The showdown over America's space policy will have to wait until September at the earliest: House Democrats had considered rushing through passage of a $19 billion NASA authorization bill today, before the start of Congress' August recess. But the leadership decided instead to keep the bill in limbo, in part because Democratic members from California protested.

One factor might have been the strong opposition to the House version of the bill that came from advocates of space commercialization. The House bill would have made deep cuts in the Obama administration's request for $6 billion over five years to support the development of private-sector spaceships capable of bringing crew to the International Space Station.

However, that's only one factor. Revisions in the measure, sparked by the Congressional Budget Office's criticism of a proposed loan guarantee program for launch companies, complicated efforts to suspend House rules and fast-track the bill to a vote by the full House.

What's more, two unions - the American Federation of Government Workers and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers - came out with a jointly written letter that sharply criticized the House bill for its "many serious shortfalls." They urged lawmakers not to try pushing it through. Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers sent a letter strongly supportive of the House bill. The Machinist union's website also referred to an independent report that raised questions about the Obama administration's space commercialization initiative.

The Senate's space legislation is currently seen as a compromise between President Barack Obama's original plan and the House version. The best realistic outcome, at least the way most space commercialization advocates see it, would be for the Senate's version to prevail. But it's clear that the debate over America's future space effort is just warming up - and that there's plenty of processing yet to be done in the sausage factory on Capitol Hill.

For further details on today's twists and turns, click on over to Space News' explanation as well as the Space Politics blog and RLV and Space Transport News.

Rocketeers ranging from SpaceX's millionaire founder to the maverick engineers behind the DIRECT heavy-lift design effort are sounding the alarm over a space spending bill due for consideration by the House on Friday. Their bottom line: Support the Senate version of the bill instead.

H.R. 5781, the House's version of the $19 billion NASA authorization bill for fiscal 2011, lops off most of $6 billion being sought by the Obama administration for boosting the development of commercial spaceships capable of bringing astronauts to the International Space Station over the next five years. Instead, it would put more money into the internal NASA rocket development program - although not as much as previously budgeted under a plan that an independent panel said was "not viable."

For a detailed analysis of the various plans, check out this comparison from the Space Foundation, and this Popular Mechanics commentary by Rand Simberg.

Many folks on the entrepreneurial space frontier say the House spending plan is so deficient that the Senate version must prevail, even though it also short-changes commercial space development. They say the alternative could be an extended period of dependence on the Russians for crew transport.

Interestingly enough, folks on the other side of the argument - including Apollo spacewalkers Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan - mirror that argument, insisting that relying on commercial space would lead to dependence on the Russians. They don't think commercial space providers will be able to deliver on their promises. House Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., said last week that "we cannot be dependent on yet-to-be-developed commercial crew systems for U.S. access to the ISS and low Earth orbit, lest we make the would-be commercial providers 'too big to fail' before we have proof that they can succeed."

Cernan, who commanded the last Apollo mission to the moon in 1972, has been quoted as saying that "the commercial sector is still walking around like a young kid learning to walk. They don't know what the risks are. They don't know what they don't know."

Such claims, however, run counter to the fact that commercial ventures, including the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin, have been involved in the human spaceflight effort since Apollo. The difference is that NASA would be paying fixed prices for space services rather than following its traditional cost-plus pricing formula. It's really a question of rethinking the financial underpinnings of the space business rather than its technological foundations.

Critics of the commercial approach to spaceflight also worry that it will lead to widespread dislocation for the nation's aerospace workforce - with this week's layoff notices for space shuttle workers held up as an example. Preserving traditional space jobs is a prime motivation for the House's approach to the spending bill. But up-and-coming players in the space business - including California-based SpaceX, which conducted a successful first test of its Falcon 9 rocket last month - say they are creating thousands of new jobs to offset job losses elsewhere.

Friday's debate in the House could lead to a quick vote under a "suspension of the rules" that would limit the time for debate and amendments, but would also require a two-thirds majority. That prospect led to a chorus of bugle calls from the House bill's opponents:

• In an e-mail alert, SpaceX founder Elon Musk asked recipients to call their representatives in Congress and urge them to vote "no" on H.R. 5781. "SpaceX rarely asks you to take action, so you know it really matters when we do," he wrote. Musk said a five-minute phone call could make a big difference. "The only hope for the average citizen to one day travel in space is in danger due to the actions of certain members of Congress," Musk said. "SpaceX does not have the enormous lobbying power of the big government contractors to stop them, however with your help the day can still be saved."

• In a rare news release, the DIRECT rocket development team urged the House to back the Senate bill, which has the support of the White House as well. "The president's support for the Senate bill is a big step in the right direction, a wise meeting of the minds between all of the various stakeholders," DIRECT team founder Ross Tierney said. "If approved, the newly proposed $6.9 billion, 75-ton 'Space Launch System' project, very similar to our 'Jupiter' shuttle-derived system, would represent serious cost savings compared to the $15 billion, 20-ton Ares 1, and would also prevent the repeating of the tragic mistake of the 1970s, when Apollo vehicles, infrastructure and highly skilled personnel were simply discarded at the end of that program." Tierney complained that the House approach would continue work on the "current, problematic and far more expensive medium-lift Ares 1 development program, which is incapable of sending humans beyond Earth without a heavy-lift vehicle needing to be developed later."

• In a statement, the nonprofit Planetary Society urged the House leadership to put off consideration of the bill until after Congress' August recess, "allowing a full and open debate and for amendments to improve the bill." The society said it was concerned that the bill deviated significantly "from any plan offered by NASA or any previous administration" - by abandoning any significant investment in exploration technology, turning back the White House's commercialization initiative, leaving out any mention of specific goals for U.S. human spaceflight and reinstating programs "that have been determined to be unsustainable."

• In an urgent update, the Space Access Society noted that both the House and Senate versions of the authorization bill fell short of what the White House was asking for in terms of support for commercial space development. But it said that the House version was "far worse" than the Senate's - and that any attempt to approve it should be rejected. "There is a good chance that constituent pressure (that's you!) on congressmen in general can either delay this attempt till August if the votes aren't there, or defeat it outright," the Space Access Society sayd.

• In a Twitter update, planetary scientist Alan Stern asked his followers to "call your Congress rep TODAY @ 202-225-3121" to urge a "no" vote on H.R. 5781 and voice support for the Senate version. Stern is a former associate administrator of NASA who now serves as an adviser to suborbital space ventures (and hopes to take a suborbital research flight into space himself). Stern told me that he prefers the Senate wording on support for suborbital research trips under a program known as CRuSR.

For more about the space policy showdown, monitor RLV and Space Transport News as well as Space Politics. And as Stern has said, you should let your representative in Congress know how you feel, by calling 202-225-3121 in Washington, or calling your representative's district office, or sending an e-mail.

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Kevin Costner, here's your chance. Sparked by the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a well-connected environmental activist is offering $1.4 million for new methods to clean up oil spills.

The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge is being funded by, you guessed it, Wendy Schmidt. She's president of The Schmidt Family Foundation and helped get the foundation's 11th Hour Project and Climate Central going. She's also co-founder of the Schmidt Marine Science Research Institute - along with her husband, Eric Schmidt, Google's billionaire CEO.

Schmidt said she was prompted to act by the Deepwater Horizon leak and oil spill in the Gulf, which has created environmental havoc for more than three months.

"With tens of thousands of ocean oil platforms across the globe, and billions of barrels of oil being transported every day by tankers, it's not a question of 'if' there will be another oil spill, but 'when,'" Wendy Schmidt said in today's announcement of the challenge. "We need to come up with better solutions to capture oil on the surface, to minimize the harm these spills are causing to marine life, coastal wetlands, and beaches and to our livelihoods — a harm that can last for generations. This is why I am personally funding this X Challenge: to inspire innovators around the world — and all those who want to help address what has happened in the Gulf — to focus on solutions to an ongoing, systemic problem."

As Schmidt points out, the Gulf isn't the only place that faces oil-spill ills. Just in the last month, devastating spills have occurred in locales ranging from Michigan to China. And it's widely accepted that the technologies for cleaning up oil leaks have lagged behind the technologies for finding the oil in the first place.

So here's the deal, as laid out by the X Prize Foundation, which has added Schmidt's challenge to its portfolio of prizes:

Phase I. From August 2010 to April 2011, teams from around the world are invited to register for this competition, and to submit their approach to clean up oil slicks created by spills or leaks from ships or tankers (e.g. Exxon Valdez) land drainage, waste disposal, or oil platform spill (e.g. Deepwater Horizon). An expert panel of judges from industry and academia will evaluate all of the proposals along the following criteria:

• Technical approach and commercialization plan
• No negative environmental impact
• Scalability of and ability to deploy technology; cost and human labor of implementation
• Improvement of technology over today's baseline booms and skimmers.

Phase II. The judges will select up to 10 of the top teams to demonstrate their ability to efficiently and rapidly clean up oil on the ocean surface in a head-to-head competition. These proofs of capability, which will determine the winner, will take place at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHSMETT) in New Jersey. The top team that demonstrates the ability to recover oil on the seawater surface at the highest oil recovery rate (ORR) and recovery efficiency (RE) will win the $1 million Grand Purse. Second place will win $300,000 and third place will win $100,000 in purses.

The money should be awarded around this time next year.

The X Challenge FAQ file says the challenge is focusing on surface cleanup "because we believe that in order to minimize the environmental impact of all oil spills ... we must capture the oil at the spill site. Once the oil hits the shore or is weathered on the sea surface, it is too late. We must have the technologies necessary to stop oil spills at the spill site."

Wendy Schmidt hopes that the X Challenge will capitalize on some of the lessons learned by Silicon Valley ventures such as Google and Apple.

"Silicon Valley has become a culture of venture capitalism that generates new ideas, and competition, and innovation and job creation," she told me today. "With oil, we haven't had that. So with this prize, we look at this as 'pre-venture capital,' if you will. There isn't just one winner in this, even though that's how it's ostensibly set up. There are many winners."

Even before today's official announcement, the contest's backers have received more than 1,000 e-mails asking for more information. They expect 75 to 100 teams to register for the competition.

"Any corporate entity can compete. Companies and non-profits can register to compete. Universities and communities can form corporate entities which can then register to compete. Government agencies are not eligible to compete," the backers say.

The X Prize Foundation has been in charge of four big-ticket competitions, including the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight ($10 million), the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-cars ($10 million), the Archon Genetics X Prize for low-cost gene sequencing ($10 million) and the Google Lunar X Prize for moonshots ($30 million). It also ran the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (with NASA providing the $2 million purse).

The foundation said it was making a distinction between its X Prizes (which usually take years to win) and this new X Challenge (which has a smaller purse and a one-year time frame). Despite those differences, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge and the Progressive Automotive X Prize have the same goal: to use cash incentives as an extra lure for environmentally minded innovation.

"The X Prize Foundation is focused on the environment in two ways," Peter Diamandis, the X Prize Foundation's chairman and CEO, told me this week. "First, with Progressive, it's about reducing the consumption of oil. And second, we are pleased with Wendy Schmidt, who is personally funding this, for dealing with the issue of oil spills - not only from platforms, but potentially from tankers. While we have an oil economy, it's naive to think this is the last oil spill we'll have. Finding out ways to much more efficiently clean it up when it does happen is an important objective of that competition."

Just last week, a consortium of major oil companies announced that they would set aside $1 billion to focus on new technologies for containing deep-sea oil leaks. But the X Challenge's backers said this program "will not negate the need for oil cleanup technology" that focuses on surface spills. They said they hoped non-traditional tinkerers as well as deep-pocketed corporations would go after the X Challenge cash.

After all, if a couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio could figure out how to build a heavier-than-air flying machine, a couple of grease monkeys from heaven-knows-where just might come up with a better way to clean up the oil. And thousands upon thousands of potential solutions to the Gulf oil crisis have been streaming in from the general public over the past three months.

So here's my question: Would "Field of Dreams" film star Kevin Costner, who has bankrolled an oil-sucking invention now being used in the Gulf cleanup effort, be eligible to enter?

"From what I understand of his centrifuge solution, they could be part of a team competing for the prize," Francis Beland, prize director for the X Challenge, said in a forwarded e-mail.

There it is, Kevin: If you bring it, you could win.

More on oil cleanup technologies:

• Video from 'Rachel Maddow Show': Peter Diamandis on X prizes
• Video: Kevin Costner testifies to House panel on Gulf cleanup device
• Video from 'Rachel Maddow Show': Kevin Costner's no crackpot
• The pilots behind the Gulf's robot navy
• Deep water brings more oil and more danger
• 'Super skimmer' a giant bust in Gulf oil cleanup
• House approves legislation on drilling safety and oil cleanup
• Full coverage of the disaster in the Gulf

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Summer's the season for kicking back, taking time off and heading out on flights of fancy ... preferably with a good book (or e-reader) in your backpack. It's great if the book is associated with far-off times and places. And if the book sparks your brain's science-loving regions, so much the better.

Here's a roundup of books keyed to different fields of science as well as different travel destinations, some of which you can visit only in your imagination:

Archaeology and anthropology: You might think I'd go with something Egyptian, like "In the Valley of the Kings," but instead I'm staying a little closer to home. "Cahokia" is the story of the most powerful pre-Columbian city-state north of the Rio Grande, and how it was unearthed just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. It's a story of power plays, massive pyramids, Stonehenge-like structures made of wood, and spectacles with human sacrifices, all set in the 12th century. And it's all true. You can even go to Illinois and visit the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which offers this video online. For a wider-angle view of the Americas before Columbus, "1491" is a must-read. The book, which gives a decidedly different perspective on Pocahontas, the Pilgrims and other facets of Native American history, was a January 2006 selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club.

Physics: CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the French-Swiss border, is definitely the place to be if you're a particle physicist. And even if you're not a physicist, Geneva is grand in the summertime. But if you can't be there in person, you can still read about the drama of the physics quest in "Why Does E=mc²?" The book doesn't stop with Einstein's famous equation but goes on to work out the implications for mysteries such as the LHC's hunt for the elusive Higgs boson. Paul Halpern's "Collider" and Don Lincoln's "The Quantum Frontier" focus fully on the LHC and the mysteries it could help solve. All this should whet your appetite for "Massive," another book about the Higgs quest due to come out in the U.S. this fall. And if you don't mind a little science fiction with your physics, you can consult my list of favorite physics doomsday tales.

Biology: Extreme longevity seems to be a hot topic lately, and there are plenty of books that trace the long history of our quest for immortality, including "Long for this World" and "Mortal Coil." I recently picked up on a friend's suggestion and paged through "The Spring," Clifford Irving's 1996 novel about a Colorado mountain town with a secret. It's not great literature, but if you can pick it up from a used-book seller or your local library, it might make you think more deeply about the implications of immortality (or about vacationing in the Rockies). Besides, knowing that it was written by the guy behind "The Hoax" adds to the thrill - and kinda makes me want to see the Richard Gere movie again.

Oceanography: If you're vacationing by the coast, "Deep Blue Home" could serve as the perfect literary complement for your summer idyll. It traces filmmaker/diver/writer Julia Whitty's encounters with the wonders of the world's oceans, from the Galapagos Islands to the Antarctic to the Lost City in the Atlantic's depths. For additional perspectives on ocean science, check out Sylvia Earle's "The World Is Blue" or Ellen Prager's "Chasing Science at Sea." And for something completely different, crack open Peter Ward's new book about the climate crisis, "The Flooded Earth."

Planetology: Celebrate science-fiction titan Ray Bradbury's 90th birthday by re-reading "The Martian Chronicles," which was published back in 1950. A lot has changed since then, but we still haven't tried sending any astronauts to Mars. Which makes the 1980 TV version of the book, starring Rock Hudson, look even sadder. Heck, we were supposed to have built colonies on Mars and destroyed Earth in a nuclear holocaust by now! For different perspectives on Red Planet odysseys, check out Kim Stanley Robinson's hard-core, hard-sci-fi Mars Trilogy or William Hartmann's easy-to-read tourism manual, "A Traveler's Guide to Mars."

Cosmology: If you're serious about the underlying structure of the universe, "From Eternity to Here" is among the latest in a long line of books about cosmology. But Sean Carroll's treatise about time can make for some heavy summertime reading. I think Dan Falk's "In Search of Time" is a little easier to digest. Neal Stephenson's monastic science-fiction novel, "Anathem," is another heavy book (in more ways than one, seeing as how the print version is more than 900 pages long). But I totally enjoyed listening to the audiobook version. "Anathem" offers up a fantastic blend of cosmology, physics, philosophy ... and even neuroscience, in the form of the parable of the fly, the worm and the bat.

Bonus round: For more choices, check out the journal Nature's summer book recommendations. Here's the rundown for quick reference:

• "Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates"
• "The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play"
• "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves"
• "Stumbling on Happiness"
• "Elegance in Science: The Beauty of Simplicity"
• "The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science"
• "The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong With the World's Leading Media Companies"
• "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming"
• "Composed: A Memoir" (by Rosanne Cash)
• "The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory"
• "Galileo's Dream"
• "Two on a Tower"
• "Tigers in Red Weather: A Journey Through Asia"
• "The Lion and the Mouse"
• "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"
• "Ils on fait Paris: Une balade en 1000 lieux de memoire"

Update for 10:40 p.m. ET Aug. 5: I should have known I'd get the title of Sean Carroll's book, "From Eternity to Here," scrambled up if I wasn't careful. Though I suppose watching the 1953 movie "From Here to Eternity" would be a fine summertime activity as well. I've fixed the reference to the book ... my apologies to Sean.

For still more summer reading options, check out this roundup from the 2009 holiday season, this 2009 Apollo reading list and this 2007 sci-fi roundup. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

• Cracked: 5 ridiculous ancient beliefs that turned out to be true
• New Scientist: Are we living inside someone else's black hole?
• ArXiv Blog: Quantum time machine gets around paradox (via GeekPress)
• The Guardian: Monkeys are the masters of dental flossing

Israeli archaeologists say they have found two 3,700-year-old clay tablets that appear to contain legal pronouncements similar to the Code of Hammurabi and the biblical "tooth for a tooth" rule.

The clay fragments, bearing Akkadian cuneiform script, were unearthed this summer during the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's excavations at Hazor National Park in northern Israel. They date to roughly the same time frame as the Babylonian Hammurabi Code, which is considered the world's oldest surviving written collection of laws. And the fact that the tablets were found in Israel suggests they might have had an influence on Old Testament writers.

Wayne Horowitz, a professor at Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology, told the Jerusalem Post that a team of experts is preparing the Hazor code for publication as part of a book. He said the discovery could open up interesting new connections between the Hammurabi Code and biblical law.

Horowitz said it wasn't yet clear whether the document was written at Hazor, where a school for scribes existed in ancient times, or was brought in from elsewhere.

The tablets and stone monument that first brought the Hammurabi Code to light were discovered in present-day Iran in 1901. The latest find marks the first time an ancient legal document resembling the code has been found in Israel.

So far, the team has translated only parts of the Hazor text, but those parts are enough to suggest that the tablets address the same sorts of topics covered by the Hammurabi Code. Horowitz told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that the first word he deciphered was a legalistic Akkadian term meaning "if and when." There are references to "master" and "slave," as well as a word referring to a body part, most likely a tooth.

The Babylonian legal code laid out a range of punishments that were graduated according to the status of the offended party: Injuries done to slaves, for example, were judged to be less serious offenses than injuries to their masters. Hammurabi's idea of reciprocity in offense and punishment has parallels in the biblical law of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," which appears in Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy (and which gets an different twist in the Gospel of Matthew).

The Hazor archaeological team is continuing its work, under the direction of Hebrew University's Amnon Ben-Tor and Sharon Zuckerman - and it sounds as if there's much more to come. Device Magazine reports that the archaeologists are about to uncover a monumental Bronze Age building where they expect to recover additional tablets. An honest-to-goodness "Bible Code" may be lying right under their feet.

More ancient mysteries:

• Shard bears oldest script found in Jerusalem
• Biblical fragments reunited after centuries
• In ancient wall, scholar sees proof for Bible
• Artifact suggests Bible written centuries earlier
• Noah's Ark found? Not so fast

• Science News: 2 is the magic number in quantum physics
• Help NASA's Desert RATS decide where to explore next
• News.com.au: The 'Eden' where humans survived
• NPR: Experts fuss over cost of fusion research
• Behind the Black: How to get into a moon pit
• Next Big Future: Carnival of Space 164

The $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition finished up its final on-track round, and the results are clear: If anyone is going to win the $5 million contest for four-seat cars, it's going to be the Virginia-based Edison2 team. If anyone is going to win the $2.5 million contest for alternative two-seat tandem vehicles, it's going to be the Swiss X-Tracer team. It's only the last $2.5 million - set aside for two-seat, side-by-side cars - that is up for grabs.

Edison2 and X-Tracer are sure things, because those teams have the only cars still standing in each of those contests ... two in each category. The side-by-side contest has five cars entered, and based on a runoff race that was conducted this morning, it looks as if it's down to the Finnish RaceAbout team vs. the Wave II from Nevada-based Li-Ion Motors. Those teams finished the course at the Michigan International Speedway just seconds apart, with RaceAbout leading by a nose.

"Only performance stats will tell who wins the big prize in this category," the X Prize Foundation's Amanda Stiles reported in a Twitter update from the race track in Brooklyn, Mich.

The final results aren't exactly "final" yet: As Stiles mentioned, performance data will be used to adjust the times for the runoff. That includes readings for overnight battery charging, because all five of the runoff's competitors are all-electric. As a result, the adjusted results won't be available until Wednesday. (Check back here for updates.)

What's more, all nine of the cars still left standing have to go through laboratory tests at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois next month. Those lab tests, which are run on a dynamometer instead of a race track, will verify that the winning cars really can get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline, or MPGe.

That's the main point of the X Prize competition: to promote the development of cars that are ultra-efficient as well as safe and salable.

Edison2 has taken one approach: Its aerodynamic Very Light Cars weigh about 800 pounds, which is half the weight of a Smart Car and a third the weight of a Mini Cooper. The spacey-looking vehicles are powered by one-cylinder motorcycle engines that burn an 85 percent ethanol fuel blend. Even with a tiny engine, the cars have no trouble getting up to 60 mph and reportedly can hit 110 mph - thanks to a lightweight body construction that nevertheless satisfies safety standards.

All the other X Prize vehicles are battery-powered. Some, like the ZAP Alias and the RaceAbout, look like pint-sized sports cars. Others, like the X-Tracer vehicles, look like beefed-up motorcycles. And the cars fielded by Li-ion, Aptera and the German TW4XP team look like visitors from another, cooler planet.

Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, told me today that this diversity is exactly what the competition is all about. "The future of energy is going to be diverse," Diamandis said. "I think oil and gasoline are not going away. We're going to be driving to make it much more efficient. And I think electric is on the rise. We're going to see a new generation of vehicles."

But will drivers buy cars that look like outer-space pods?

"About five years ago, I'm not sure how many people would have thought that the Smart Car was something that was similar to the type of cars people are buying today," Diamandis said. "So people's vision of what a car should look like could be changing. And then also ... these technologies from super-lightweight vehicles to control systems to suspension systems, and individual technologies might be picked off by an automobile manufacturer. That's what we need to get to revolutionary change from the evolutionary change we've been seeing."

Even the also-rans can contribute to the auto revolution, Diamandis said. The competition started out with 136 vehicles from 111 teams, and each round of the competition has eliminated teams with good ideas that couldn't quite make the grade. During just the past nine days of speedway finals, six cars have fallen by the wayside.

The latest to fade included Western Washington University's Viking sports car, which couldn't accomplish a double-lane-change maneuver on Monday. That pass-fail safety test was required to advance.

"This has been a grueling event because the standards are so high," Eric Leonhardt, the director of WWU's Vehicle Research Institute, told The Bellingham Herald. "Just to be able to have our students experience this is a great opportunity. This has really been a classroom on wheels, to get our students to get all this experience in a very short while."

Edison2's two-seat tandem car was eliminated due to mechanical troubles, leaving X-Tracer's two entrants as the last super-cars standing in that category.

Four other cars didn't make the grade during last week's fuel efficiency and range tests: the Amp electric vehicle, Commuter Cars' Tango, Spira's gasoline-powered car and Tata Motors' Indica Vista EVX. And there could be further eliminations during next month's verification stage at the Argonne Lab. Some of the competitors, such as Edison2, were just on the edge of meeting the 100 MPGe standard during the on-track runs. Those numbers will be averaged with next month's lab test numbers - and if a car's average doesn't come up to 100 MPGe, it could still be eliminated.

"It's not a slam dunk by any means," Diamandis said. "It's an X Prize, of course, and we try to make these on the edge of audaciousness that's achievable."

If multiple cars satisfy the 100 MPGe standard in the tandem two-seater category, their adjusted time in today's combined efficiency and performance test, which went for 100 miles, will serve as the tie-breaker. RaceAbout, Li-ion and TW4XP finished the course, while Aptera and ZAP fell short due to battery issues. The only way those last two teams could win the $2.5 million would be if none of the first three teams hit an average of 100 MPGe after next month's lab tests.

"There's still a lot to go," technical team director Steve Wesoloski said. "It's not over."

Brian Silva, Progressive Insurance's chief marketing officer, said he was most impressed by the level of commitment shown by all the teams. "It's the human interest side of this thing that gives you hope," he told me. "You know what? There are people out there who are going to make a difference in this world."

Once all the numbers are crunched from this month's on-track finals and next month's lab tests, the winners will be selected for a Sept. 16 awards ceremony. Any money that is not awarded will go back to Progressive, which is providing the $10 million purse as well as the cash for administering the competition.

Diamandis feels as if the contest has already had as much impact as the best-known X Prize to date: the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, which was won by the team behind SpaceShipOne back in 2004.

"It's really about changing the paradigm," he said. "When we did the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight, the paradigm before was that only governments could fly into space. Afterwards, it was that you could be a private citizen and fly on a Virgin Galactic or a Space Adventures-Armadillo flight. The paradigm we're trying to change here is that, after the competition, we want people to know that you can have a beautiful, fast, affordable, safe car that also gets over 100 miles per gallon energy equivalent. You don't have to choose between safety and efficiency, or speed and efficiency, or cost and efficiency. You can have it all. That's the paradigm that we want, with our partners at Progressive Insurance, to get out there to the public."

But is that message really worth $10 million-plus to Progressive? "I'll tell you," Silva told me, "when you see the cars that are out here today, I really think that the 10 million dollars was a very effective use of the money."

Here's a list of the last super-cars standing after the final stage of X Prize on-track trials:

Mainstream Class Teams:
Mainstream Class vehicles must carry four or more passengers, have four or more wheels, and offer a 200-mile range.

• Edison2, Lynchburg, Virginia (E85, two cars)

Alternative Class Teams:
Alternative Class vehicles must carry two or more passengers and allow for a 100-mile range.

Side-by-side seating:

• Aptera Motors, Vista, California (Electric)
• Li-ion Motors at EV Innovations, Mooresville, North Carolina (Electric)
• RaceAbout Association, Helsinki, Finland (Electric)
• TW4XP, Rosenthal, Germany (Electric)
• ZAP, Santa Rosa, California (Electric)

Tandem seating:

• X-Tracer Team Switzerland, Uster, Switzerland (Electric, two cars)

More about the Automotive X Prize:

• Slideshow: Racing to beat 100 mpg
• Light cars take on heavy trips
• Cool car technologies you can't have now

Update for 11:55 p.m. ET July 28: The X Prize organizers have released the results of Tuesday's 100-mile runoff race:

"Team Li-Ion finished first by a narrow 0.179 seconds! RaceAbout placed second and TW4XP third by 11 minutes, 36.9 seconds.

"ZAP completed 48 laps and Aptera completed 18 laps. Both experienced mechanical issues that forced them off the track before completing the test.

"There were a few penalties assessed for speed violations:

· Team Li-ion received 1 penalty for driving under 45 mph
· RaceAbout received 2 penalties for exceeding 70 mph
· TW4XP had 4 penalties for being under 45 mph

"Mileage numbers are proving impressive given the stress of this real world challenge on the contenders. For those who completed the race, Team Li-Ion achieved a respectable 125 MPGe and RaceAbout achieved 100 MPGe. Though placing third, TW4XP achieved a remarkable 138.9 MPGe."

Here's what that means: If all of the cars going to next month's verification trials in Argonne come up to the 100 MPGe standard, Li-ion Motors wins the $2.5 million for the two-seat, side-by-side competition. If Li-ion is eliminated, Finland's RaceAbout wins. If both those cars are eliminated, Germany's TW4XP gets the money. If all three are eliminated, the X Prize judges will have to figure out whether ZAP or Alias would be eligible for the prize. But considering that all three of the finishing teams met or exceeded the 100 MPGe standard, it's almost a sure bet that the judges won't be facing such a scenario. In fact, it's almost a sure bet that Li-ion will be judged the winner sometime in the next two months.

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Update for 1:15 p.m. ET July 29: The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge is offering $1.4 million for oil cleanup ideas, and the money will be given away by this time next year. Get the updated story right here.

Tuesday's original item: Even as the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition is nearing its climax, another multimillion-dollar competition is taking shape, courtesy of the X Prize Foundation. This one targets a challenge even more topical than fuel efficiency: cleaning up oil spills.

The latest venture, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, is to be fully unveiled at Washington's National Press Club on Thursday, according to a news advisory issued today. The prize's "name sponsor" is Wendy Schmidt, president of the Schmidt Family Foundation, founder of the 11th Hour Project and Climate Central, co-founder of the Schmidt Marine Science Research Institute ... and the wife of Google's billionaire CEO, Eric Schmidt. That's a signal that the foundation is backing the prize purse, the amount of which is yet to be announced.

The X Prize Foundation says the challenge is "designed to inspire entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface."

If the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico runs its expected course, the challenge may come too late to turn up fresh technologies for that cleanup. Nevertheless, the three-month-long Gulf crisis points up the need for more rapid - and more environmentally friendly - responses to oil spills.

In addition to Schmidt and the X Prize Foundation's chairman, Peter Diamandis, attendees at Thursday's news conference are to include Philippe Cousteau Jr., co-founder and CEO of Earth Echo and Azure Worldwide ... and the grandson of the famed late ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Dave Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and government officials will be on hand as well.

The X Prize folks have been in charge of several major challenges, including:

• The $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, awarded to the SpaceShipOne team in 2004.
• The $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-efficient vehicles, which is likely to produce winners this summer (more on that later today).
• The $10 million Archon Genetics X Prize, aimed at promoting low-cost, mass-market genetic sequencing.
• The $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, which would reward the first rocketeers to launch a private-sector rover on the moon.
• The $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, which handed out the last of the prize money (provided by NASA) last year.

There's a wide spectrum of models for the prize money and the time frame for competition. We'll have to see where the Oil Cleanup X Challenge fits in that spectrum, but I have a feeling the money will be awarded well before an X Prize rover lands on the moon. Stay tuned for the details on Thursday.

Space journeys for $60,000 ... the coming boom in space-junk salvage ... and a settlement on the Martian moon Deimos. These are the long-term outlooks that emerged over the weekend from the NewSpace 2010 conference in California's Silicon Valley.

The annual meeting, organized by the Space Frontier Foundation, champions the role of private enterprise in space exploration. But NASA types are also well-represented on the list of speakers. There was lots of talk about how recent twists and turns in space policy might affect future exploration as well as the development of new players in the space game. You can rely on Clark Lindsey's RLV and Space Transport News for a blow-by-blow recap of the event.

Here are some of the NewSpace 2010 highlights on the Web:

• At The Space Review, Jeff Foust provides a detailed analysis of the current debate over commercial crew transport to the International Space Station. Most members of Congress are reluctant to give private enterprise a freer hand in developing launch systems to replace NASA's space shuttle fleet, but among NewSpace attendees, the sentiment is "full speed ahead." Space policy consultant Jim Muncy emphasized that the debate shouldn't be framed as New Space vs. Old Space, since long-established companies such as Boeing as well as upstarts such as SpaceX hope to get a piece of the commercial space pie. Instead, Muncy said, the real fight is between a "white-collar welfare state space program and a frontier-opening, settlement-enabling, future-changing space strategy." I wonder which side he's on?

• Sometime in the next couple of years, Virgin Galactic is due to offer suborbital space tours for $200,000 - but Space News quoted observers as saying they expect the price for such trips to fall to somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 by 2014. That could be due to competition from outfits such as XCOR Aerospace, Blue Origin ... and Armadillo Aerospace, which recently partnered with Virginia-based Space Adventures. NewSpace Journal reports that Tom Shelley, Space Adventures' president, discussed the $100,000 price point in his NewSpace 2010 talk. Shelley also indicated there would be "some fun announcements coming out of us in the next few months," apparently relating to multimillion-dollar orbital trips.

• Parabolic Arc's Doug Messier provides bullet points about the opportunities for orbital-debris salvaging and asteroid mining. One possibility for profit is to bring together unused hardware in Earth orbit, and find ways to repurpose or reuse the less junky "space junk." Another possibility is to clear the junk away, just to keep the orbital pathways clear for current and future satellites. Governments or private companies might be willing to pay robotic trash collectors, thus reducing the risks posed by orbital debris. Just today, Space.com published a couple of reports that expanded upon the threats and opportunities associated with asteroids and orbital debris: One report says a NASA task force is recommending that the space agency create a Planetary Defense Coordination Office to deal with asteroid threats, while the other report notes that the European Space Agency's Envisat Earth-observing satellite could pose an orbital-debris threat for 150 years.

• Another posting to Parabolic Arc focuses on Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons. Putting human settlements on Deimos and near-Earth asteroids could avoid some of the problems associated with operations on the surface of the moon or Mars (such as radiation exposure and the need for heavy-duty landers). Space physician Jim Logan, who discussed zero-G sex at the NewSpace conference four years ago, proposed a 1,000-day mission to Deimos at this year's meeting.

We've already talked about missions to Mars' other moon, Phobos, as well as the possibility of taking shelter within pit craters on the moon or Mars. Is Deimos a better destination? Feel free to weigh in on Logan's idea or other long-term (as well as short-term) New Space outlooks.

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• Science produces formula for perfect handshake (via Slashdot)
• ArXiv Blog: Where are the aliens? Math shows the way
• Planetary Society Blog: Carnival of Space 163
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Who Killed the Red Baron?'

With only a couple of days of on-track testing left, four ultra-efficient cars have fallen out of the race for multimillion-dollar payoffs in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize competition. That leaves 11 vehicles still in the running, including a couple of little cars that seem likely to bring home a big $5 million prize for the Virginia-based Edison2 team.

The months-long X Prize contest is aimed at promoting the development of ultra-efficient cars that are also safe and roomy enough to succeed on the open road as well as the showroom floor.

Both of Edison2's mainstream-class, four-seat Very Light Cars passed this week's efficiency and range tests at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich. To make it through, the ethanol-burning hybrids had to hit the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline (MPGe) during a 136-mile series of urban, city and highway drive tests. According to The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va., one car had a combined efficiency rating of 100.3 MPGe, while the other recorded 95.6 combined MPGe - not quite 100, but good enough to surpass this week's adjusted requirement of 90 MPGe. The cars also had to show in a separate range test that they could go at least 200 miles without refueling or recharging.

Because the two Very Light Cars are the only ones left in the $5 million mainstream competition, the Edison2 vehicles just have to fill in the final boxes on the checklist for victory: pass next week's safety and acceleration/braking tests, stick to a 100 MPGe performance during a final 200-mile run, and get their engines' performance verified during lab tests next month. It's not as easy as a Sunday drive, but at least real-estate developer Oliver Kuttner and his Edison2 teammates have no other competitors breathing down their necks.

Edison2 has a third Very Light Car competing in a different X Prize contest, the $2.5 million competition for two-seat tandem vehicles. Yet another $2.5 million awaits the winner of the competition for two-seat, side-by-side cars. The two-seaters must satisfy the same 100 MPGe requirement, but need only drive 100 miles without refueling or recharging. (Penalties of extra laps are assessed for rule infractions.)

One of the Edison2 team's secrets is the lightness of its cars. They weigh in at less than 800 pounds each, compared with roughly 1,800 pounds for a Smart Car. But just being lightweight isn't enough to take the prize, as demonstrated by this week's dropouts in the alternative two-seater classes:

• Amp's electric vehicle met this week's 90 MPGe fuel efficiency requirement, X Prize organizers said, but it exceeded the maximum carbon-dioxide emission limit (200 grams of CO2 per mile). The team also couldn't finish all its laps in the 100-mile range test.
• Commuter Cars' tiny Tango couldn't meet the fuel efficiency standard, exceeded the CO2 emission limit and couldn't finish the range test.
• Spira's gasoline-powered vehicle couldn't satisfy the minimum fuel-economy requirement.
• Tata Motors could not present its Indica Vista EVX for today's range test, due to a technical issue, and has withdrawn the all-electric car from the competition.

The front-runners that I listed after last month's Knockout phase are all still in the race: If anyone is going to win the $5 million prize this year, it'll be Edison2. The Li-On Motors Wave II recorded the highest fuel efficiency in the side-by-side two-seater category, and thus holds the pole position for one of the $2.5 million prizes. And Switzerland's X-Tracer Team still gets my vote over Edison2 for the other $2.5 million prize, set aside for tandem two-seaters.

There's a lot of driving to go yet: If more than one vehicle hits the 100 MPGe mark and satisfies all the other requirements for a particular prize, the money goes to whoever posts the fastest pace in a time trial to be run on Tuesday. So in the two-seater categories, at least, this competition could turn into a real race.

Here's the rundown going into next week's tests:

Mainstream Class Teams:
Mainstream Class vehicles must carry four or more passengers, have four or more wheels, and offer a 200-mile range.

• Edison2, Lynchburg, Virginia (E85, two cars)

Alternative Class Teams:
Alternative Class vehicles must carry two or more passengers and allow for a 100-mile range.

Side-by-side seating:

• Aptera Motors, Vista, California (Electric)
• Li-ion Motors at EV Innovations, Mooresville, North Carolina (Electric)
• RaceAbout Association, Helsinki, Finland (Electric)
• TW4XP, Rosenthal, Germany (Electric)
• Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington (Gasoline)
• ZAP, Santa Rosa, California (Electric)

Tandem seating:

• Edison2, Lynchburg, Virginia (E85)
• X-Tracer Team Switzerland, Uster, Switzerland (Electric, two cars)

More about the Automotive X Prize:

• Slideshow: Racing to beat 100 mpg
• Light cars take on heavy trips
• Cool car technologies you can't have now

Stay tuned for X Prize updates next week. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

It's been 41 years since that first "giant leap" to the lunar surface - a feat that stands as humanity's farthest and arguably greatest voyage ever made. When will astronauts next land on the moon? Will they ever?

That goal may seem farther away now than it was last year, due to the White House's decision to revise America's vision for human space exploration and leave lunar landings off the to-do list. But maybe that's the wrong impression. Maybe the step-by-step approach that is taking shape in Congress, at the White House and within NASA will bring the moon - and other destinations beyond Earth - more surely within our grasp.

That's an optimistic view. But the space effort needs a little optimism, in light of what's happened since last year's 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The back-to-the-moon initiative begun five years ago was canceled after an independent panel found that it was unworkable given current budget constraints. A new initiative for human spaceflight was drawn up, targeting a yet-to-be-named asteroid in 2025 and eventually Mars and its moons - but forgoing a return to our own moon, based on a "been there, done that" rationale. The new initiative is now being dramatically tweaked by lawmakers, extending the period of uncertainty for the space agency.

All that could make for a gloomy 41st anniversary. But I'm going with an optimistic spin: The important thing to do at this point is to settle on a way forward, and shift the debate from arguing over the destination (the moon? Mars? asteroid?) to building the ships capable of going anyplace beyond Earth orbit.

The spaceships that existed in 1969 were designed for a single purpose: to send humans to the moon and return them safely to Earth. Once the Apollo program ended, NASA had to start from scratch with the design for the space shuttles, which have been in operation for nearly 30 years. Now that the shuttle era is nearing its end, the smart thing to do is to take what can be adapted from that era and build a space launch system that can take the next giant leaps - to an asteroid, to Mars, and yes, even the moon.

It looks as if that's the flexible path that Congress, NASA and the White House are settling on. Can spaceflight companies ranging from the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin to SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace make it happen? The signs are encouraging.

Just this week, Boeing and Bigelow detailed their plans for a plug-and-play space station system. It's not hard to imagine that such a station could serve as the assembly point for spacecraft that could head toward the moon or Mars. After all, the inflatable spaceship design now being tested by Bigelow started out as a NASA concept for a Mars transport vehicle. Other innovative designs will surely emerge ... if the will and the wherewithal are available.

The will and the wherewithal are key factors: Will America's leaders keep a straight course on the path to the next frontier? Will taxpayers go along? Can international cooperation be as much a motivator in the 21st century as international competition was in the 1960s? The answers to those questions are hazier.

As robotic spacecraft send back more data about the moon, Mars, asteroids and other faraway places, the reasons for reaching out will become clearer. There could be valuable resources to extract, or deep questions to answer, or new territory to settle. Of course, we could decide that none of those reasons is worth the trip. We could be stuck on this rock until we go extinct. But on this Moonday, I choose to be optimistic. How about you?

Update for 11:55 p.m. ET: One more development is detracting from the optimism ... the House Science Committee's draft authorization bill for NASA, which is due for markup on Thursday. In two important areas, the development of commercial spaceships for reaching low Earth orbit and support for suborbital research using passenger-worthy craft, the draft bill undercuts the compromise worked out by the Senate with the White House's assent.

The bill seems to be intended to make things as hard as possible for companies such as Boeing and SpaceX to get a toehold in the business of resupplying the International Space Station or flying research payloads on quick suborbital trips. Such opportunities are key to opening up wider access to space - much as government airmail-delivery contracts were key to kick-starting commercial aviation in the 1920s.

Check out Space Transport News, NASA Watch, Space Politics and QuantumG's Blog for more on the House committee's draft. Today, Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell said they favored either the House or the Senate version, while a statement from SpaceX voiced strong support for the Senate version. This Wall Street Journal commentary suggests that both versions are letdowns.

Although the legislative process has a long way to go, it's not too early to tell your members of Congress what you think. As I said before, it all comes down to will and wherewithal. Are you willing to stand up for the space vision you believe in, and follow through on your convictions with your votes and your tax dollars?

More from msnbc.com about Apollo 11 and its meaning:

• Your moonshot memories
• Moonshots on your computer
• Revisit Apollo on your TV screen
• How spaceflight sparks spinoffs
• Video: A long look back at Apollo 11
• What we didn't know about the moonwalk
• Audio slideshow: Voyage of the Millennium
• Interactive timeline: Glory Days on the Final Frontier
• More about Apollo 11 and space history

More from the Web for your Moonday meditations:

• Celebrate Moonday, a.k.a. Evoloterra
• Buzz Aldrin on America's future in space
• Behind the Black: A flag in the dust
• Universe Today: Elevator on the moon by 2020?
• The day's roundup from RLV and Space Transport News

Is immortality possible? Is it desirable? Last week we delved into the topic of extreme life extension with futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil and took note of an anti-aging initiative proposed by British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and his colleagues. Now David Despain has pointed me toward his interview with de Grey, posted to the KurzweilAI website. Give it a look, and weigh in with your second thoughts.

Fresh photos from NASA's lunar orbiter suggest that pit craters could provide havens for humans on the moon – just as they do in 50-year-old science fiction.

About 10 candidate pit craters have been identified in high-resolution imagery from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, according to Mark Robinson, the principal investigator for the orbiter's camera. He features images that appears to show sunlight slanting down at an angle into holes in the ground.

"They could be entrances to a geologic wonderland," Robinson says in a NASA Science News report. "We believe the giant holes are skylights that formed when the ceilings of underground lava tubes collapsed."

Over at Beyond the Black, space writer Robert Zimmerman offers up a provocative pair of pictures, showing sunlight hitting a pit crater at different times during the lunar day. These observations follow up on last year's first picture of a lunar skylight, based on data from Japan's Selene spacecraft.

Such pit craters are thought to be a consequence of ancient volcanic activity on the moon, with surface openings leading to the lava tubes beneath. The tubes could provide shelter from the moon's harsh surface conditions.

"The tunnels offer a perfect radiation shield and a very benign thermal environment," Robinson says. "Once you get down to two meters under the surface of the moon, the temperature remains fairly constant, probably around -30 to -40 degrees C." That's the equivalent of 20 to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit - pretty chilly, but not as inclement as typical temperatures at the lunar surface, which swing between 225 degrees above zero during the day and 250 below zero at night.

You could even imagine sealing off the openings and creating a tunnel city. That's basically what Robert Heinlein did in his tales of Luna City, published as short stories and novels in the late 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps the best-known of these works is "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," one of my favorites.

Robinson as well as moon maven Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute say more observations will need to be made to confirm what's actually within the pits. "Hold off on booking your next vacation at the Lunar Carlsbad Hilton," the NASA report quotes Spudis as saying. "Many tunnels may have filled up with their own solidified lava."

If it does turn out that the caves of Luna are open for business, that might lead NASA's mission planners to reconsider their next steps for human exploration. But when it comes to pit craters, the moon isn't the only game in town ... or the solar system.

Mars appears to have pits as well, including one that discovered by a group of seventh-graders only recently. As I mentioned a few days ago, the Martian caves around Arsia Mons are on the short list for potential human missions. The caves could be among the best places to look for signs of past or even present life on Mars. So when I say that life's the pits on other planets ... that's meant to be a good thing.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

The Taliban's training monkeys to gun down Americans? It's a bogus claim that's sparked some serious (and not-that-serious) fact-checking.

People's Daily Online started the monkeyshines in China a couple of weeks ago, with a report claiming that the Afghan Taliban was using bananas and peanuts in an experiment to teach monkeys how to fire machine guns and mortar rounds at soldiers wearing U.S. military uniforms. The report even said the program was modeled after a CIA effort to train "monkey soldiers" during the Vietnam War, and quoted an unnamed U.S. military source as confirming the existence of the Taliban monkeys.

The fallout has been as hilarious as the original story: Taiwan-based Next Media Animation, which churns out CGI parodies like The Onion on ginseng, put together a video report on the killer monkeys. Over at Stars and Stripes, Jeff Schogol (the Rumor Doctor) went so far as to check with NATO officials, Chinese Embassy officials and a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Schogol turned up no hard evidence of monkey mayhem, although primatologist Christopher Coe said he had heard unsubstantiated reports of monkeys being trained to jump into enemy trenches carrying grenades when India and Pakistan were at war.

The widely distributed photos of a gun-wielding monkey also came in for scrutiny: Staff Sgt. Roy Dunigan sent Schogol a full-color version of the picture from his own collection, clearly showing that the baboon is on a leash, crouching behind a toy gun. So where did that photo come from? Dunigan couldn't recall.

Can monkeys possibly be trained to recognize combatants and fire sophisticated weapons at them? Uuuuunlikely. Some researchers say the ability to learn sequential tasks is what separates humans from other primates in evolutionary terms. It may be why language comes so easily to us. Non-human primates can learn to do some amazing things, such as using limited sign language or playing a computer memory game. Scientists only recently found out that monkeys can learn to fish. And the U.S. military has recruited dolphins for guard duty.

But monkeys carefully aiming machine guns at adversaries wearing the Stars and Stripes on their sleeves? No way.

The follow-up question is, can readers and editors possibly be trained to recognize a ridiculous report? Not always. The New York Post's straight-up coverage of the monkey terrorist threat, for example, earned Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" award on MSNBC last night. And if you think that everyone in the Chinese news media will learn a lesson, consider that the Beijing Evening News was badly fooled eight years ago by a similarly silly story about Congress' demands for new digs ... originally appearing in The Onion, no less.

Tip o' the Log to Discovery News' Jennifer Viegas.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Automotive innovators are proving that low-weight, high-efficiency cars can go the distance. But can they can make it in the marketplace?

If anyone thinks that lightweight cars can't cover long stretches of the road, the solar-powered XOF1 electric car should convince them how wrong they are. Back in 2008, the spacey-looking car's creator and driver, Marcelo da Luz, steered the XOF1 (which stands for "Power of One") from Buffalo, N.Y., to the Canadian Arctic, then down to California, then over to Florida, then back up to Canada and the Arctic again.

In April, the 470-pound XOF1 became the first all-solar car to travel Canada's Ice Highway between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk in the high Arctic, as documented in this amazing CBC News documentary. Da Luz now holds the world distance record for solar-powered automobile travel, racking up 22,436 miles (36,220 kilometers) on the XOF1.

Along the way, he's been pulled over 26 times - sometimes just because troopers wanted to take his picture, and one time because somebody told police in Palmer, Alaska, that a UFO was spotted traveling down the road. "They checked to make sure I'm not an alien," da Luz, who was born in Brazil and lives in Toronto, told me today. "Well, yes I am, but just because I'm not from the U.S."

Da Luz is visiting Seattle this weekend to talk about his solar-powered odyssey at the Shoreline Solar Project's annual Solarfest.

Why is a former flight attendant mortgaging his house and taking out loans to hit the road in a freaky flying-saucer car? It all began in 1987 when he heard about the Solar Challenge for sun-powered cars in Australia. "I thought, 'That's the future - I want to build a car and compete in that race.'" He put that thought on hold for 12 years, but eventually "the pain of not following the dream became unbearable," he said.

He said it took an estimated 50,000 hours of volunteer labor to build the car from polyurethane foam and fiberglass, cover it with 893 solar cells and get it on the road. The solar array's maximum output is about 900 watts. "With less energy than a toaster, I can charge the batteries and drive the car," da Luz said. The maximum range for night driving is 120 miles, but eventually the sun is going to have to shine. Da Luz's car has no provision for plug-in charging.

"On my worst days I drove for 4 miles ... or not at all," he said.

Now da Luz is hustling to raise the money for his biggest challenge yet. "If I find enough sponsors, I will drive the car from the Arctic to the tip of South America," he said. But as far as he's concerned, making money is not the point.

"The whole idea with the car is to promote the use of clean, renewable energy," da Luz told me. "Any electric car can be covered with solar cells. Maybe they will generate only 10, 15, 20 percent of the power needed for the car. But that's 10, 15, 20 percent less from the environment, and from your pocketbook."

Making cars lightweight is one of the leading strategies for making them more energy-efficient. At least that's the approach taken with the XOF1 solar car, as well as with the Very Light Cars being fielded in the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize by the Virginia-based Edison2 team. Unlike de Luz, however, the engineers and entrepreneurs behind Edison2 are counting on making money. Maybe lots of money.

David Imbaratto / Stellar Exploration for Planetary Society

One of Edison2's four-seat mainstream cars takes to the track during the Knockout phase of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize. The car is a front-runner for the competition's $5 million top prize.

Edison2 has two experimental cars in the running for the contest's top prize of $5 million - in fact, they're the only cars that haven't been eliminated in the competition for four-seat mainstream vehicles. The team also has a two-seater in competition for one of the two $2.5 million prizes being offered for alternative vehicles.

To win the $5 million, at least one of Edison2's ethanol-burning cars will have to get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline (MPGe) in a 200-mile drive while satisfying all the safety and emission requirements for a marketable vehicle. To win the $2.5 million, the two-seater would have to get the same mileage but meet a less stringent range requirement of 100 miles. And by the way, it would have to beat out all the other competitors in its class.

During last month's X Prize Knockout round, one of the Edison2 mainstream cars actually exceeded the 100 MPGe mark, but after penalties were assessed for irregularities in the car's operation, the score was barely good enough to make the cutoff. The final round begins next week at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich., and the stakes couldn't be higher.

"We feel good about it," David Brown, director of communications for the Edison2 team, told me today. "But we know it's a challenge and we're right on the edge. The truth is, we need to do it without penalties, and that's our anticipation."

Brown said he and his teammates are keeping its focus on the finals, "because that's important to us," but they can't help but think as well about what will happen after the X Prize.

"One of the lessons of the X Prize is that you're not going to get dramatic changes in fuel efficiency by modifying an existing car," he said.

Edison2's Very Light Cars show that low-mass vehicles can produce dramatic improvements in energy efficiency while still providing a safe, sure ride on the racetrack or on the highway. The Very Light Cars have a curb weight of less than 800 pounds - which is a third of the weight of a Mini Cooper, or half the weight of a Smart Car. "Moving toward lightweight cars, we feel strongly, is in this country's future," Brown said.

The way Edison2 sees it, the key to success isn't necessarily so much about the power source - whether it's ethanol, or diesel, or plug-in electric power, or good old gasoline. It's more about the aerodynamics and the materials that serve as the platform for the power source.

"We chose a path for the X Prize, and that path involved an internal combustion engine," Brown said. "But we actually feel what's significant about this car is the platform, and we're looking forward to exploring that platform with all the sources of power available to us. We believe it's the direction where we need to go."

Edison2's innovators may be heading in that direction, but they realize they can't create the car of the future all by themselves.

"We see ourselves developing collaborations with other companies to see these ideas go into production," Brown said. "There are all sorts of places where we took a fork in the road, but the other fork had a lot of promise, too. We feel as if there's a part of all this that ends with the X Prize - but there's also a part that starts with the end of the X Prize."

Is there a lightweight car in your future? Or do you need a heavier chassis to feel protected? Feel free to "weigh" in with your comments below.

Update for 9:10 p.m. ET: XOF1's Marcelo da Luz responded to some questions from one of my Facebook friends, Tony Rusi, and was kind enough to send me a copy of his replies. Here's the edited Q&A:

Tony Rusi: After all your experience with solar-electric cars, do you feel as if your design would be practical if mass-produced today?

Marcelo da Luz: Any electric vehicle could be covered in solar cells, even if the cells only generate 50 percent, 30 percent or 10 percent of charging due to weather and short winter days. That is 50 percent, 30 percent or 10 percent less on the environment and less on our pockets.

XOF1 was designed and built for efficiency, not as a practical vehicle to be driven every day. However, much of its technology and design can be transferred to a future vehicle design to accommodate a more practical application. For example, passenger and luggage.

Q: Do you have any ballpark idea of how much they would cost, if mass-produced by a big auto company that was making hundreds of thousands of them a year?

A: The popular Tata car is set to sell in India for about $2,500. The research and development effort cost them millions. My uneducated guess would be initially be $50,000 to $60,000, dropping down to $20,000 to $30,000 a few years later. I don't have experience with large-scale manufacturing to give an educated guess on the cost of producing a vehicle. XOF1 cost 50,000 man-hours, design, R&D, testing, etc... The reduction of cost would be a direct result of the volume being produced.

Q: Have you ever been approached by anyone from Tesla, Toyota or Nissan about mass-producing your vehicle?

A: No. I would welcome the opportunity to work with anyone interest to design XOF2. The next generation of XOF1.

Q: Did you feel safe in regular car traffic and on the freeway in the U.S. in your solar car?

A: I felt very safe. XOF1 is made out of Polyurethane foam (6-pound-per-cubic-feet density) covered in fiberglass, reinforced with carbon fiber. Foam has incredible absorbing properties in case of impact.

Q: You must be quite a spectacle on the road! Do the police stop you often because you are so novel? Or do they stop you because you create a traffic delay? And is the novelty factor wearing off at all with more electrics on the road all the time?

A: Yes, I have been pulled over by the police 26 times. In Palmer, Alaska, someone called 911 about an UFO on the road. In Washington, D.C., I got pulled over by the Secret Service on one day and a SWAT team the next day. It is not easy being green :-)

Q: Do you feel that an electric bike can be made into a solar-electric bike? Would you feel safer on a good dedicated bike trail versus a U.S. freeway?

A: Absolutely. Any electric vehicle including e-bikes could take advantage of charging with sunlight. In the case of an e-bike, a deployable panel might be more practical to use while the e-bike is stationary. It could also take advantage of small-scale wind generation while stationary. Any vehicle on a freeway should be able to sustain the minimum speed of the highway. Electric motorcycles are capable of 100 mph+. An e-bike with a 500-watt motor can't get over 20 mph, in which case they should only be allowed where human-powered bikes are.

Q: Could your solar car fairing be made to "tilt up" 90 degrees so that you could quickly get your vehicle between the closely spaced pylons that keep most motorized vehicles off of bike trails in the USA?

A: Yes, it could. However, there is always a snowball effect. Adding complexity to the design could translate in efficiency losses.

Q: I have heard that CIGS thin-film solar cells are getting near a dollar a watt. Do you know of anyone building a solar cars with those types of solar cells?

A: Due to the limited about of space to harvest solar energy, most solar vehicles use the most efficient solar cells they can get. I am not aware of anyone using thin film on a vehicle. However, for stationary applications it is a great way to reduce cost. Roofs and ports can be covered by cheap panels to charge electric vehicles.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'B-29 Frozen in Time'
• Daily Mail: Crop cubes (via Daily Grail)
• Symmetry Magazine: The Large Hadron Collider decoded
• Discovery News: The Large Hadron Collider, now in comic form
• StarTrek.com: The next generation | Space.com on the relaunch
• Bad Astronomy: This was the last time we walked on the moon

• NASA: Three pictures add up to one sweet eclipse image
• JPL: Tour a hydrocarbon lake on Titan | Death Valley vs. Titan
• Thoughtware: Vernor Vinge talks about the singularity
• National Geographic: Visions of Earth
• Skymania: Carnival of Space 162

Update for 6 p.m. ET July 15: The Senate Commerce Committee has cleared an authorization bill for NASA that would add one more space shuttle mission a year from now, speed up development of a heavy-lift rocket and slow down the move toward private-sector resupply of the International Space Station.

Amendments have reportedly been accepted to boost funding for robotic missions (from Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.) and suborbital research (from Tom Udall, D-N.M.). But an amendment from Mark Warner, D-Va., that would have kept space commercial funding on the track sought by President Barack Obama's original proposal was not incorporated into the bill.

The White House is on board with the changes to its space policy, according to Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. Further revisions in NASA's spending plan could come in the months ahead as legislation moves through Congress' sausage-making machine. Check out this fleshed-out report from Space.com, with a little extra spice added in by yours truly. You can also revisit this preview that anticipated Thursday's committee action:

Alan Boyle writes (on Wednesday): The Senate Commerce Committee is due to vote Thursday on a measure that would shift the direction of NASA's revised space vision - not necessarily to return to the moon, but to extend the space shuttle program, speed up the development of a heavy-lift rocket and slow down spending on space commercialization.

The prospect of reduced spending for private-sector spaceflight has sparked an 11th-hour campaign to get the legislation amended.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said in a DemRadio sound bite that he expected his version of the bill to win the committee's approval, and that "the White House will announce their support for our bill" on Thursday. The Orlando Sentinel quoted an aide to President Barack Obama as saying the measure "appears to contain the critical elements necessary for achieving the president's vision for NASA."

Obama's original proposal fell flat in Congress, and Nelson has portrayed his compromise version of the reauthorization bill as the best way to safeguard thousands of aerospace jobs as the space shuttle program winds down.

The bill calls for NASA to add one more shuttle flight in mid-2011 to resupply the International Space Station, and start work on a heavy-lift launch vehicle and crew vehicle that could eventually send astronauts beyond Earth orbit. The White House's proposal said only that work on the heavy-lifter should begin by 2015.

Backers of commercial spaceflight are concerned about provisions that would spread out the $6 billion set aside for private-sector spacecraft over six years rather than five years, with most of that money being paid out in the latter years. During the first three years, $1.2 billion would be budgeted for commercial launches, rather than the $3.3 billion that Obama was asking for.

This has led groups such as the Space Frontier Foundation to urge support for an amendment offered by Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., which would restore spending on commercial spaceflight to the levels sought by Obama - and would ease back on spending for NASA's in-house launch system. Another amendment, offered by Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., would explicitly authorize $15 million a year for a suborbital research program known as CRuSR. Yet another amendment from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., would boost funding for robotic space missions that set the stage for human exploration.

Two dozen astronauts, including Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Rusty Schweickart. sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., strongly supporting space commercialization. "By allowing the private sector to take on the transportation of crew to low Earth orbit, NASA will finally be able to direct its resources and focus on human exploration beyond, and we strongly feel this direction for the agency is the right one," they wrote in the letter, which was posted on the SpaceRef website.

The letter served as something of a balancer to the opposition expressed by Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan during their Senate committee testimony earlier this year.

Since Cernan and Armstrong sounded their warning about commercial space companies, one of the better-known entrepreneurial rocket companies, California-based SpaceX, notched a significant success with the first test flight of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle. SpaceX has served as a lightning rod for criticism of Obama's space commercialization policy, but the fact is that many of the same companies involved in the shuttle-station program are also aiming to get a piece of the commercial spaceflight pie.

In his sound bite, for example, Nelson said his bill would support the use of commercial rockets "such as the Boeing Co.'s Delta that can take astronauts to and from the International Space Station much cheaper than the much more expensive heavy-lift rockets." Boeing is the prime contractor for the space station and a partner in the United Space Alliance, which manages many aspects of the shuttle program on NASA's behalf.

Nelson said White House support will "enable us to keep moving the ball forward and being able to have NASA continue a vigorous path of human exploration of the cosmos." The only question is, will America's space effort move forward, beyond Earth orbit, or will it keep going around in circles?

Jeff Foust goes into the details (or links to other articles that do) on the Space Politics blog. Parabolic Arc gets granular as well. Mark Whittington points out on Associated Content that the legislation could put the moon back on NASA's list of potential destinations. The NASA Engineer blog links to a host of resources. Clark Lindsey has plenty to say (and point to) on RLV and Space Transport News. So does Keith Cowing at NASA Watch. Legislative action alerts have been issued by the Planetary Society and the Space Access Society.

The bottom line is that if you care about the cosmos, now is the time to let your senator know how you feel - particularly if your senator sits on the Commerce Committee.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."