X Prize Foundation via AP

Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket rises from its pad at California's Mojave Air and Space Port during Wednesday's Lunar Lander Challenge flight.

Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket has prevailed in its second attempt to qualify for a $150,000 rocket prize from NASA. The first attempt, back on Sept. 16, ended at the halfway point of the required round trip due to an engine leak, but today the rocket went the full distance.

The prize is being offered through the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a competition that was set up with NASA backing to encourage the development of new rocket technologies. Xombie was built to go after the second prize in what's known as the Level 1 competition. (Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace won the $350,000 first prize last year.)

To qualify for the $150,000, the alcohol-fueled rocket had to take off from a starting pad in California's Mojave Desert, rise up to a height of more than 160 feet (50 meters), hover for at least 90 seconds and then land on another pad for refueling. All that was done - and then Xombie retraced its steps through the air, back to the starting point.

Xombie satisfied all the requirements, hanging in the air for 91 seconds on the way home.

"We flew us a rocket ship!" David Masten, the team's leader and chief executive officer of Masten Space Systems, was quoted as saying.

Will Pomerantz, who is managing the Lunar Lander Challenge as director of space prizes for the X Prize Foundation, said Xombie came within 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) of its target on the pad for its final landing. Doug Graham, a spokesman for Masten Space Systems, told me that the average accuracy for today's two landings was around 16 centimeters (6.3 inches).

In its own Twitter update, NASA's Centennial Challenges program confirmed that Xombie's qualifying flight was "successfully complete."

NGLLC / X Prize Foundation

The Masten Space Systems team gathers around their Xombie rocket. Team leader David Masten is standing in the middle with his arms folded. XCOR Aerospace's Randall Clague holds the Xombie mascot as he kneels in front.

Masten and his teammates still have to wait until the end of the month to find out whether any of their competitors for the $150,000 prize - California-based Unreasonable Rocket or BonNovA - can do better.

The same goes for Armadillo Aerospace, which qualified for the challenge's more ambitious $1 million Level 2 prize last month. Masten, Unreasonable Rocket and BonNova are going after Level 2 prizes as well. (Second prize is $500,000.)

Graham said that if Masten and his team could maintain the kind of accuracy they achieved today during their upcoming Level 2 flight, "they'll beat Armadillo" for the million dollars. The best thing about today's outing was that it proved there's more than one prizeworthy competitor out there.

"Now it's no longer a one-man show," Graham said.

David Masten himself voiced that sentiment in a statement distributed by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation: "The Xombie's flights have established Masten Space Systems as a serious competitor. This is not just good for Masten, but good news for the commercial spaceflight industry. It shows that we have grown to the point that many teams now have the skills to build and fly successful rockets." 

Although the contest is called the Lunar Lander Challenge, the point of the exercise is not so much to produce an actual moon lander as it is to push ahead technologies that could be used in future suborbital or even orbital spacecraft. Such rockets could be useful for passenger space tourism as well as cut-rate space research.

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Chris Reardon / NGT

Henry Ian Cusick portrays Charles Darwin in "Darwin's Darkest Hour."

This year serves as a double anniversary for Charles Darwin: It's been 200 years since the birth of the naturalist, as was noted widely back in February.

Now there's a second wave of books and broadcasts that serve to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterwork, "On the Origin of Species."

The tangled genesis of that work is the focus of "Darwin's Darkest Hour," a two-hour docudrama premiering tonight on PBS.

The show features a little more star power and a little less laboratory time than you usually see in a science documentary on public TV, and that's because the "Nova" / National Geographic production team went with a scripted approach that's reminiscent of a Jane Austen adaptation.

Henry Ian Cusick (who plays Desmond in the TV series "Lost") plays Charles Darwin, and Frances O'Connor (who starred in a film based on Austen's "Mansfield Park") plays his wife, Emma.

If you're looking for an Austeneque romance, however, you're watching on the wrong night. The show finds a way to blend the joys and sorrows of the Darwins' family life (including the untimely loss of two children) with the key turning point of Darwin's scientific career. It's not exactly a spoiler to note that other biologists - principally Alfred Russel Wallace - were on the same trail that Darwin was, and that Darwin had to cope with the prospect of being scooped on the theory he spent 20 years nailing down.

As the story traces Darwin's doubts and decisions, you get an overview of the scientist's professional development, told through flashbacks as well as on-screen exposition. The show even touches upon the beginnings of the decades-long evolution-vs.-religion debate, couched in dialogue lifted from Charles and Emma's actual writings.

Charles, for example, marvels that "from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Emma, meanwhile, worries about the implications of her husband's theory for religious faith - but in the end sticks with her view that "honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin."

If "Darwin's Darkest Hour" leads viewers to seek out more of the true story behind evolutionary biology's past and present, there are much brighter hours ahead.

Here's just a sampling of recently published books about Darwin and evolution:

• "Why Evolution Is True," by Jerry A. Coyne.
• "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution," by Richard Dawkins.
• "The Missing Link: An Inquiry Approach for Teaching All Students About Evolution," by Lee Meadows.
• "Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul," by Kenneth R. Miller.
• "The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution," by Carl Zimmer.

Stay tuned for more to read and think about next week.

Update for 8:40 p.m. ET: No discussion of Darwin depictions would be complete without mentioning "Creation," the big-screen biography of the biologist. For a while, it looked as if the film wouldn't be distributed in the United States - and that sparked all sorts of hemming and hawing over America's creationist bent. However, the movie was picked up by Newmarket Films last month and is now slated for December release. A few years ago, Newmarket made a splash when it distributed Mel Gibson's controversial gospel film, "The Passion of the Christ."

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto," which is coming out this month.

British National Space Centre

Most digital cameras and spacecraft carry a chip known as a charge-coupled device that resulted from Nobel-winning research.

Nobel-winning science sometimes touches on subjects as remote as the big bang and the weird world of quantum physics, but this year's Nobel Prize for physics celebrates breakthroughs that are as close as your cellphone and computer keyboard.

CCD discoveries
Two of the laureates, Willard Boyle and George Smith, will split half of the $1.4 million prize for their work 40 years ago on a little thing called the charged-coupled device, or CCD. Such devices are arrays of tiny solar cells that turn light into electricity. The trick that Smith and Boyle (no close relation to me, by the way) came up with was a way to read out the signals from all those cells in an orderly string, and then translate the strings of data into a picture.

The innovation opened up a new realm of digital imagery - a realm that you travel through every time you snap a picture with your cell-phone camera or click through a Flickr album. To get an idea how far that realm has come since 1969, click through this roundup of the latest camera crop.

Digital imagery from CCD-equipped spacecraft has opened up even more wondrous realms beyond Earth. The technology came into vogue too late for the Voyager and Viking spacecraft, which used TV-style cameras called vidicons. But NASA's Galileo probe to Jupiter, launched in 1989, pioneered CCD applications for robotic spacecraft.

Today, virtually every astronomical picture ever taken comes to us thanks to CCDs - ranging from the pictures sent back from Saturn as part of the $3.4 billion Cassini mission to the experimental near-space images that an MIT student team took for less than $150. Our latest roundup of the greatest space images puts the fruits of Boyle and Smith's labors on full display.

Here are some fast facts about CCDs from Inside Science News Service:

• Every major telescope in the world uses a CCD chip, including Hubble with three wide-field chips and one high-resolution planet imager.
• The fastest CCD video cameras can take 100,000 pictures per second.
• Medical equipment such as breast biopsy machines and dental X-ray machines use CCDs originally developed for astronomical imaging.
• The CCD makes use of a discovery that received the Nobel Prize back in 1921 - Albert Einstein's photoelectric effect.

For more about the workings of CCDs, check out this explanation from Cornell University's "Ask a Scientist" Web site. This HowStuffWorks article goes into the differences between CCDs and their electronic cousins, CMOS devices.

The fiber-optic frontier
The other half of the physics prize goes to Charles Kao, who laid the theoretical groundwork for high-speed, fiber-optic communication. Back in the 1960s, scientists were just beginning to experiment with transmitting light through glass fibers. Kao's analysis of glass's optical properties led him to conclude that ultra-pure glass could transmit pulses of light five times farther than ordinary glass could.

The trick was cutting down on the scattering and absorption of photons by the glass itself, by cutting down on the impurities. Traditionally, ingredients such as soda, potash and lime are added to molten glass to make it easier to work with. Other compounds are added to tweak the properties of the glass.

Kao and his colleagues were apparently the first scientists to figure out just how much light could be transmitted if all those impurities could be removed. As related in "City of Light," science writer Jeff Hecht's book on fiber optics, Kao worked with Corning Glass Works to develop a purer kind of glass that was well-suited for data transmission.

The first demonstration of the technology came in 1970, the first experiments with fiber-optic telephone lines took place in 1977, and the first trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cable was laid between Europe and North America in 1988. Today, fiber is ubiquitous.

You can see frivolous demonstrations of fiber optics in the form of toy flashlights, or you can conduct an experiment on your own computer. First, open up a command prompt. (If you're using Windows, here's how.) Type in the command ping vpn.cuhk.edu.hk, then hit the return key. The command measures how many milliseconds it takes for packets of data to make the round trip between wherever you are and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where Kao was once vice chancellor.

Typically it takes no more than a quarter-second for data to make the trip halfway around the world and back - which is a good thing for the global Internet. It's not much of a stretch to say that our wired world exists as it does today because of what Kao did 40 years ago.

Here are some of Inside Science's fast facts about fiber optics:

• Optical fiber is tough - it starts to lose structural integrity at 100,000 pounds per square inch.
• 186,000 miles of optical fiber cable sits at the bottom of the world's oceans, connecting 60 countries.
• The total length of optical fiber on the surface of the planet totals over 1 billion kilometers and could encircle the Earth 25,000 times.
• The current speed record for data sent over an optical fiber is 100 petabits per second per kilometer, the equivalent of sending 700 DVDs per second from Paris to Chicago.
• The U.S. company Corning, a glass manufacturer, is the largest producer of optical fiber in the world.

For more about the workings of optical fiber, check out this tutorial from HowStuffWorks.

Update for 8:20 p.m. ET: The estimable German space journalist Daniel Fischer points out (in a comment below) that CCD technology was pioneered on the European Space Agency's Giotto probe, launched toward Comet Halley in 1985. Funny how that wasn't mentioned in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "Basics of Space Flight."

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NASA

A NASA graphic depicts planets and other solar-system objects (not drawn to scale).

How many planets do you want with your Happy Meal? At McDonald's restaurants in Britain, they're serving up a solar system with nine planets - which has thrown some hot sauce (plus a dash of hilarity) on a cosmic conundrum.

The planetary faux pas came to light last week in The Register, a British-based tech Web site that published what it said was the "fairly damning evidence of Ronald McDonald's opinion on the matter."

McDonald's UK made a deal with Planet Cook, a venture that tries to get kids into cooking, to produce a series of planet-themed boxes for the restaurant chain's Happy Meals - you know, the ones that come with a burger or Chicken McNuggets, plus other kid-size nibbles and drinks.

One of the fun facts printed on the box proclaims that "the solar system is made up of all the planets that orbit our sun," and that "there are 9 planets in total." That claim runs counter to the International Astronomical Union's controversial resolution setting the planet count at eight - including Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, but not Pluto.

With its figurative tongue firmly in cheek, The Register accused McDonald's of spreading "U.S. scientific propaganda." (The nationalism angle supposedly enters the picture because Pluto was discovered by an American, Clyde Tombaugh.)

"This is what happens when you get your degree in astronomy from Hamburger University," one commenter joked.

Over the weekend, Britain's Sunday Mirror picked up on the story. The Mirror quoted Cambridge astronomer Paul Murdin as saying that the restaurant chain had "got it wrong."

"It's a shame they didn't check their facts," Murdin said.

Meanwhile, McDonald's told the Mirror merely that "we are aware of the debate about Pluto."

Eight planets, nine, or more?
As someone who has spent the past year researching and writing a book stating the case for Pluto, I'd have to say that Murdin is correct and McDonald's is wrong - but probably not for the reason Murdin has in mind. If you're totally on board with the IAU definition, you might think revising the box to read "there are 8 planets in total" would do the trick. But can anyone honestly say the solar system is made up of four giant planets, four terrestrial planets, and that's it?

I would argue that an eight-planet view of the solar system is only slightly less nonsensical than a nine-planet view. Any perspective that doesn't include Pluto and the other dwarf planets, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud and all those crazy comets would be woefully incomplete.

One of the saddest things about the Happy Meal misstep is that it could leave kids with the impression that there's nothing more to be discovered in our solar system. That'd be particularly sad for the British: A pilot survey of more than 200 schoolchildren in English schools, published in the February 2007 issue of the journal Space Policy, indicated that discovering a new planet was the top thing kids would want to do if they were space scientists. (The same study rated Pluto as a runner-up behind Mars as the kids' favorite planet in space.) 

The nine-planet view of our solar system is gone forever, thanks to the discovery of Eris in 2005. Now it's up to scientists, educators - and yes, even Ronald McDonald - to present a view of the solar system that reflects our widening planetary horizons and inspires the next generation of planet-hunters.

'Three categories of planet'
Coincidentally, yet another perspective on planethood has just popped up in the form of the latest "Astronomy Question of the Week," presented by the German Aerospace Center to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy.

Most of the center's answer reflects the IAU's definition, including the confusing part about a "real" planet having to clear the area around its orbit of small bodies (like Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, for example?). But toward the end, the answer takes a turn toward a more realistic view of our solar system's planetary retinue by dividing it into three categories: the eight classical planets, a slowly growing number of dwarf planets and a large number of irregular planetoids.

If the IAU had gone along with that perspective, as outlined by astronomer/historian Owen Gingerich and his international colleagues, it would have saved astronomers a lot of trouble. And who knows? A "big tent" view of our solar system might yet prevail.

What do you think? Is the planetary discussion basically beating a dead horse, or is the golden age of discovery just getting started? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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Laura Rauch / AP file

Five-year flashback to Oct. 4, 2004: Astronaut Brian Binnie unfurls the American flag atop SpaceShipOne after the flight that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Five years after the first privately funded space plane won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, the spirit behind the contest has spread far beyond spaceflight. Have realities kept pace with the expectations sparked back in 2004? What are the next multimillion-dollar feats on the horizon?

OK, maybe the second privately funded space plane is not quite ready for takeoff yet. And maybe the dream of having an annual rocket festival known as the X Prize Cup has faded somewhat. But it's still possible to meet the timeline laid out by SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan in this TODAY interview five years ago.

"In 10 years, everyone will know that if they want to, they can go to orbit in their lifetime," Rutan said at the time, speaking from SpaceShipOne's hangar in Mojave, Calif. "They will know that instead of just hope or dream."

Five years after that interview, Cirque du Soleil billionaire Guy Laliberte is clowning around in orbit, after paying a $35 million fare. In another five years, that price may or may not come down. But the long-term trend is on Rutan's side. That's based on comments from Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Virginia-based Space Adventures, the company that helped put Laliberte in space.

"Hard to believe it's been five years, isn't it? Wow," Anderson asked when I reminded him about the X Prize milestone.

TODAY

Click for video: SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan and the X Prize Foundation's Peter Diamandis reflect on the future of spaceflight in an interview from Oct. 5, 2004.

"Things have never looked brighter, but spaceflight is a business that requires patience, so we seem to be two years away from suborbital spaceflight - like we have been since 2001, right?" he joked. "But that's OK. Most of these companies have made it through the global economic crisis. I'm confident that once this industry opens up it will exceed everyone's expectations."

Another Mojave milestone is expected to take place later this year, when SpaceShipTwo finally rolls out of its hangar at Rutan's Scaled Composites shop. The rollout is still on track to take place on Dec. 7, according to Stephen Attenborough, commercial director of Virgin Galactic.

But wait ... there's more:

• The field of competitors is continuing to expand for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the richest reincarnation of the original X Prize. Just in the past month, a Russian team named Selenokhod ("Moonwalker") and a German team known as the c-base Open Moon Group have thrown their hats in the ring. There are now 21 teams vying to be the first to put a privately developed rover on the moon.
• NASA has adopted the X Prize formula for its own challenges, and, at the end of the month, the space agency will make its richest payout yet, in the form of a $1 million first-prize purse for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, an also-ran in the original X Prize race, has already put its Scorpius vehicle through the required course. The only question left is whether any of the three other teams with mock lunar landers (Masten Space Systems, Unreasonable Rocket and BonNovA, which joined the contest just this week) can do any better by the end of the month.
• The X Prize Foundation is managing the lunar lander race as well as privately backed challenges that go beyond the spaceflight realm - including the Archon X Prize for Genomics and the Progressive Automotive X Prize. NASA is considering a whole new crop of  challenges as well. There's even a student competition for water recycling systems - which is particularly timely, considering last week's revelations about extraterrestrial water and Laliberte's focus on global water conservation.

Over the past few weeks, the X Prize Foundation has been posting a series of blog items commemorating the five-year anniversary of SpaceShipOne's victory. The bloggers have included space pilot Brian Binnie, space millionaire Anousheh Ansari, Virgin Galactic's Will Whitehorn, Romanian rocketeer Dumitru Popescu ... and Peter Diamandis, the guy who started it all as the X Prize's co-founder.

Earlier this week, Diamandis took time out from a whirlwind tour of Abu Dhabi and Europe to answer a few questions I posed about the past, present and future of the X Prize. Here's the full Q&A, which Diamandis fleshed out into a blog item and a half:

Peter Diamandis: As we celebrate the five-year anniversary of SpaceShipOne's winning of the Ansari X Prize, I'm taking the liberty to reflect on a number of key questions ... On what worked well, what didn't, and what we learned.

Ultimately, what was the real value of the competition?

I often think about the real value that the Ansari X Prize contributed to this field of spaceflight, which I love so much. I think ultimately it gave teams around the world permission to dream, to assemble teams and dare to think about building private spaceships. By creating the structure of the competition, it validated the importance and the viability of private spaceflight. It defined a 'clear goal' ... or a meaningful finish line that teams could pursue. As my friend and early X Prize founder Astronaut Byron Lichtenberg is fond of saying, "Without a target you will miss it every time!" We gave space dreams and entrepreneurs a target to shoot for.

Before the X Prize there really wasn't a generally accepted definition of where space begins. There were always three numbers thrown about, namely 50 kilometers, 100 kilometers and 162 kilometers (100 miles). In retrospect, I'm pleased that we picked 100 kilometers, because it was "just hard enough" ... and if we had chosen 100 miles (162 kilometers) we might not be celebrating this five-year anniversary!

The competition also created the public excitement, expectations, rooting interests and, ultimately, future customers who were lining up to buy a seat on the Ansari X Prize class of spaceships.

I also feel that we played an important role in driving the regulatory policy that today allows private, reusable, piloted spaceships to carry paying passengers. Only a year before the prize was won, the rules were not defined and there was no clear way for such a ship to be licensed to fly. We worked closely with FAA Administrator Marion Blakey and Associate Administrator Patricia Smith to get the rules in place. Rutan had threatened many times to take his ship out of the country (I think he bluffed that he would launch from Mexico) if needed to fly, since the U.S. obviously didn't (yet) allow these types of flights. Remind me never to play poker against Burt!

Would this have happened anyway?

I have no doubt that eventually someone would have flown privately to space, just as someone would have flown across the Atlantic (in the case of the Orteig Prize and Lindbergh). But I do believe that the structure of the prize, the creation of a competition and the involvement of the public and the media helps to supercharge the paradigm transformation. As humans we have evolved to compete… it is in our genes and we love to watch a competition.

Any big-picture thoughts on this five-year milestone?

The most important legacy and meaning of the Ansari X Prize on its five-year anniversary lies in the fact that the event kicked off a new industry. In the same way that Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic in 1927 is seen as an inception point for today's $300 billion aviation industry, I'm extremely proud that the Ansari X Prize has created a new personal spaceflight industry. Not only did these historic flights culminate in a beautiful exhibition in the Smithsonian, at the entrance to the National Air and Space Museum, but much more profoundly, the winning flights by SpaceShipOne kicked off the personal spaceflight industry which has had over $1 billion invested in it during the past five years.

There were a lot of X Prize competitors, but was there really a race? Was the Da Vinci Project or Armadillo really in the running?

When the X Prize was announced on May 18, 1996 (before it was even called the Ansari X Prize), I knew of maybe three or four potential teams that might compete for the purse. I was shocked in the final result to have 26 teams from seven nations in the running. In retrospect, I would say that the 26 teams could be divided into three groups. The first group, about a third of the field, had a shot at building the vehicle. They had a strong design, a strong team and the money or the ability to raise the funding. The second group had a strong design, a strong team, but lacked the real ability to raise the funds. The final group was made up of those whom we registered, but who were unlikely to ever make anything significant happen beyond their basic concept.

We discussed in the early days the criteria for registration, and the conditions under which we would turn away teams. Gregg Maryniak would always remind us that we "didn't want to turn away those pesky bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio."

In retrospect, Burt truly had a commanding lead ahead of the pack. Both the Da Vinci Project and Armadillo were there as leading contenders, but had a significant way to go in their financing and construction. Regardless, I would always remind the media and remind Burt that Admiral Byrd (first person to fly to the North Pole in an airplane) was the leading contender for the Orteig Prize, but Byrd crashed on take-off and a somewhat unknown aviator, Charles Lindbergh, ultimately claimed the purse.

What would you have done differently?

As I think back to the Ansari X Prize, the one thing which I wish we would have done differently is to have offered a second-place prize of some amount, perhaps $1 million or $2 million. Such a second prize would have kept the drive for other teams to continue their development. At this time, a number of the Ansari X Prize contenders, and new players that have come forward since them, are pursuing suborbital craft. For them the prize is the marketplace. But without the pressure of the prize and its deadline, these teams have relaxed pushing forward and have taken a much more measured course of development.

It's worth noting that when I asked Burt Rutan what he thought we should have done differently, his answer was a bit of a surprise to me. He would have preferred that we required three actual humans onboard the two winning flights rather than a pilot plus the weight and volume equivalent of the two passengers. Clearly the X Prize offered this alternative option (weight and volume rather than actual humans) as a safety measure. I think Burt would have wanted the excuse to ride in the back seat himself.

Now that several X Prize competitions have been launched, what makes a good X Prize vs. a not-so-good X Prize?

The X Prize Foundation and its entire team have learned a lot over the past 15 years. With a team of nearly 50 people, we've invested over 500 human-years into studying and learning about incentive prizes, what works and what doesn't. We've studied other great successes like the work done by DARPA, NetFlix, GoldCorp and others. Recently I wrote a detailed paper called "Using Incentive Prizes to Drive Creativity, Innovation and Breakthroughs" (available on the X Prize Web site for download) which outlines the cumulative thinking on this matter. In summary, I would say that a Great X Prize is one that is telegenic, with a clearly defined goal, simple to explain, addresses a market failure (or area that is stuck) and something that can be won by a small dedicated team.

How do you feel about Virgin Galactic?

The fact that the Virgin logo was on the side of SpaceShipOne on Oct. 4, 2004, was fantastic. To be honest, at the time, I was really somewhat angry that Richard Branson had pulled off yet another marketing coup and captured the prime real estate for the Virgin brand (we had originally wanted to have the Ansari X Prize logo in that spot). But I quickly changed my point of view. Clearly Richard and his entire team are the marketing geniuses.

In the days and years following the winning of the $10 million purse, I've come to appreciate that having the Virgin brand on the ship that day was really a success for the X Prize as well. Had the SpaceShipOne flight only ended up as a museum piece and a historical story, it really would have been somewhat of a failure. It is the fact that the winning flights ended up creating an industry and the fact that this industry was born co-temporal with the winning of the prize that is great news. So thank you, Richard, Will Whitehorn, Alex Tai for taking the risk and moving the industry forward!

What prizes is the X Prize operating today? What is their status?

Since the award of the Ansari X Prize, three additional competitions have been launched. Each of these is stretching our mission and our reach. They are:

• Archon X Prize for Genomics - $10 million prize for the first team to successfully sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. Thus far, we have about nine teams registered with another five or six teams on the wings waiting to register. I would be surprised if this prize was not claimed in the next 24 months.
• Google Lunar X Prize - $30 million prize for the first privately funded teams to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth. Thus far, we have 21 teams registered from 11 nations. The recent discovery of H20 and OH [hydroxyl] in the lunar soil makes this prize more important than ever. Each of these vehicles being developed represents future "prospecting" missions looking for resources on the Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.
• Progressive Automotive X Prize - $10 million prize for the team that can demonstrate an automobile which is fast, safe, manufacturable, affordable and exceeds 100 MPGe (energy equivalent) fuel economy. I was blown away that we had 134 different designs that registered.

How does the Lunar Lander Challenge, which may be reaching something of a climax this year, compare with the Ansari X Prize atmosphere?

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the amazing success of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a $2 million competition that the X Prize operates in cooperation with NASA (which provides the purse).

The competition is challenging teams to create a rocket that can launch a vertical takeoff and landing that achieves the total delta-V needed for a vehicle to move between the surface of the Moon and its orbit. What is amazing about this competition is the teams and what they have been able to accomplish with a small part-time team (typically three to eight people) working on five- or six-figure budgets.

While this competition hasn't had the visibility and historic significance of Ansari, I'm very much proud of what we are doing here. The companies that are actually building and demonstrating hardware are creating a cottage industry of propulsion engineers that will give us the experience base needed to fuel entrepreneurial spaceflight efforts. The engine, for example, being used by Armadillo in the NGLLC is the same engine that they will use to power their suborbital human-carrying vehicles in the next 24 months.

What Space Prizes are you excited about going forward? What would you recommend to NASA's Centennial Challenges program?

We've thought about space prizes along the following lines:

• Rapid point-to-point travel, say, New York to Paris in less than 60 minutes.
• An Orbital Debris X Prize, that is, a prize for the team able to target and remove a specific pieces of orbital debris.
• Asteroid rendezvous and mapping.
• Asteroid deflection – demonstrate the ability to deflect an asteroid in a precise and controlled fashion.

Perhaps my favorite space X PRIZE and the one that I'm spending the most time promoting is what I call a "Beamed Energy Propulsion X Prize." If you stop and think about it, the form of propulsion used today hasn't changed in over 1,000 years - since the invention of fireworks by the Chinese. Basically, you burn (oxidize) a material in a tube, hot gases come out one end and the vehicle flies in the opposite direction. Sure, our rockets have gotten bigger and more efficient, but the basic design remains unchanged.

The concept I'm excited about is demonstrating propulsion that uses a ground-based energy source, typically high-energy directed microwave beams, that are precisely aimed at a rocketship that absorbs the energy using it to heat a working fluid (typically hydrogen or water) that is then expended out of the nozzle. Such a system (which I believe is very feasible today) would revolutionize propulsion.

Draft guidelines for such an X PRIZE might look something like:

(1) Demonstrate a fully-reusable system able to launch a 10-kilogram payload to 30-kilometer altitude which derives 100 percent of its energy from a ground-based beamed power system.

(2) Recover the launch system and payload and repeat the launch within 48 hours.

(3) Team can replace no more than 10 percent percent of the dry mass between launches.

What future prizes are you interested in outside of space?

The prizes of most interest outside of the space realm are the following:

• Health Care X Prize – Must improve health care value by 50 percent in a 10,000-person community during a three-year trial, changing health financing, care delivery and create new incentives to improve health value for individuals and communities. (Funded by Wellpoint, Inc.)
• TB Diagnostics – Develop a fast, portable, accurate diagnostic system that can rapidly diagnose tuberculosis, the second most lethal infectious disease in the developing world. (Funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
• Ocean X Prize Suite – Focusing on research, exploration, conservation and healing to improve the Earth's oceans. In particular, we are looking at prize concepts for mapping the ocean floor and developing efficient, safe and affordable human transportation to the ocean floor. (Funded by Eric Schmidt.)
• Bionics – Develop a set of prosthetic biomechanical legs that allow a paraplegic the ability to walk and function normally in society at the same time that these legs could allow a person to climb a mountain.
• AI Physician – Develop an artificial-intelligence agent that can diagnose a patient through a natural language interview at the same level of accuracy as a board certified physician.
• Autonomous Car - There are two versions of this prize that we are thinking about. The first is for the first autonomous car that can drive nonstop from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., 100 percent autonomously, do it within 3 days and obey all of the traffic laws. The second version is the equivalent of the "Big Blue" chess match. This prize would be for the first autonomous car to win a grand prix race against a top human driver.

How does the X PRIZE Foundation and the recently founded Singularity University fit together?

Both organizations are focused on future breakthroughs. While the X Prize Foundation is in the business of clearly defining and articulating these challenges, the Singularity University is focused on attracting and educating the graduate students who will ultimately form the teams to competing in these future X Prizes.

How do the recent water findings on the moon affect the Google Lunar X Prize?

Today's launch costs are unfortunately extremely expensive. On the average it costs something on the order of $20,000 per pound to get supplies into low-Earth orbit (where the International Space Station is located) and, optimistically, 10 times to 20 times that cost, or approximately $400,000 per pound, to land something on the moon's surface.

So the cost of transporting water to the lunar surface, or oxygen, or hydrogen is about $400,000 per pound or $25,000 per ounce… about 25 times the price of gold today!

Revealing water in significant quantities on the moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration. Who will set up the first water mining plants? Given low-cost availability of water, hydrogen and oxygen, what type of off-Earth economies and exploration will this enable? The question is not too dissimilar to those questions asked when oil was discovered buried deep under the Earth or under the oceans. We eventually designed the technology to mine and extract this precious resource. It's what we do as humans and entrepreneurs.

I'm excited for all of the teams building vehicles for the Google Lunar X Prize. I think of these vehicles as low-cost "prospectors" looking for information and valuable data. Perhaps equivalent to the pick-and-shovel suppliers for the California Gold Rush. Utlimately, everyone will benefit from low-cost lunar exploration, and these Google Lunar teams will be on the cutting edge of a new gold rush.

Given the success of the Ansari X Prize, are other organizations being to emulate the incentive prize model?

The success of the Ansari X Prize has proven that incentivized competition stimulates growth in industries that have the potential to benefit the entire world. As noted in a recent McKinsey & Co. report, "prizes attract diverse groups of experts, practitioners, and laypeople – regardless of formal credentials – to attempt to solve difficult problems, dramatically expanding the pool of potential solvers and lower the cost of attempting or recognizing solutions." Further, "prizes highlight and elevate superlative behaviors, ideas, and achievements in order to motivate, guide, and inspire others. Identifying excellence remains the cornerstone of many prizes – the essence of their power to produce change."

Incentive prizes represent the future of philanthropy and driving breakthroughs. X Prizes offer incredible leverage (typically 10 to 40 times the prize purse is spent to win the prize) and efficiency (you only pay the winner).

You get what you incentivize. Incentive prizes work. Today, there are now more than a dozen $1 million or greater incentive prizes in a wide range of areas. A decade from now, there might be well over 100 active multimillion-dollar incentive prizes.

Update for 9 p.m. ET: It goes without saying that Sunday not only marks the fifth anniversary of SpaceShipOne's X Prize win, but also the 52nd anniversary of Sputnik's launch and the opening of the Space Age. But lest we forget, you can check this flashback to the 2007 observances as well as my golden-anniversary musings on the next space age. Feel free to reflect on either space age by leaving a comment below.

• NASA: Opportunity finds another meteorite on Mars
• Physics arXiv Blog: Brueghel's painted telescope poses puzzle
• Wired Science: How Earth's hum could help us map Mars
• SDSS III: New search for dark energy begins
• SFSU: Consciousness is the brain's Wi-Fi
• Nature: Past quakes cause future shocks
• MIT: A new day dawned fast

Columbia Pictures

An airplane flies into a scene of devastation in the movie "2012."

Marketers are escalating the media blitz for the "2012" disaster movie to Defcon 2 tonight with a TV teaser that touts the coming apocalypse. If you watch the two-minute scene, here are two words of advice:

DON'T PANIC!

The teaser is due to run on major broadcast networks as well as scads of cable channels and local stations sometime between 10:50 and 11 p.m. ET/PT, and it's sure to get viewers whipped up in advance of the movie itself, which premieres on Nov. 13.

The flick's premise is that there really is something behind the speculation about an apocalypse supposedly due in 2012. An earlier viral marketing campaign highlighted the fictional "Institute for Human Continuity," which was said to be setting up a lottery for spots in an underground refuge from doomsday.

Unfortunately, not everyone immediately saw through the IHC's TV commercials (or the Facebook group or the Twitter postings or the YouTube channel...).

"The ads seemed very real," Cosmic Log correspondent Darrell Messbarger wrote in an e-mail, "and some of my daughter's friends were in a dead panic over them. Even their parents."

Messbarger figured out that the ads were a hoax, but that didn't make him feel any better about it.

"There has been too little indication that this is just movie advertising," he wrote. "We have many survivalist businesses that are using it as a cue to keep ramping up the anxiety of their terrified patrons. People are actually signing up for the 'lottery,' many of whom, I am sure, believe this is real. I personally don't know whether it is or isn't, or to what extreme this is actually being taken. If it is just advertising, it has produced a lot of fear among many people, reminiscent of the 'War of the Worlds' radio program of the '30s."

The worries about 2012 go back way before "2012" was even a gleam in a Hollywood producer's eye. The cornerstone of the apocalyptic claims is the idea that the ancient Maya devised a 5,126-year calendar system that ran into a blank on Dec. 21, 2012. For the doomsayers, that implied that the end date would mark the end of the world as we know it.

There's one problem with that hypothesis: It's only a calendar!!! Over at the Universe Today blog, Ian O'Neill has an excellent 2012 overview that lays out all the cycles within cycles in the Maya calendar system. Another great explanation from University of Portsmouth astronomer Karen Masters goes into why 12/21/2012 has the same significance for the Mayan calendar that 12/31/1999 had for our calendar, or that 99999.99 miles does for your car. Check here and here for more about the Long Count.

The calendar confusion has gotten wrapped up with a whole bunch of other claims, ranging from the alignment of the sun with the galactic plane (which basically happens every Dec. 21) to an expected rise in solar storms (which follows the sun's 11-year activity cycle rather than the Mayan calendar).

Way-out worries
There are even farther-out claims - for example, that Earth's orbit will be thrown out of whack by an encounter with a roving Planet X (sometimes called Nibiru) or a dark star (sometimes called Nemesis). Some of the doomsayers even cite an article I wrote 10 years ago about the potential for undetected celestial objects on the very edge of our solar system.

I go into the Planet X issue in detail in my forthcoming book, "The Case for Pluto," but here's the Cliff's Notes version: Yes, there's a chance that an icy world bigger than Mercury or Mars is lurking out on our cosmic frontiers. That perceived possibility is based on statistical analysis as well as the fact that its presence would make some computer models work better.

Discoveries of dwarf planets beyond Pluto have added to the intrigue. But a leading proponent of the Planet X hypothesis told me he's not happy about having his work associated with doomsday talk. "It is important to understand that such theories in planetary sciences have absolutely no relation to Nibiru, 2012 or other hoaxes that claim for the existence of 'apocalyptic' or 'mystic' celestial bodies," Japanese astronomer Patryk Sofia Lykawka said in an e-mail.

Even the term "Nibiru" has a dubious connection to doomsday. Some of the folks behind the 2012 flap claim that the ancient Sumerians prophesied the advent of a mysterious planet called Nibiru, but linguistic scholar Michael Heiser makes a pretty convincing case that they were actually talking about the naked-eye planets we know and love.

As for Nemesis, some planetary scientists suspect that our sun did indeed have an encounter with a passing star, which may have played a role in rearranging planetary orbits and even sculpting Uranus and Neptune. But such an encounter had to have taken place millions or billions of years ago, and couldn't happen again until millions or billions of years from now.

What are the chances?
Is there a chance that Earth could someday slam up against a killer space rock? Sure, there's a chance. But there's nothing on the radar screen that would pose a threat in 2012. That goes for asteroid collisions as well as pole reversals, supernova blasts and gamma-ray bursts. (Here are the top 10 world-ending scenarios from Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait, author of "Death From the Skies.")

Well, could we possibly bring doomsday on our own heads? Again, there's a chance. Some doomsayers worry 2012 is the year that the Large Hadron Collider will create a globe-gobbling black hole, magnetic monopole or strangelet - but that's such a theoretical impossibility that it pales in comparison with other nightmares such as bioterror attacks and nuclear conflict.

The LHC should be the least of our paranoid worries, as I explained last year. In fact, worrying about the collider is likely to be a more significant cause of death than operating the collider. Which brings me back to the advice I started out with:

DON'T PANIC!

Next week's Nobels? Bah! The real action comes tonight at 7:15 p.m. ET at Harvard - when this year's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony pays tribute to science that makes you laugh, and then makes you think. Catch the webcast via Improbable.com, and thrill to prize-winners who are following in the footsteps of the geniuses behind the flame-throwing automobile and the LOX-equipped barbecue grill. And if you still can't figure out what the Ig Nobels are all about, listen to this podcast.

Here are more examples of scientific silliness on the Web:

• Cracked: Six 'brilliant' movie scientists who suck at their job
• Popular Science: Dawn of the age of telekinetic cyborg monkeys
• The Onion: Putting transmitters in moose vaginas is hard work
• Slate: What America learns from its TV doctors
• From the archives: Silly mysteries solved