated my comfort with being able to take that slot," and California investment adviser Dennis Tito went instead.

Now that Garriott's fortunes have rebounded, he's ready to claim the seat he hoped to fill years ago. He told me he has "already spent the better part of a year to get the premedical work handled," including minor medical procedures aimed at making sure he's shipshape for the ride. Garriott expects to pass his preflight medical review in January and begin his cosmonaut training in February.

Garriott said he was impressed by the way Deep Ocean Expeditions, a venture founded by Space Adventures board chairman Mike McDowell, blended adventure tourism with scientific research to keep Russia's fleet of submersibles afloat. The company is best-known for its dives to the Titanic, the Bismarck and other underwater hot spots.

"I think it is a beautiful model of a public-private partnership for the good of science, and to lessen the burden on taxpayers," Garriott told me. "I believe that space has the possibility to follow that same model, and Space Adventures is going to lead the way in proving that model."

Here's today's news release from Space Adventures:

"Space Adventures Ltd., the world's leading space experiences company, announced today that famed game developer Richard Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has begun preparations for a 'commercially active' mission to the international space station (ISS).

"Mr. Garriott's spaceflight, currently planned for October 2008, will be the first in a series of missions that will accommodate commercial activity aboard the ISS.  Involvement from the private sector can include scientific and environmental research and educational outreach programming.

"'It has always been Space Adventures' goal to open the space frontier.  Now, with Richard's flight, we have designed a series of missions devoted to increase commercial involvement in manned space missions,' said Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures.  'It is a very rare occasion when so many commercial opportunities are available in one space mission. We encourage interested parties to contact us.'

"Space Adventures made history in 2001 by organizing the mission of the first private space explorer.  Now, the company continues to bring innovation to manned spaceflight by enabling corporate and nonprofit entities to participate in commercial endeavors on the planet's only orbiting outpost.

"'I am dedicating my spaceflight to science,' said Mr. Garriott.  'It is my goal to devote a significant amount of my time aboard the space station to science, engineering and educational projects.  I understand the necessity for conducting research in extreme environments whether it is collecting microorganisms from deep sea hydrothermal vents to carrying out experiments in the continuous micro-gravity of Earth orbit.' He continued, 'We need to be adventurous in mind and simulate our intellects to answer today's most daunting scientific questions and to invent tomorrow's technological marvels.'

"The first commercial research partner involved in Mr. Garriott's mission is ExtremoZyme, Inc., a biotechnology company co-founded by Owen Garriott. The company plans to conduct protein crystallization experiments in space with proteins that have important cellular functions and are usually associated with common human diseases.  Having access to these superior crystals will enable researchers to learn more about the molecular details of these proteins which is essential for protein engineering and structure-guided drug design.

"'Because of my career, it was almost natural for Richard to be interested in space and exploration.  I am so pleased that he is able to embrace this himself and that he is dedicating his flight to research.  I am very proud of him,' said Owen Garriott, Mr. Garriott's father and former NASA astronaut (Skylab II/SL-3, STS-9/Spacelab-1).

"Interested parties, including commercial and non-profit entities and space enthusiasts, can get involved in Mr. Garriott's spaceflight via his Web site (www.richardinspace.com).  Mr. Garriott will be updating the site continuously via photos, blog entries and individuals can submit questions and suggestions for his mission activities.  'I want to involve as many people as possible in my mission,' said Mr. Garriott."

About Richard Garriott:
Richard Garriott is best known as a key figure in the computer gaming field.  He was one of the earliest and most successful game developers.  Mr. Garriott developed the Ultima series which remains the longest running computer game franchise, and with his brother, Robert, he founded Origin Systems, one of the most respected PC game developers and publishers. Richard also created Ultima Online, which ushered in the new massively multi-player online (MMO) genre, the fastest growing segment in computer gaming today. More recently, he co-founded the North American arm of NCsoft, the world's largest online game developer and publisher.  In October, his latest game, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, will ship in North America and in the European Union.  For more information, please visit www.rgtr.com.

About Space Adventures:
Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world's first private space explorers: Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi, is headquartered in Vienna, Va. with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts. The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev. For more information, please visit www.spaceadventures.com.

There is the matter of Russian tycoon-politician-adventurer Vladimir Gruzdev, who was rumored to be on deck for a trip to the space station as early as next fall, but today's announcement implies that Gruzdev would have to take a later flight.

Based on the current schedule, the younger Garriott would become the world's second spacefaring son of a spaceman, just months after the first, said NBC News space analyst James Oberg.

"It's long been known that cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, 35, son of three-time veteran cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov (now 60), was training for a space mission to the international space station. He blasts off in April," Oberg wrote in an e-mail.

Volkov and Garriott might even meet in orbit a year from now, Oberg observed.

There have been plenty of other family connections in space, usually involving husband-and-wife astronauts. One shuttle mission even had a husband and wife flying together - which sparked some whispering about the prospects for studying sex in space. (The couple in question divorced after that mission.)

Currently, there are two twin brothers in NASA's astronaut corps: Scott Kelly, who commanded the most recent shuttle mission, and Mark Kelly, who is due to command a mission next year.

Update for 4:45 p.m. ET Sept. 28: Reuters has some additional quotes from Garriott:

• "I think everyone has the fantasy or the desire to travel in space. But for me, I grew up in an environment where not only was my dad actually going to space but both of my next-door neighbors were astronauts, the guy behind me over the fence was an astronaut. Basically, the whole neighborhood was either astronauts or engineers in support of NASA. I just sort of assumed that one day we would all be going to space."
• "My income in the computer gaming industry superseded my dad's income as an astronaut while I was in high school."

Andrea Ottesen / University of Maryland

A mass of seaweed known as Irish moss was spread out and dried in preparation for this picture showing the plant's delicate structure.

Can you find beauty by looking up someone's nose, or inspecting a slimy mass of seaweed, or following the flight of a bat? Scientsts can, and the proof is found in this year's annual competition for the coolest images in science and engineering.

This is the fifth year for the International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. The winners are featured in this week's in-print issue of Science - but the beauties are best experienced through interactive exhibits on Science's Web site and at NSF.

Science's editors said more than 200 entries came in from 34 states and 23 countries, representing every continent except Antarctica. The winners were selected not only for their scientific impact, but also for their artistic flair.

"The impact of these winning entries is far greater than can be achieved by written descriptions alone," Monica Bradford, Science's executive editor, said in today's news release. "We applaud the winners and encourage other scientists to follow their lead."

The winners produced not only pretty pictures, but also sharp informational graphics that make complex concepts such as ultra-cold atom condensates and mathematical Möbius transformations more understandable. Check out this list of the winners, and be sure to see the graphics in their full glory:

Photography:

Kai-hung Fung / Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital

A color-coded picture shows the sinus air envelopes of a 33-year-old patient, mapped by a CT scan. This view looks up into (and behind) the patient's nostrils.

Two entries tied for first place: Andrea Ottesen, a botanist and molecular ecologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, snagged a bunch of the seaweed known as Irish moss from the Nova Scotia coast - then stretched it out, dried it and snapped a beautiful picture showing the plant's complex structure.

Kai-hung Fung, a radiologist at the Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital in Hong Kong, took imagery from a CT scan of a thyroid cancer patient - then processed the data to produce a color-coded rainbow image of the 33-year-old woman's beautiful sinuses, as seen from below.

Adam Siegel, Douglas Weibel, Derek Bruzewicz and George Whitesides of Harvard University earned honorable mention for a picture showing a 200-micrometer-wide microcircuit, poured into clear silicon and then tied in a knot to demonstrate the circuit's flexibility.

David Willis, Mykhaylo Kostandov et al. / Brown / MIT

This detail from a poster titled "Modeling the Flight of a Bat" shows a computer simulation of the aerodynamics behind a short-nosed fruit bat's wings.

Informational graphics:
Brown University's Mykhaylo Kostandov and David Willis, who has a joint academic appointment at Brown and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won first place for a poster showing a computer simulation of the flight of a short-nosed fruit bat. The graphic explains the complex flight dynamics, captured by a sophisticated multicamera motion-tracking system. Other contributors include Kenneth Breuer, Daniel Riskin, Jaime Peraire, David Laidlaw and Sharon Swartz, all of Brown University.

An honorable mention went to Mark McGowan, Pat Murphy, David Goodsell and Leana Rosetti at San Francisco's Exploratorium for a poster showing how muscles work, right down to the molecular level.

Non-interactive multimedia:

Donna DeSmet, Jason Guerrero et al. / Hurd Studios

"Nicotine: The Physiologic Mechanism of Tobacco Dependence" focuses on the chemical effects on the brain's neurons, shown in this screen shot.

First place went to Jane Hurd, Donna DeSmet, Jason Guerrero and Donald Tolentino of New York-based Hurd Studios for a video showing how nicotine molecules mess with your brain's pleasure-inducing systems. The video's title, "Nicotine: The Physiologic Mechanism of Tobacco Dependence," might not make it onto the marquee at the multiplex, but the Pfizer pharmaceutical company (which makes a smoking cessation drug) liked it well enough to distribute it to physicians worldwide.

Two other videos earned honorable mentions, and are available via YouTube as well as the contest galleries: "Towers in the Tempest," an explanation of tropical storm patterns from Gregory Shirah and Lori Perkins at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; and "Möbius Transformations Revealed," a display demonstrating new twists on the mathematical concept from Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness at the University of Minnesota.

Other contributors to "Towers in the Tempest," all from NASA Goddard, include Horace Mitchell, Scott Braun, Stuart Snodgrass, Kevin Mahoney, Mike Velle, Michael Starobin, James Williams, Marte Newcombe, Randall Jones, B. Alex Kekesi, Tom Bridgman, Cindy Starr, Helen-Nicole Kostis and Joycelyn Jones. 

Interactive multimedia:
Here's one category where still imagery really doesn't do justice to the graphic effect. Carl Wieman won first place for a collection of 65 computer simulations produced for the Physics Education Technology project, or PhET. Wieman started the project when he was at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but is now based at the University of British Columbia. Among the subjects covered: projectile motion, supercold Bose-Einstein condensates and quantum tunneling.

PhET's other contributors include Sarah McKagan, Kathy Perkins, Wendy Adams, Michael Dubson, Noah Finkelstein, Linda Koch, Patricia Loeblein, Chris Keller, Danielle Harlow, Noah Podolefsky, Sam Reid, Chris Malley, John de Goes, Ron LeMaster, Mindy Gratny and Linda Wellmann.

"Breast Cancer Virtual Anatomy," a graphic (but tasteful) explanation of the disease and its effects, won an honorable mention for Cathryn Tune and Samantha Belmont of New York-based CCG Metamedia. Other contributors include Steve Rothman, Nicola Landucci and Joseph Speiser.

No awards were given this year for illustrations - but that should just encourage illustrators and other science-oriented visualizers to get their masterpieces ready for next year's challenge. Check out the NSF's Web site for entry deadlines, instructions and forms.

• Dave's Daily Dose: Is scientific journalism doomed?
• Improbable Research: Rock, scissors, monkey
• Breitbart.com: Study says parallel universes exist (via Slashdot)
• Onion: Rhino, tickbird stuck in dead-end symbiotic relationship

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Workers at Fermilab line up the first segments for an experiment that could set the stage for the multibillion-dollar International Linear Collider.

Particle physicists can't afford to get too sentimental about where they work. They need bigger and bigger machines to focus on smaller and smaller frontiers - and when they just can't make the machines bigger, they have to blaze a completely new trail to those frontiers.

That's the situation facing researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago: Some researchers are squeezing the last ounce of performance out of the 24-year-old Tevatron accelerator, looking for a mysterious particle called the Higgs boson. Others are working on the next big machine, Europe's Large Hadron Collider. And still others have begun building something called "Project X," the prototype for a radically different kind of multibillion-dollar physics machine.

That mega-machine, known as the International Linear Collider, won't become a reality until well after 2012. But lots of experts are already working on the ILC's design - and how to pay for it - because it takes years to go from one generation of supercollider to the next.

"You're completing your experiment, but you're also always looking to the future," said the University of Florida's Jacobo Konigsberg, co-spokesman for the CDF experiment at the aging Tevatron.

The current plan (PDF file) calls for the Tevatron to keep going until at least 2009, and Fermilab's managers have recommended extending its life even further, into the federal government's 2010 fiscal year. "To me, it looks like a pretty straightforward decision," the lab's director, Pier Oddone, told me last week after I toured the site.

Oddone's rationale was that the teams using the Tevatron were "very close to making an important measurement" in the quest for the Higgs boson, the only particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been detected. The Higgs boson has been called the "God particle," because it is thought to be responsible for the masses of other particles. But a better nickname might be the "goad particle," since the quest itself has become a goad for increasingly complex experiments in particle physics.

A major reason for building the Large Hadron Collider is to study the Higgs boson and its effects, and the commonly accepted view is that the LHC will render the Tevatron obsolete. "At some point, when the LHC is working well, it will wipe us out," Oddone told me.

But the LHC's official startup has been delayed from this fall to next spring, and it may take more time than expected for the next top gun to start shooting subatomic bullets. Keeping the Tevatron running through 2010, at an estimated cost of $30 million, would ensure that there's no break in the action. What's more, an analysis of the attributes of other subatomic particles recently hinted that the Higgs boson may actually be lighter than some theorists had thought - and lying in a sweet spot for the Tevatron, between 114 billion and 144 billion electron volts.

"If it is very light, it's not easy to get it in the LHC," Oddone said. "It's not a Day 1 experiment. It's one of the hardest things that the LHC can do. Eventually, they'll get it, no question. But it wouldn't be quickly. ... So there is some reason to run the Tevatron in this very important area."

Colleagues as well as competitors
Once the Tevatron is shut down, that won't be the end for Fermilab. Ironically, teams based at Fermilab play big roles at the Large Hadron Collider as well.

One of those roles was to provide superconducting magnets for the LHC's 17-mile accelerator ring. Earlier this year, Fermilab came in for some unwelcome attention when one of those magnets broke during pressure testing. The magnet failure was cited as a factor behind the decision to delay the LHC's start-up until next spring. 

CERN / CMS Outreach

Scientists can see what's up at Europe's Large Hadron Collider from Fermilab's Remote Operations Center.

Fortunately, the magnets' design flaw was something that could be fixed in place, and Fermilab spokesman Kurt Riesselmann told me that all the magnets have gone through the required modifications. No problems have turned up in the tests so far, he said.

Once the LHC begins operation, Fermilab will serve as America's primary center for dealing with the data flowing from the accelerator in Europe. A brand-new remote operations center can be seen through a glassed-in wall on the first floor of Wilson Hall, Fermilab's headquarters building.

Particle physics isn't restricted to miles-wide accelerator rings, of course. Oddone also points to Fermilab's role in a plethora of experiments probing the mysteries of the neutrino, dark matter and dark energy, on Earth and perhaps in space. Elsewhere on the astrophysics front, Fermilab is a collaborator in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as well as the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory.

Building a subatomic dragstrip
The most advanced project on Oddone's agenda is Project X, which involves developing the technology for the International Linear Collider. Fermilab's Riesselmann said the Project X linear accelerator would be a "1.5 percent ILC." If Project X gets fully built out, the cost estimates would be in the range of $500 million or more. But if an international consortium gives the go-ahead for building the ILC sometime in the 2010-2012 time frame, Project X would give Fermilab a head start toward playing a lead role in that multibillion-dollar project.

Project X and the ILC would be fundamentally different from ring accelerators such as the Tevatron and the LHC. If you compare the rings to Indy-style racetracks, linear colliders are more like dragstrips. Magnetic forces pull charged particles through a series of "cavities" chained together in one straight line, revving them up to nearly the speed of light.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Workers prepare Fermilab's New Muon Lab for experiments that could set the stage for a new linear collider. Blue-green blocks of concrete have been set up as a radiation shield.

The proposed 20-mile-long International Linear Collider, which currently carries an estimated price tag of $6.7 billion (detectors not included), would not be as powerful as the LHC. But it could smash together electrons and positrons, rather than protons. That's good, because the readings from electron collisions are much more precise than the data from messy proton collisions.

When you're playing with protons, it's like playing pool with a collection of beanbags rather than billiard balls. The electrons are more like balls, and thus easier to manage. But you need a long, straight shot rather than a curved roll to accelerate those electrons to the required energies. That's why Fermilab and other physics labs are turning their attention to linear accelerators.

Project X would start out working with protons, not electrons, and it would be used primarily for neutrino studies. But the technology could be applied to building the electron-smashing ILC - as well as other next-generation linear accelerators. Riesselmann said the applications would likely benefit the general public as well as particle physicists - just as past advances sparked revolutions in medical imaging and cancer therapy.

"With this technology, you can envision hospitals having accelerators for medical applications, or homeland security using them for cargo scanning," Riesselmann told me.

Fermilab has already built its first series of eight cavities for its Project X accelerator, modeled on a German design. Last week, I watched as one group of workers tinkered with the assembly on a shoproom floor, while another group worked on the building space set aside for the project.

Project X would put Fermilab in a good position for getting a piece of the action if the ILC project moves forward, but would yield benefits even if the ILC discussions are hung up in limbo, Oddone said.

"If we've made a lot of progress by 2010 on site selection, on international arrangements, if the LHC is popping out physics that tells us this is exactly what we need to do, then we would move straightforwardly to the ILC," he explained. "If the LHC takes more time to turn on, if the physics is not easy to get, if the countries haven't engaged in discussions on site selection, then you know you have time. In the meantime ... you haven't wasted the technology. You have a vehicle by which you can industrialize in the U.S. This has many virtues."

Oddone hopes Project X will help get America back in the game for international physics projects, after fumbling the ball with the aborted Superconducting Super Collider. But that hope rests on at least one big assumption: that there will be an international physics project to bid on. Like the Superconducting Super Collider, the International Linear Collider could fade away as it gets closer, like a mirage.

The future could well depend on how much comes out of the experiments at the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. If those experiments shed new light on cosmic questions - for example, what we're made of, and where we came from - it may be easier to sell the public on the prospects for more.

"It is a question of priority: Is this important?" Oddone said. "That ultimately rests with the taxpayer. Is this exciting to them, that the country gets involved in exploring this frontier? Or would we much rather have something that's economically competitive tomorrow, and we don't care about the fundamental questions? When you look at a country that is trying to be at the edge of science, as a way to the future, it seems to me that asking these questions - which are the hardest questions in physics - is an important thing to be engaged in."

More dispatches from the Big Science Tour:

• From Fermilab: Suspense on a subatomic scale ... Inside the subatomic race.

• From Europe's CERN physics lab: Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Living in the Web's cradle ... First the Web, now the Grid ... Inside the antimatter factory.

• From the ITER project: Fusion when? ... Fusion's fortress.

• Big picture: The science behind the tour ... Beyond big science.

• N.Y. Times (reg. req.): The past and future space age
• CollectSpace: The top 10 Sputniks
• USA Today: 50 years later, are we lost in space?
• Discovery Channel Canada: 'Race to Mars'

Fermilab

An aerial photo of Fermilab shows the futuristic  Wilson Hall alongside the cooling canal for the  Tevatron, with a prairie habitat inside the ring.

On the surface, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory looks like a patch of Illinois left behind from the 1970s - or sometimes even the 1870s.

Much of Fermilab's 6,800-acre preserve, nestled amid Chicago's suburbs, has reverted to wilderness. A herd of bison roams the prairie. Decades-old frame houses and industrial buildings dot the developed areas. The tallest building is Wilson Hall, a 16-story headquarters that looks like a setting for the '70s sci-fi flick "Logan's Run."

And then there's the Tevatron.

From the surface, all you see of the Tevatron is a perfectly circular ridge and canal, running around a mile-wide island of prairie. But 30 feet down, bunches of protons and antiprotons race through supercooled high-tech plumbing. Every time those bunches collide, the chances go up ever so slightly that something remarkable will be discovered - something that nations around the world are spending billions of dollars to find.

The most exciting action at Fermilab is just beneath the surface - literally, and figuratively as well.

For now, the underground Tevatron is the world champion of particle accelerators, capable of smashing beams together at energies of up to 1.8 trillion electron volts, or TeV (the acronym that gave the Tevatron its name). But like boxer Muhammad Ali, the old champion eventually has to give way to a new generation. For physicists, the Large Hadron Collider is the up-and-comer, with expected top energies of 14 TeV.

At those energies, physicists expect to see the evidence for the only subatomic particle that's been predicted by widely accepted theory but never observed: the Higgs boson, a particle that is thought to be behind the fundamental quality of mass. The top reason for building the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border is to bag the Higgs boson. After months of delay, the LHC is due to start up next spring.

The old champion may have one more surprise punch left, however: The word is that something interesting has shown up in data from the Tevatron's DZero detector - interesting enough to extend operations into 2009 and maybe into 2010.

Could the aging Tevatron actually scoop the LHC and find the Higgs boson first?

"It's a good story now for physics," Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director, told me last week. He said the "David and Goliath type of situation" pitting the Tevatron against the LHC is just part of the story.

"It's very seldom that you're opening, well, I call it a continent - it's opening some great expanse of new territory for the first time, where you truly don't have a clue as to what's going to turn out," the Peru-born physicist said.

Oddone isn't fazed by the fact that merely detecting the Higgs would stretch the Tevatron's capabilities to the limit, and that it would be up to the LHC to explore the rest of that subatomic continent.

"Columbus only got to the beach. There was a whole continent out there. But he got a lot of mileage out of that," he said with a smile.

DZero: Inside the cathedral
If Oddone's metaphor holds water, the DZero detector serves as one of the vehicles in Fermilab's fleet to find that new continent.

To get to the detector, you enter one of the industrial buildings and take an elevator four stories down. The Tevatron does its proton-smashing underground so that there's minimal electromagnetic interference from topside to spoil the results. When the ring is at work, DZero and Fermilab's other detector, the CDF, monitor the violent sprays of radiation given off every 132 nanoseconds by particle collisions. Computers sift through the resulting data, looking for telltale patterns in the subatomic blast.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

DZero co-spokesperson Darien Wood stands in the detector's "cathedral," with muon detectors on the left and the calorimeter assembly on the right.

You don't want to be in there when the beam is on. Radiation warnings are posted all over the control room and the stairwell leading to the detector room itself. The Tevatron was shut down for summer maintenance - which is why DZero co-spokesperson Darien Wood, a physics professor at Northeastern University, was able to take me on last week's tour. Just to be safe, Wood wore a dosimeter around his neck to monitor our radiation exposure levels. (We came out clean.)

It's hard to describe what it's like to stand inside a detector unless you've scrambled around through the crawlspace of an underground construction site - or perhaps the hold of an ship. You have to scramble through iron structures and climb aluminum ladders to get into the guts of the 45-foot-high machine, which are mounted on rails so that they can be pushed apart for maintenance.

Wood took me into DZero's "cathedral" - a high-ceilinged alleyway with a wall of muon detectors on one side and the detector's tanklike calorimeter assembly on the other side. The muon detectors look like metal shingles, slightly overlapping so that particles thrown off by the proton collisions can't sneak through. Wood told me that the designers studied fish scales to figure out how to design the system.

The calorimeters measure the energy given off by the collisions. Inside the calorimeters are sensitive particle-tracking devices, hidden like the meat inside a corn dog. And running through the very center, like the stick in that corn dog, is the beam pipe. That's the pipe where the speeding bunches of protons and antiprotons are focused into each other for the collisions ... where the Higgs boson might fly free for less than a nanosecond before shattering into other particles.

"Many of these particles - the Higgs or the top quark - never make it out of the beam pipe," Kurt Riesselmann, deputy head of Fermilab's public affairs office, told me.

Last week, the calorimeter segments were pulled apart just enough that Wood could shine a flashlight into a crawlspace. The 2-inch-wide beam pipe ran across the space, about 10 feet away. Garish purple ribbons were tied around the pipe with their ends hanging down.

Wood said the ribbons serve as a reminder for the hardhat maintenance workers. "The last thing we want is to have someone bump the beam pipe," he told me.

CDF: Getting a tune-up
About a mile away, the maintenance work was in full swing at the Tevatron's other big particle detector, the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF.

When the detectors were first built in the 1980s, the CDF was optimized for measuring particle momentum, with a big magnet and a better tracker. DZero, meanwhile, was optimized for measuring energy, with a finely segmented calorimeter. Both detectors were upgraded in the 1990s for the current campaign, known as "Run 2," and now they have roughly similar capabilities, said University of Florida physicist Jacobo Konigsberg, co-spokesperson for the CDF experiment.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

A life-size mural showing Fermilab's CDF particle detector hangs down from scaffolding in an underground assembly hall. The real thing sits right next door, hooked up to the Tevatron.

"At the end, both experiments are doing very good physics," Konigsberg told me.

The last time the CDF was out in the open was during the preparations for Run 2, when the 30-foot-high cube of electronics was rolled out to the underground assembly hall for its upgrades. Today, a life-size mural of the CDF's front face hangs from the scaffolding in the hall. You can see what the real thing looked like back then in this archived picture, and even watch a 2001 time-lapse movie showing the CDF being rolled back into place (GIF or QuickTime).

During this month's shutdown, workers were fixing the CDF's cryogenic cooling system, which meant the delicate equipment at the detector's center had to be opened up.

We looked over the shoulders of the hardhat workers as they made the repairs - and tried to stay out of the way of the technicians who carried metal scaffolding as they marched down the hallway. The tolerances on the equipment are so tight that serious damage could be done if the replacement washers aren't just the right size.

"It's all experimental science - it's unique," Konigsberg said. "We build it as we go, we learn it as we go. ... That's why it's called an experiment."

The scientists and engineers working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will likely have to go through a similar learning curve. "They're going to have a lot of difficulty accessing their detectors," Konigsberg said.

Both sides now: Friendly rivals
During lunch at Fermilab's Wilson Hall, Konigsberg exchanged observations with Dmitri Denisov - who, like Wood, serves as a co-spokesperson for the DZero experiment. Denisov came to the United States from Russia in the 1990s, hoping to work on the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. After Congress pulled the plug on the supercollider in 1993, Denisov made his way from the Texas plains to Fermilab's prairie.

"It's very exciting," Denisov told me. "Look, my workday starts before 8 in the morning, and finishes well past 8 in the evening."

But Denisov is stingy with information about the search for the Higgs, even in his conversations with Konigsberg. Although DZero and CDF are both part of Fermilab, the two teams are friendly rivals in the quest for scientific breakthroughs. A couple of months ago, for instance, the DZero team announced the discovery of the "triple scoop" baryon just three days before the CDF team made their own independent announcement.

"People compete until they can't, and then they join forces," Konigsberg said.

That may be the case with the Higgs boson. Konigsberg noted that the properties of two other subatomic particles - the top quark and the W boson - suggest that the Higgs may be lighter than physicists thought, and just might be sitting in the sweet spot for the Tevatron.

"This issue has been moving in a way that has put it in our reach," Konigsberg said.

In the end, the discovery of the Higgs may come in small steps, with one research group reporting tentative observations that are later confirmed by another. "You'll publish if you can, and we'll publish if we can, and then we'll combine," Konigsberg told Denisov at lunch.

Even if neither team at Fermilab comes up with the definitive answer, their work can serve as a guide - and a goad - to their friendly rivals at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

"I think we're helping them in an indirect way," Denisov said.

More dispatches from the Big Science Tour:

• From Fermilab: Suspense on a subatomic scale ... Building the future of physics.

• From Europe's CERN physics lab: Toiling in the fields of physics ... Inside the big-bang machine ... Living in the Web's cradle ... First the Web, now the Grid ... Inside the antimatter factory.

• From the ITER project: Fusion when? ... Fusion's fortress.

• Big picture: The science behind the tour ... Beyond big science.

• Science News: Secret Soviet herb finds its way west
• The Future of Things: Propulsion breakthrough? (via Slashdot)
• KurzweilAI.net: Bootstrapping our way to an ageless future
• Tech Review: Will solar-powered laser solve energy woes?

SCIVIS

A young man searches for switches during a simulated launch on the shuttle Atlantis, at a space-camp session for the visually impaired.

This year's zero-gravity flight by world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking proved that disabilities need not be an impediment to spacey experiences - and another proof comes this weekend, when about 115 kids with vision impairments ranging all the way up to total blindness begin a week of space-camp training at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama.

The experience will be tailored to the kids' capabilities, thanks to voice recognition devices and other high-tech tools. Someday, we may see such technologies on real spaceships as well, said Dan Oates, coordinator of Space Camp for Interested Visually Impaired Students, or SCIVIS.

"With the space tourist industry coming along as it is, eventually there'll be an opportunity for the common person to go," he told me. "When that happens, screen readers and electronic magnification will all be a little bit more common."

Some of the space-camp modifications really aren't all that high-tech, just clever: For example, plastic overlays with Braille writing have been made up for the switch panels on the space shuttle simulators, Oates said. If a shuttle-sim trainee needs the Braille, the overlay can be attached to the panel with Velcro strips. If not, the panel can be easily popped off.

The information being fed to the space-campers has likewise been converted into more accessible forms. "All the materials here are produced in large print or Braille," Oates said. Computer monitors have been tricked up so that vision-impaired campers can zoom in on the text on the screen, or have the text converted to synthetic speech.

During a series of mission simulations - including launch and landing, a computer emergency and a satellite-raising operation - some of the kids will be monitoring the action with dual-track headsets. "One ear is good for synthetic speech, the other ear is the mission-control chat you hear all the time," Oates explained. "The kids have to learn to listen to two separate things, one in each ear."

The campers' medical conditions are being taken into account, of course. One of the experiences for advanced campers is a scuba dive that simulates a zero-gravity spacewalk. Some of the vision-impaired kids won't be able to take that in, due to glaucoma or other conditions that could be made worse by the dive. Others will have to pass up the high-G simulations. But over the 17 years that SCIVIS has been in operation, the organizers have tried to make their camp as much like regular space camp as possible.

"I'm not in the business of saying no," Oates said.

Seemingly scary experiences can be big learning experiences, particularly for those with disabilities. For example, the space-campers will get their turns on a multiaxis trainer - the tilt-a-whirl device that simulates the disorientation that real astronauts feel in microgravity.

"A totally blind child has a lot of difficulty imagining that, so that's quite a rush," Oates said. "There's a lot of fear, but there's also the joy of overcoming the fright and actually doing the experience - and getting the positive feedback from your peers. ... This is good peer pressure here, it's one of the good things that happen here."

The fact that the kids are among others who face the same challenges is an important part of the experience, Oates added. "All of the sudden, they're not the token anymore," he said.

Some of the SCIVIS space-campers go on to careers in aerospace, Oates said. But the most important outcome of the experience is that kids come away feeling that disabilities need not stand in the way of future adventures - the same lesson that can be drawn from Dr. Hawking's flight. All it takes is a little help from technology, and from each other.

"If anyone's limiting the people with disabilities, it's us who do not have them," Oates said. "They feel like they can do whatever it takes."

To learn more about SCIVIS, check out the program's Web site. And to learn more about the kinds of technologies used at the space camp, check in with Enhanced Vision.

• CollectSpace: Bill Pullman's theatrical space odyssey
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• Brown U.: Inventors add new dimension to life in a Petri dish
• Science @ NASA: Watch a giant trilobite on the sun

Francis Kenny / ClockDrive Productions

Patrick Ferris looks through a telescope in Florida, in a scene from the documentary "Seeing in the Dark." The public-TV show celebrates the joys of stargazing.

Today's amateur astronomers can access an arsenal of equipment that would make Galileo green with envy: computerized go-to interfaces that steer you toward your celestial target at the click of a button, even over the Internet if you like ... ultra-sensitive imaging arrays that rival what the professionals command ... software that can sift through a flurry of pictures, looking for patterns of change that can point to a fresh discovery.

At the deepest level, however, the essence of stargazing is the same as it's been for millennia: to encounter the cosmos, to bring the frontiers of the universe just a little closer to the soul. That meditative aspect of amateur astronomy resonates throughout "Seeing in the Dark," a highly personal documentary by Timothy Ferris that makes its high-definition debut tonight on PBS.

"It is quite a meditative activity," said Ferris, who wrote the book on which the film is based, plus many other science-themed works. "It's such an odd thing, you know. You're out there for hours, and often alone."

Ferris isn't alone as he guides viewers through the hour: His supporting players include:

• Former NFL running back Robert Smith, an astronomy buff who now coaches high-schoolers at the telescope.
• Professional planet-hunter Debra Fischer and amateur planet-hunter Ron Bissinger, who work together to detect new worlds.
• The Bisque Brothers, who build Ferris an observatory on the fly in New Mexico.

Ferris' own son, Patrick, portrays his father during the formative years of the '60s, early in the film - then plays himself as the generational tale comes full circle at the end.

"It's about the difference in time with the cosmic time scale," Ferris, who turned 63 last month, told me. "I was reluctant to have anything personal in the film, but there's a huge element missing if you don't do that - because the nature of stargazing is that it's such a personal activity. It's not like going to a ballgame, you know."

To be sure, technology has revolutionized the telescope trade. Astrophotographers like Rob Gendler can search the skies and snap jaw-dropping pictures using remote-controlled telescopes located on the other side of the continent - and that's the way professionals often do their astronomy as well.

Francis Kenny / ClockDrive Productions

Timothy Ferris adjusts a telescope.

The telescope that Ferris had built for the show, with funding from the National Science Foundation, is now being made available to schoolchildren for just such a purpose. The facility at New Mexico Skies has been dubbed the "Seeing in the Dark Internet Telescope," and students can send in e-mail requests for black-and-white pictures of celestial sights. The project's organizers intend to mail back the requested images within a day or two, depending on the weather and the workload.

"So long as you're a student, we'll try to accommodate you," Ferris said. "It's only one telescope. I don't know what the volume will be. But it's kind of a win-win. If we have a reasonable rate of requests, they're easier to fulfill. If we're overwhelmed - well, that tells us something. I'll go back to the NSF and look for funds to expand the project."

Ferris and his colleagues have added other gee-whiz tools to the Web site: an interactive star chart, a set of how-to videos for astronomy newbies, a cosmic photo gallery and a list of "birthday stars" that twinkle with the light from the year you were born.

But the neatest trick has to do with the way the film shows the sights of the night sky the way they really are, rather than as a Hollywood prop. "So far as I know, it's never been done - and it was at times as difficult as I feared it might be."

For the night scenes, the "Seeing in the Dark" team labored mightily to get the twinkling stars just right. Ferris explained that it couldn't be done naturally, because the "twinkles occur at a speed that's faster than you can yet record." The production team had to mix actual sky imagery with reverse-engineered special effects to get the picture right.

For the astronomical images, Ferris passed up the crystal-clear Hubble option and went instead with true views from ground-based telescopes - complete with the slightly wavy effect you get when you're looking at, say, Jupiter through a small scope and a turbulent atmosphere.

"Some of the best views were shot, using an HD camera, by a forensic pathologist and a fellow amateur astronomer friend up north of Sacramento," Ferris said.

Ferris said the high-definition documentary represents his best effort to reproduce the true experience of stargazing - an experience that really can't be duplicated on your desktop.

"Looking through a telescope is like playing a musical instrument, it's not like watching a movie," said Ferris, who helped pick the farthest-out tunes in the galaxy as the producer for the Golden Record mounted on NASA's Voyager spacecraft. "You get a direct return back for the effort and practice you put into it. You can get where you can see things that are really quite subtle and amazing, but it doesn't jump up in your lap and lick your nose."

Ferris said the experience is more like mountaineering - or meditation, for that matter.

"It's an option that appeals to a lot of folks who like to be engaged - who like to exert energy and not merely be entertained," he said.

I'm heading out to Illinois and Iowa to see the folks over the next few days, and Cosmic Log postings will be lighter than usual during the trip. But I'll be sure to send a postcard from the sights I see along the way.

• Korea Times: Is video-game celebrity going into orbit?
• The New Yorker: Music survives amnesia's abyss
• Aerospace Daily: Will China beat America back to the moon?
• Wall Street Journal: Sloppiness seems to taint most research

So you want to be an astronaut? For the first time in several years, NASA is putting out a job posting for astronaut candidates, including pilots, scientists and teachers. But what kind of spaceship will the Class of '09 astronauts fly? Almost certainly not the space shuttle.

Today's news release describes the employment opportunity:

"NASA is accepting applications for the 2009 Astronaut Candidate Class. Those selected could fly to space for long-duration stays on the international space station and missions to the moon.

"'We look forward to gathering applications and then being able to select from the largest pool possible,' said Ellen Ochoa, NASA's chief of Flight Crew Operations at the Johnson Space Center. 'Continuing our impressive record in successfully carrying out challenging human spaceflight missions depends on maintaining a talented and diverse astronaut corps.'

"To be considered, a bachelor's degree in engineering, science or math and three years of relevant professional experience are required. Typically, successful applicants have significant qualifications in engineering or science, or extensive experience flying high-performance jet aircraft.

"Teaching experience, including work at the kindergarten through 12th-grade level, is considered qualifying. Educators with the appropriate educational background are encouraged to apply.

"After a six-month period of evaluation and interviews, NASA will announce final selections in early 2009. Astronaut candidates will report to Johnson in the summer of 2009 to begin the basic training program to prepare them for future spaceflight assignments.

"NASA will accept applications through July 1, 2008. To apply visit:

http://www.usajobs.gov

"Additional information about the Astronaut Candidate Program is available by calling the Astronaut Selection Office at 281-483-5907 or by visiting:

http://www.nasa.gov/astronauts/recruit.html "

The last time NASA selected new astronaut candidates, or "ascans," was back in 2004, when 11 U.S. candidates and three international candidates were picked from thousands of applicants. NASA spokesman John Ira Petty told me that the agency would be looking for around 10 to 15 candidates this time around.

"That will depend on budget and how many [astronauts] we lose in the meantime through attrition," Petty said.

This time around, there won't be a special category for "educator astronauts," Petty said. Instead, teaching experience will be factored into the selection process, just as credentials in aviation or science are taken into account. International candidates may be added to the mix as well.

The USAJobs Web site notes that the pay ranges from $59,493 to $130,257, plus benefits. One of the benefits would be the chance to blast off into orbit and perhaps eventually to the moon and beyond - if NASA follows its updated schedule for space exploration.

That schedule also calls for the retirement of the shuttle fleet by 2010. Because it takes months if not years to prepare for a shuttle mission, the '09 recruits would almost certainly be out of the running for those final missions to build the space station. After 2010, NASA would turn its attention to the Orion crew exploration vehicle, which would not be flight-ready until the 2014 time frame.

That means post-2010 astronauts may well be riding on other people's spaceships for several years - perhaps a Russian Soyuz vehicle to the space station, or a privately developed spaceship like SpaceX's gumdrop-shaped Dragon craft. Who knows? Paying passengers may be going into orbit to visit Bigelow-built space modules before anyone in NASA's Class of '09 reaches outer space.

THINKFilm

Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean in the documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon."

As a Navy test pilot and an astronaut, Alan Bean had plenty of the Right Stuff. But sometimes he sounds as if he wishes he had a little more of the Left Stuff. "A lot of things I think about come from the right side of my brain. And for most of the other guys, most of the things they think about come from the left side," the 75-year-old artist and one-time moonwalker told me. "And it got me in trouble at NASA at first."

Bean retired from NASA long ago - but that other-side-of-the-brain perspective still comes through loud and clear, whether he's talking about the sullied image of the astronaut corps or his fears about the future of exploration. He may sound like an aw-shucks kind of guy, but he doesn't pull any punches. "I just say it how I think it, even though other people will say, 'That's weird,' because it's from the other side of the brain," he said.

Our conversation, which took place just before Labor Day weekend, focused on the newly released documentary about the Apollo moon effort, "In the Shadow of the Moon."

Bean was the fourth man to set foot on the lunar surface, during Apollo 12 in 1969, but in the movie he projects the folksy image you'd associate with your retired neighbor down the street. Only this neighbor happens to be one of only 12 earthlings who walked on another celestial body - and in case you ever somehow forget that, he's got a gallery full of paintings that focus on the otherworldly scenes he and his fellow astronauts saw close-up more than three decades ago.

Alan Bean

Apollo 12 astronaut painted this self-portrait, titled "That's How It Felt to Walk on the Moon."

That's the most overt manifestation of Bean's right brain at work - the artistic, emotional side that can sometimes clash with the analytical, serial-computing, checklist-marking activity on the left side of the brain.

"To do art well, you've got to be kind of holistic and look at everything at once," Bean said. "It's different. You don't stay alive as an astronaut or a pilot looking at everything at once. You better be a serial kind of guy."

Bean recalled that there were many times during NASA meetings when others thought his ideas were coming out of left field (or should that be right field?). He also wasn't the kind of guy whose ego could fill a room - which made him feel a bit out of place among all those Type A personalities.

Even during our conversation, Bean would occasionally wait to hear what I had to say about a particular topic before weighing in. "What do you think?" he asked at one point. "You've got a better feel for the big picture than I do."

But if you give him a chance, Bean is only too willing to paint the big picture for you - about the meaning of Apollo, the current state of space exploration and what might (or might not) lie ahead. I've put together a 30-minute podcast that encapsulates our conversation. Among the highlights:

• Bean said the biggest message he drew from the Apollo experience in general, and from "In the Shadow of the Moon" in particular, was that people could achieve impossible dreams under the right conditions: "That is something, a message that needs to be said on a daily basis to kids. ... The 400,000 people that worked on Apollo ... are the luckiest people around, because they got a chance in their lifetime to work on an impossible dream. Most people never get the chance."
• Bean got steamed up over the claims of heavy alcohol use by the astronaut corps in the hours before flight, as I noted in a previous Cosmic Log posting. He acknowledged that not all astronauts are angels, as exemplified by Lisa Nowak love-triangle scandal. "Maybe the girl with the diaper was doing bad stuff," he said. "I don't know. But I do know about this other stuff. Nobody would ever do any of that."
• He voiced worries about NASA's plan to return to the moon - a plan that the agency's current administrator, Mike Griffin, has called "Apollo on steroids." Bean said he saw two main challenges ahead: "One, they're not going to get all the money we got. So how do you do it on not so much money? And the second thing is, how are you going to make it safer than the shuttle to go back to the moon? ... Already they've got a challenge that's, I think, bigger than Apollo right off the bat."
• Bean feared that Americans were becoming overly risk-averse, to the point that the political will to explore could be choked off: "If Apollo 13 happened nowadays, or that pad fire on Apollo 1, I don't know what the people in America would do. I don't know whether they'd say, 'Let's just give it up, it's too risky.'"

"In the Shadow of the Moon" captures an age when attitudes were different, Bean said:

"This is one thing about this movie that I think is nice, to let people see how optimistic people were and how they worked hard to make this dream come true. And it did come true. ... We can do those things today, but it isn't going to be easy. We're going to have Apollo fires, we're going to lose people. If you want to explore the cutting edge of what we know and what we can do, it's dangerous."

That's spoken like a true right-brainer. For the left-brain perspective on NASA's future, you need look no further than today's lecture by Griffin, kicking off a series commemorating the agency's 50th anniversary. In his talk, Griffin noted that NASA was at the center of a "space economy" valued at $180 billion and growing: 

"NASA opens new frontiers and creates new opportunities, and because of that is a critical driver of innovation. We don't just create new jobs, we create entirely new markets and possibilities for economic growth that didn't previously exist. This is the emerging space economy, an economy that is transforming our lives here on Earth in ways that are not yet fully understood or appreciated. It is not an economy in space - not yet. But space activities create products and markets that provide benefits right here on Earth, benefits that have arisen from our efforts to explore, understand, and utilize this new medium."

Which argument holds more weight with you when it comes to putting a value on the space effort? Economics or exploration? Left brain or right brain? Of course, both factors come into play, plus the national prestige that comes with pushing the frontier. What will happen, for example, if China follows through on its own aspirations to send humans back to the moon?

"I think the No. 1 thing that would help us, if we wanted to be in more of a hurry than we are, would be if China did something," Bean told me.

But in the words of the moonwalker himself, "What do you think?" Feel free to add your comments below.

Download the 30-minute audio interview with Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean, plus a 30-minute chat with Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. And stay tuned for an upcoming conversation with Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 scientist-astronaut and former U.S. senator. 

• Science News: Consciousness in the raw
• L.A. Times: Reflections on 'The Stuff of Thought' 
• Times of London: The spirited beginning of Sherlock Holmes
• BBC: Big Brother is watching us all (via Slashdot)
• Network World: Where's your jetpack? Maybe it's here

The commercial space race has had its downs and ups in recent days, with Rocketplane Kistler facing financial troubles and Google signing on for a new $30 million X Prize competition. Here's an update on some of the main and lesser-known players – including good news from SpaceX and reports about a couple of teams who are hoping to chase that lunar X Prize.

First, there's some additional bad news for Oklahoma-based Rocketplane: The Abercrombie & Kent luxury-travel company is seeking up to $3.4 million from Rocketplane because the company is behind schedule on development of its suborbital space jet, according to The Chicago Tribune. Cindy Cashman, who was angling to become the first bride in space, is quoted as saying she wants her deposit back, too.

Rocketplane has said it's continuing to work on its suborbital XP craft - and hopes to salvage its deal with NASA as well, even though the clock is ticking toward termination in early October.

Like Oklahoma-based Rocketplane, California-based SpaceX won financial support from NASA last year for its orbital spaceship development effort, with the idea that NASA might later buy transportation services for sending cargo and perhaps even crew to the international space station.

Unlike Rocketplane, SpaceX has been signing up (and announcing) other customers for its rockets - and those contracts count toward convincing the space agency that private enterprise has "significant skin in the game," to use NASA Associate Administrator Scott Horowitz's phrase.

That's part of the reason why SpaceX is hitting its financial as well as technical milestones, according to Elon Musk, the dot-com millionaire who founded the company. Among the more recent positive developments:

• SpaceX passed a critical design review for its Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon spacecraft "with flying colors," Musk told me.
• The company has also completed the first phase of a safety review for hooking up with the space station. "According to the NASA guys, we passed Phase 1 in record time," Musk said.
• Today, SpaceX announced a deal with Britain's Avanti Communications Group for the launch of one telecom satellite on a Falcon 9 in 2009, with options for three more launches that together could amount to $150 million.

SpaceX hasn't yet put a payload into orbit successfully, but Musk is hoping that his third Falcon 1 launch, now scheduled for early 2008, will reassure customers as well as NASA that the company is staying on track. For now, he said, the potential for turning a profit is in sight - and he's not looking for outside investors.

"We've not solicited any funding," Musk said, contradicting some claims that have appeared in the press. "We've not approached a single person for funding, and we don't even have a private-placement memo written up, so I don't know what the hell people would look at."

Musk already has a growing launch manifest, but he's willing to provide launches at cost for competitors in the Google Lunar X Prize. "We don't expect to generate any extra sales out of this," he said. Instead, Musk - who is a member of the X Prize Foundation's board of trustees - sees this as a way to contribute to the success of the X Prize program.

"This prize is going to be super-helpful in generating public interest in space," he said. "The whole space industry should look at this as something that will be helpful to them whether they're government or commercial. It's exciting."

Some teams are already making themselves known: On Thursday I referred to Carnegie Mellon University's Red Whittaker, who has been working on lunar rover prototypes for years and now wants to field an X Prize entry. Rocket engineer Allen Newcomb, who was part of the team behind the SpaceShipOne rocket plane and is now part of the BonNova team in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, told me he's also interested in the real lunar challenge.

"Since we have already built a Lunar Lander analog ... we could scale up our design to carry the rover for the new prize," Newcomb said in an e-mail. "We could design and build the rover also, and/or partner with some other team for launch services."

That may well be how the Google Lunar X Prize will develop, with "New Space" players coming together with other elements of the tech frontier. Whittaker knows as much as anyone about robots, but he's going to need a little help with the rocketry part. That's the way NASA manages its Mars missions, for instance, with roles for companies ranging from Lockheed Martin to Honeybee Robotics.

Doug Graham, spokesman for California-based XCOR Aerospace, told me that's how success stories in commercial space will likely play out as well. XCOR, for example, recently earned a place on Inc. magazine's prestigious list of 500 "Fastest Growing Private Companies" (at 446th place, to be exact) - even though its main business is currently to supply rocket know-how for other people's ventures.

"Rocketplane Kistler's problems are particular to Kistler," Graham said today. "We're on the Inc. 500. We're going strong. And it's going to be very interesting to see how the new prize is going to generate even more activity."

Although XCOR isn't planning to field its own team for the Google Lunar X Prize, it's ready to provide an assist to anyone who needs a hand, he said.

"I think we're going to see some of the players bonding together. ... It's very possible that if somebody's competing for this prize, they're going to go to the players who have the expertise in the various fields rather than reinventing the wheel," he said. "And of course we'll be happy to help someone who needs our advanced rocket engine technology."

For still more on the commercial space race, remember to plug into Clark Lindsey's RLV and Space Transport News, Jeff Foust's Personal Spaceflight and Ferris Valyn's Space Revolution News. Rand Simberg has some interesting thoughts on the lunar X Prize over at Transterrestrial Musings, and if there are other Web musings you'd like to pass along, feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

Update for 12:10 a.m. Sept. 16: After the lunar X Prize was announced, I asked Armadillo Aerospace's John Carmack whether he'd want to enter the competition. At the time, he was intrigued, but he noted that a launch to the moon wasn't his top priority and that he'd be in no hurry to sign on.

Since then, however, he's had some time to think about the possibilities - and in a posting to the venerable aRocket discussion list, he sounds as if he's more than just intrigued.

Carmack notes that his development path calls for building modular rockets that can rise higher and higher, straight up - then build an upper-stage booster that could make the extra push into orbit. "That same upper stage, if launched into orbit instead of just straight up to 100 km, could fly to the moon and land, with some performance to be cannibalized for lunar operations," Carmack wrote.

So suppose Armadillo was able to develop this upper stage, after a progression of relatively inexpensive tests. Carmack wrote that the technologies for an even longer trip could be worked out during a series of orbital launches.

"After putting a half dozen vehicles in orbit, we could try and find someone to spring for a [SpaceX] Falcon 1 launch to put the fully fueled vehicle in orbit.  Alternately, we might be far enough along to scale our own design up for the initial orbital launch.

"The only real design concession would be building the upper stage at a size and mass that would allow it to be launched by Falcon 1. This is conveniently rather close to what we were already planning."

SpaceX's Musk told me that Carmack and the Armadillo team were his favorites to win the lunar X Prize. Could this be a match made in the heavens? Stay tuned ...

Update for 7:20 p.m. Sept. 16: This weekend brought sad news from Paul Breed, head of the Unreasonable Rocket father-and-son team. Breed had hoped to compete in this year's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, but some parts literally shook loose from his rocket engines as they were being driven out for a static-firing test.

"The trip killed the vehicle," Breed reported on the Unreasonable Rocket Web log. "This ends the 2007 effort."

Carmack's Armadillo team remains the front-runner for the Lunar Lander Challenge's top prize at next month's X Prize Cup competition in New Mexico - but it's not a slam-dunk. Even if Armadillo wins, Breed is hoping some of the leftover prize money will still be available next year.

Update for 3:05 p.m. Sept. 18: Masten Space Systems is also bowing out of this year's Lunar Lander Challenge race due to tank fabrication problems, as Bill Hensley notes in the comments section below. Masten's blog provides the details.

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Google is bankrolling a $30 million race for privately funded moon rovers - an endeavor that takes the X Prize to new heights.

The Google Lunar X Prize, announced today by the search-engine giant and the X Prize Foundation at the Wired NextFest in Los Angeles, ranks among the richest contests ever offered for technological innovation. It follows up on the $10 million Ansari X Prize for manned spaceflight, which was won nearly three years ago by the SpaceShipOne rocket plane.

BlastOff.com / Diamandis.com

This artist's conception shows a lunar lander descending to the moon's surface. The concept was prepared for BlastOff.com, a venture that aimed to put privately funded rovers on the moon. That venture went by the wayside, but the idea has been revived for the Google Lunar X Prize.

The new prize calls upon teams to create autonomous rovers that could land on the moon, travel at least three-tenths of a mile (500 meters) and send video, images and data back to Earth.

The first team to succeed would win $20 million - that is, if the job is done by 2012. After that, the prize drops to $15 million, and if no one is successful by the end of 2014, the money could be withdrawn. If a second team succeeds before the deadline, $5 million would be given as a runner-up prize. Another $5 million would be reserved for bonus tasks - for example, roving for longer distances, taking pictures of old lunar spacecraft, finding water ice or surviving the long lunar night.

The imagery and other data beamed back from the moon would be shared with the world via the Google Lunar X Prize's Web site.

"By working with the Google team, we look forward to bringing this historic private space race into every home and classroom," Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the California-based X Prize Foundation, said in a prepared statement. "We hope to ignite the imagination of children around the world."

Dreams of flight
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the competition would follow through on some of his own childhood dreams. "Like all kids, I'm somewhat interested in space, but I followed it more in recent years, especially as some of the early Internet pioneers have also turned their attention to space," he said in a video prepared for Thursday's announcement.

At one time, Brin toyed with the idea of mounting a full-fledged lunar lander mission as a Google marketing venture, much as other billionaires might race sailboats or buy sports teams. Brett Alexander, the X Prize Foundation's executive director for space prizes, said Brin mentioned the idea to Diamandis in March during a fund-raising gala. Later that same evening, Diamandis got back to Brin with his proposal for the Google Lunar X Prize.

"At the end of the pitch, Sergey said, 'That's a great idea, let's do it,'" Alexander told me. Larry Page, Google's other co-founder, has likewise been supportive of the X Prize Foundation as a member of its board of trustees.

In addition to the $30 million in prize money, Google is covering a portion of the foundation's  administrative costs, Alexander said.

Follow the money
The idea of a privately funded lunar landing has been kicking around for more than a decade. Diamandis himself was among a group of entrepreneurs at BlastOff.com who worked on such a mission during the dot-com boom. Another company, LunaCorp, tried for years to sell the idea of a corporate-supported lunar rover. Neither of those efforts got off the ground.

The past few years have seen plenty of big-money incentives for innovation as well - not only the Ansari X Prize, but also the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous road vehicles and NASA's Centennial Challenges program. Back in 2004, Nevada billionaire Robert Bigelow offered a $50 million "America's Space Prize" for the first privately funded orbital flight. That particular space race fizzled out, however, when Bigelow determined that no one could make it to orbit by the 2010 deadline while observing a total ban on public funding.

The no-government-funding provision has been softened somewhat for the Google Lunar X Prize. Alexander, a former White House aide, said the competing teams would be limited to receiving no more than 10 percent of their income from government contracts. The competition would also be open to anyone in the world, and not just U.S.-led teams, he said.

Detailed draft rules for the contest would be distributed over the coming weeks for review, eventually leading to the formal registration of X Prize teams, Alexander said. 

NASA vs. the rocketeers?
Alexander saw no conflict between the private-sector prize and NASA's plans for lunar exploration - which call for the launch of a lunar orbiter next year and a progression of robotic missions leading to the first human landing in the 2018 time frame.

"I was at the White House and was involved in writing the Vision for Space Exploration when I was there, so I view this as very complementary," he said.

NASA's deputy administrator, Shana Dale, was due to attend Thursday's NextFest announcement as a signal that the space agency was on board with the X Prize plan. Although NASA would take no role in the X Prize competition, Alexander said officials could conceivably "buy the technology, the system, the mission, the ride or the intellectual property that comes out of all these teams."

"This is not about stopping government exploration," Alexander said. "It's about enhancing it so that we get even more out of exploration."

A little help from their friends
The teams won't be expected to do everything themselves. The X Prize Foundation forged strategic alliances with several partners that could provide the teams with space services:

• SpaceX says it will offer each team an in-kind contribution that, in effect, represents a 10 percent reduction in the price of a Falcon rocket launch.
• Universal Space Network will give the teams a 50 percent discount on its tracking, telemetry and control services, for data uplinks as well as downlinks.
• The Allen Telescope Array, operated by the SETI Institute, will pass along 500 free megabytes of downlinked data from the lunar spacecraft - most likely including the required high-definition TV "mooncasts" sent back after landing and doing 500 meters of roving.

Even with those discounts, is $30 million really enough of an enticement to draw in qualified competitors? That may well be the biggest question surrounding the lunar race. Last year, science-fiction author Jerry Pournelle told me that $50 million was too little to offer for manned orbital flight. But this week, SpaceX's millionaire founder, Elon Musk, told me he thought an unmanned trip to the moon was eminently doable in that price range.

"They might be able to get this done maybe for $20 million, and they could actually potentially make money with the prize," he said.

Musk said SpaceX's two-stage Falcon 1 could get a payload to the moon, as long as the team's spacecraft was equipped with third-stage capability for entering lunar orbit. "I would just take the same engine I was going to land on the moon with, and add some tanks that you could drop off," he said.

Space synergies
Musk said his current pick to win the prize would be Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which has spent years developing a succession of rocket prototypes. Led by video-game programmer John Carmack, the Armadillo team is considered the favorite to win the top prize in the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at next month's Wirefly X Prize Cup, an annual rocket festival in New Mexico.

The SETI Institute's chief executive officer, Thomas Pierson, told me the competition could spark interest in other nongovernmental space ventures, including his institute's efforts to further radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

"Everything that NASA has done and tries to do is admirable, and it should be doing it, but I also believe that for a long time our national process did not encourage private space development, and I think it's high time that it's happening," he said.

Jill Tarter, director of the institute's Center for SETI Research, said she hoped the lunar rovers would fire the public's imagination as much as the Mars Pathfinder rover did a decade ago. "This is an outward-looking adventure, and nobody's life is at risk," she said.

Past and future legacies
The X Prize Foundation said it would offer a range of earthly outreach programs to complement the race to the moon - starting with a "Lunar Legacy" service that lets the general public upload digital files for inclusion on the future rovers.

The "send-your-stuff-to-space" concept has become a standard feature for outward-bound spacecraft ranging from NASA's Mars rovers to Bigelow's orbital modules. The nonprofit Planetary Society has organized its own "send your name to the moon" project, with a digitized list of the names due to be placed on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter next year.

NASA

Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke left this plastic- wrapped photograph of his family on the moon.

Lunar Legacy reaches even further back for precedents, said Lane Soelberg, the X Prize Foundation's vice president of marketing and partnerships. He noted that Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke left behind a plastic-wrapped family portrait when he walked on the moon.

"It's been the only photographic representation of humanity left on the lunar surface," Soelberg told me.

Internet users will be able to upload images and text messages via the Lunar Legacy Web site, for $10 per submission, Soelberg said. Each submission will be limited to 1 megabyte of data, and the files will be reviewed to exclude spam, copyright infringements and offensive material, he said.

Each team making a lunar landing attempt would be required to put the digitized legacies on its spacecraft, encoded on a DVD or perhaps a more advanced type of storage device developed between now and liftoff.

"Details are still being worked out, but we fully intend to broadcast, or 'Mooncast,' a number of our supporters' Legacies back to Earth," Diamandis said in a written introduction to the project. "Which means that one of our Lunar Legacy creators will quite literally be the Neil Armstrong of private space exploration."

Half of the proceeds from the project would be distributed to the competitors, and the other half would go toward the X Prize Foundation's educational activities. The foundation said the Saint Louis Science Center will serve as its education partner and the coordinator for a network of museums and science centers. The International Space University will conduct international team outreach and serve as facilitator for the competition's judging committee.

In his video statement, Google's Brin said the lunar venture would be like no other corporate sponsorship.

"It's really going to accomplish something very, very impressive ... something no commercial entity has ever done and only a couple of governments have ever accomplished, and doing it with modern technology, with the modern imagery, with what I hope to be really incredible results," he said. "And that's the kind of thing that we love to be involved with."

Update for 3:50 p.m. ET Sept. 13: Now that the official announcement is percolating, the reactions are starting to come in. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center (which is conveniently near Google's Silicon Valley headquarters) tells Reuters that NASA is "kind of an interested bystander" in the lunar X Prize race.

"If a private company perfects a process to get payloads to the moon, NASA will have a lot interest in that," Reuters quotes him as saying.

Meanwhile, I checked with Armadillo Aerospace's John Carmack, a veteran of the Ansari X Prize as well as the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, to find out whether he'd enter the Google Lunar X Prize as well. "I am beginning to think about configurations for it, but I can't say it would be a major driver for what I'm doing," he told me.

He said it's a good thing that SpaceX and other service providers are willing to cut a break to would-be lunar rover teams: "Even $30 million is pretty borderline for launching something up to the moon. ... It's definitely a lot harder, relatively, than the original X Prize there. For two to three times the potential award, it's definitely more aggressive there." 

Carmack said the rockets that Armadillo is currently building are "characteristic cousins" to what would be required for a lunar landing, and he could imagine "taking some steps off our path to make some room for this." But he's also focused for the time being on nearer-at-hand ventures - such as a system for space diving, which is a super-extreme variant of skydiving. For now, the moon can wait, at least as far as Carmack is concerned.

"There's no huge hurry on this," he said. "We'll have to see how things go for this in the next couple of years."

In contrast, Carnegie Mellon University robotics researcher Red Whittaker wasted no time in announcing that he'll pursue the prize. Whittaker and his colleagues have been working on a wide range of autonomous vehicles over the years, including lunar rover prototypes as well as robo-cars for DARPA's challenges.

"Planetary exploration is a dream we pursue and a technology we create," Whittaker said in a CMU news release. "We have spent decades building and testing robotic technologies for just this purpose. We are also veterans of competitive technology challenges. These are the things we do, so combining lunar rovers with a competitive race to the moon is a great opportunity."

The former Marine said he'd recruit partners to help his team with the various aspects of launch, landing and exploration - and line up sponsors to cover the costs. "Public access, made available through innovative corporate sponsorships, could be a breakthrough feature of the first-ever private robot on another body in space," he said.

Whittaker's team has already set up a Web site to start generating some buzz.

"This challenge is a thrilling thing for space exploration and a thrilling thing for robotics," Whittaker said. "It's inevitable that someone will find a way to win it. Regardless of who takes home the cash, this achievement will enrich us all."

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Buzz Aldrin's head is buzzing with ideas – ranging from spaceship-building projects to film appearances to, yes, commentary on lovelorn astronaut Lisa Nowak's travails. The 77-year-old moonwalker sadly notes that people know more about the allegedly diaper-wearing astronaut than about NASA's program to go back to the moon. And over the next five years, Aldrin intends to do something about that.

Jim Seida / msnbc.com file

Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin is still trying to  keep America focused on the outer-space horizon.  Click on the image to hear or download a 30-minute  MP3 audio interview with msnbc.com's Alan Boyle.

Aldrin's biggest claim to fame is his status as the second man to walk on the moon – a title that surely rubs him the wrong way. Unlike the "first man," Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, Aldrin still gets his share of publicity's glare. Last month, he was featured on the gossip sites for getting a facelift, and this month he's one of the stars in the new space documentary "In the Shadow of the Moon," where he talks about coping with the burden of fame as well as being the first man ... to pee on the moon.

This week, Aldrin stirred up yet another buzz with his observation that there was something admirable, though inexcusable, about Nowak's drive to meet up with a romantic rival. And on Thursday he'll be at the Wired NextFest in Los Angeles, where the X Prize Foundation is due to announce its next big competition.

Just before Labor Day, Aldrin and I talked about a wide range of subjects – including life after NASA, his bouts with depression and alcoholism, his backing for commercial space efforts and his reflections on the future of spaceflight. Among the highlights:

• Aldrin, whose engineering background earned him the nickname "Dr. Rendezvous" during the Apollo days, has kept his hand in the spaceship design business – and says he is trying to set up a joint venture with California-based SpaceDev, which is developing a private-sector spacecraft for NASA and other potential customers.
• Although Aldrin noted that round-the-moon flights are now being offered by the Russians, at a cost of $100 million per seat, he said he wouldn't take the ride. "I don't have the money, and I really don't need to do that," he said. Instead, he's working out the details of a ShareSpace "adventure awards program" that could eventually send a winner around the moon with the "spin of a wheel." He said the first stage of the ShareSpace program could be unveiled "at the beginning of next year."
• Aldrin said he enjoyed seeing the Apollo experience from the perspective of other astronauts in "In the Shadow of the Moon" - including the unexpected humor of Apollo 11 crewmate Mike Collins, who circled the moon in the command module while Aldrin and Armstrong explored the surface. "He was the life of our mission," Aldrin said. "Neil and I were kinda, in those days anyway, a little reserved and not quite as jovial particularly."
• Now Aldrin is trying to organize a series of astronaut reunions, perhaps in association with a TV network, that would stoke public interest for the 40th and 50th anniversaries of space milestones. By the time the 40th anniversary of the last Apollo moonshot takes place in 2012, Aldrin hopes that the path will be set for NASA's return to the moon in time for the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 2019.

Keeping America's space program in the public eye is a high priority for Aldrin, particularly as memories of the glory days of the 1960s fade – and as society looks inward rather than out to the stars.

"A poll was taken, and 50 percent of the people knew about Lisa Nowak and the diaper saga, and only 8 percent of the people knew about our plans to return to the moon and go to Mars," Aldrin complained.

He's worried that NASA's space vision could fail - not by aiming too high, but by aiming too low and settling for a juiced-up Apollo program:

"The moon could bog us down, as the space station in a way has bogged us down, when robots could do a lot of those jobs very well. Our real objective, in addition to visiting asteroids and near-Earth objects, is a settlement, a permanent growing settlement on Mars. And that, people just don't understand.

"So the way you get there, the way you prepare by going to the moon to get to Mars, shouldn't emphasize, 'Well, we did it this way in Apollo, so let's do it this way again, and then we'll think about Mars.' No, it should be, 'Let's think about how we're going to get to Mars, and then let's prepare by going to the moon in the best way that prepares us for going to Mars.'"

Here's the MP3 file of the interview, edited down to 30 minutes. You can either click on the link to listen now, or right-click and download the clip for listening later on your MP3 player of choice. Then feel free to weigh in with your comments on the buzz about Aldrin, Apollo's legacy and future space visions. In the days ahead, stay tuned for more moonwalker interviews with Apollo 12's Alan Bean and Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt.

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NASA has given notice to one of the winners of its $500 million spaceship competition that it's no longer interested in working with the company due to its investment woes. That could open the way for termination of the agreement with Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler as early as next month. In response, Rocketplane's chief executive officer told me that "we are working on possible cures" for the funding crisis.

Rocketplane Kistler

An artist's conception shows Rocketplane Kistler's K-1 rocket blasting off.

George French, who serves as the company's chairman as well as CEO, declined further comment on the company's financial fix - which was first reported by Aerospace Daily & Defense Report. However, NASA confirmed that it sent Rocketplane the notice on Friday after the company missed two scheduled milestones in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS.

"As a result of a review of that performance, NASA decided that further efforts by the company are not in the agency's interest," agency spokeswoman Beth Dickey told me today. She said the notice came in a letter signed by Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems.

The letter itself did not mention any deadline, but under the terms of NASA's agreement with the company, the agency could terminate its relationship with Rocketplane 30 days after sending the letter, Dickey said.

Rocketplane Kistler and California-based SpaceX have each been getting a share of the $500 million set aside for supporting the development of private-sector spaceships capable of resupplying the international space station after the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. After last year's COTS competition, $207 million was allocated for Rocketplane's K-1 launch system, and $278 million for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon pressurized capsule. Another $15 million covered NASA's administration costs.

NASA has been distributing the money as the companies meet pre-specified milestones, and Rocketplane received $32.1 million for hitting the first three milestones, Dickey said. However, the company failed to hit the fourth milestone - which was to raise $500 million in private investment by the end of May. Dickey said Rocketplane also missed the deadline for a review of the design for its pressurized cargo module, with the company saying its funding woes were preventing work on the review.

Rocketplane did raise $40 million in cash last year for the K-1, Dickey said, and some work was being done on the launch vehicle even though NASA funds were held up. Even if NASA terminates its agreement, Rocketplane will not have to refund the money already received. Under the termination scenario, NASA would set up a new competition for the remaining $175 million that has been set aside for Rocketplane, Dickey said.

The competitors for that money would likely include spaceship companies that are working with NASA on an unfunded basis, in hopes of getting future COTS funds. Those companies include PlanetSpace and t/Space as well as Constellation Services International, SpaceDev and Spacehab. Rocketplane could also enter the new competition, Dickey said.

French did not detail the "possible cures" for his company's financial woes, but Dickey said if Rocketplane were to attract $500 million in investment over the next month, NASA would take that into consideration when weighing whether to terminate the relationship.

The terms of the agreement also could conceivably be amended to make things easier on Rocketplane. The company has been facing difficulties in its money-raising efforts - in part because investors nowadays are warier of high-risk ventures (which take in private-sector space ventures as well as subprime housing loans), and in part because NASA has been sending mixed signals about how it intends to get crew members and cargo to the space station when the shuttles go away.

In addition to the relatively low-cost COTS program, NASA has been pursuing its own multibillion-dollar moonship development effort. The space agency has also made deals with the Russians for low-cost resupply flights after 2010, and recently put out a request for more information about resupply services. All these programs could be seen as supporting rivals for Rocketplane, SpaceX or other companies seeking to break into the spaceflight business - and that's not reassuring for would-be investors.

SpaceX says it has been meeting its financial as well as technical milestones for the COTS program - and the fact that SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, has been putting more than $100 million of his own dot-com fortune into the company may have something to do with that.

Rocketplane Kistler's pockets don't seem to be quite as deep. What's more, Rocketplane has a separate program to develop a suborbital spaceship known as the Rocketplane XP. Reports from Oklahoma indicate that work on the K-1 orbital vehicle has slowed up the timetable for building the suborbital XP, and the current best guess is that the XP won't enter commercial service until 2010.

Rocketplane's French declined to provide specifics about the XP project, other than to note that other companies in the suborbital space industry have been weathering setbacks as well. California-based Scaled Composites, which is building the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane for Virgin Galactic, suffered a fatal accident during testing in July that founder Burt Rutan said would force a delay in SpaceShipTwo's schedule. Before the accident, Virgin Galactic had been targeting its first flights for 2009. Now 2010 sounds more realistic.

"Everyone is experiencing difficulties, but no one is giving up, and neither are we," French said.

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