As SpaceX prepares for Friday’s maiden launch of its Falcon 9 rocket, the company’s founder says he feels as if he’s about to play Russian roulette in a scene from the movie “The Deer Hunter” … but with a slightly smaller chance of success.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told reporters today that he gauges the chances of a successful launch at 70 to 80 percent. That assessment is more optimistic than the 50-50 chances for the typical brand-new rocket, but worse than the 83 percent chance of surviving a Russian-roulette trigger pull.

"So if anybody remembers that scene from 'The Deer Hunter,' that's tomorrow," he said.

This launch isn’t a life-or-death matter, but it could be a game-changer for NASA’s future course. Even though the two-stage Falcon 9 is due to carry merely a dummy payload into orbit this time around, the test is seen a major step in the planned pathway toward commercial resupply of the International Space Station, and eventually toward putting NASA astronauts into orbit aboard private-sector spaceships.

NASA wants such transport ships to take on most of the resupply duties that are currently handled by its space shuttle fleet - which is due for retirement in late 2010 or early 2011. Russian, European and Japanese space transports will also fill the gap. NASA's long-term vision is to focus on trips beyond Earth orbit, while leaving the job of space station resupply to the commercial providers.

First chance for first flight
Falcon 9's first opportunity for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida comes on Friday between 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET. For weeks, SpaceX has been biding its time while the rocket's self-destruct system went through a series of checks and signoffs from the Air Force, which controls the range for the test flight. Ken Bowersox, a former NASA space station commander who is now SpaceX's vice president for astronaut safety and mission assurance, said the Air Force gave its go-ahead today.

Musk said "the latest I've heard is that we're 100 percent good to go." The biggest factor standing in the way of launch is the weather forecast: There's currently a 40 percent chance that anvil clouds will force a postponement.

Even if the weather looks good, SpaceX could stop the countdown at any time for technical reasons, and potentially restart it later during Friday's launch window, or on another day. That has happened during SpaceX's previous launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, a less powerful precursor to the Falcon 9.

If the Falcon 9 launch is successful, the rocket would head due east and reach orbit in eight to 10 minutes, settllng into a 156-mile-high (250-kilometer-high) circular path, Musk said. The rocket and its structural test capsule would send back data about the spacecraft's performance throughout the flight. "Very quickly after launch, we'll know if it reached orbit or not," Musk said.

Failure is an option
It took four launches for the company to get the Falcon 1 to orbit, and Musk's reference to "The Deer Hunter" highlighted the fact that this Falcon 9 maiden outing could go awry as well. But he emphasized that the survival of SpaceX or commercial spaceflight would not depend on this launch’s outcome. Even if Friday's launch fails, the company plans to continue with a series of test launches.

"We're going to learn something that's going to make the second flight more likely, and the third flight, and the fourth flight," Bowersox said.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, using an estimated $100 million of the fortune he earned in the dot-com industry. Since then, other investors have entered the picture, and SpaceX says its financial picture is healthy despite recent reports about Musk's personal troubles (including a messy divorce). Musk said development of the Falcon 1 as well as the Falcon 9 has cost in the range of $350 million to $400 million. "That's pretty cost-effective relative to any other developments one could point to, certainly in big rocketry," he said.

During today's teleconference, Musk acknowledged that he was feeling extra pressure for a successful launch. "Since I'm the chief designer of the rocket, every time I think about the rocket, I just sort of cycle through all the places where there are things that could go wrong," he said. Stage separation and the startup of the second stage were on the top of his list.

Some in Congress and the space community have expressed grave doubts about the ability of SpaceX and other commercial launch providers to meet NASA's requirements for future spaceflight, but Musk said it would be wrong to judge the wisdom of a commercial approach to spaceflight based on a single launch or a single company. He pointed out that the potential players include the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin, which have been doing launches for NASA and the U.S. military for decades.

"I hope people don't put too much emphasis on our success, because it's simply not correct to have the fate of commercial launch depend on what happens in the next few days," he said. "But it certainly does add to the pressure, and there's more weight on our shoulders because of that. I wish there weren't."

Musk said that if spaceflight continued to rely on "super-expensive" government programs, "we will never do anything interesting in space." In the long run, he said, commercial space travel is not just “a path forward – it’s the only path forward.”

Shortcut to the space station
To accelerate progress on the path, Musk said SpaceX and NASA were working out a potential shortcut in the testing timeline for the Falcon 9.

The next flight, currently set for this summer, is aimed at testing SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule as well as the Falcon 9 in orbit. During the third test, scheduled to take place by the middle of next year, a Dragon capsule was supposed to approach the space station while holding off from docking. However, Musk said SpaceX now hoped to go all the way to the station during that test flight and perhaps deliver inexpensive cargo such as food or water.

The fourth Falcon 9 flight, which originally was meant to be the first one to achieve docking, would instead be considered a second chance in case SpaceX is not successful with the third flight. And if the entire system works during the third test flight, the fourth flight would be taken out of test mode and be considered the first formal resupply mission under a $1.6 billion NASA contract.

If Congress and the White House give the go-ahead, Musk said SpaceX could conceivably use the Falcon 9 to launch astronauts as well by the end of 2013. Bowersox said thinking about that possibility gave him “goosebumps” - not out of dread, but out of excitement.

SpaceX plans to webcast Friday's countdown and launch, and company spokeswoman Emily Shanklin said she expected "a few folks" to turn out and watch liftoff from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 40 in person. But the crowd won't come anywhere near the 40,000 or more who watched the shuttle Atlantis' final scheduled launch last month.

As time goes on, Bowersox said, a rocket launch might not draw a crowd at all. "I hope someday it's so routine that nobody comes to [watch a] launch," he said.

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Is the constellation Orion's famous red supergiant due to go supernova sometime in the next few months? Mmmm, not likely, says Phil Plait, the scientist and skeptic who runs the Bad Astronomy website. And even if Betelgeuse does blow up, it won't pose a threat to Earth, he says.

Plait should know. He's the author of "Death From the Skies," a book that goes into supernovae and other bad things that the cosmos can dish out. The buzz started with a posting on the Life After the Oil Crash Forum, claiming that Betelgeuse's blast might "burn the crops" and "freak everybody out." Plait weighed in with the reasons why that won't be the case.

It is true that Betelgeuse appears to be shedding mass and looks as if it might explode sometime in the next 10,000 years or so. But it's hard to pinpoint exactly when the end will come - and at a distance of 600 light-years, the blast won't have a big effect on Earth, Plait says.

The doomsday talk is reminiscent of earlier scares over the Large Hadron Collider and 2012's approach. And the bottom line is the same: DON'T PANIC!

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Academic sleuths have used fine art and old newspapers to figure out exactly which meteor Walt Whitman was talking about in his poem "Year of Meteors (1859-60)." It's the latest example of a historical exercise known as "forensic astronomy."

The "strange huge meteor procession" that Whitman saw occurred on July 20, 1860, researchers from Texas State University at San Marcos report in the July 2010 edition of Sky & Telescope magazine. The event inspired not only Whitman, but the famed landscape painter Frederic Church as well - and it was Church's painting that helped solve the mystery.

"This is the 150th anniversary of the event that inspired both Whitman and Church," Texas State physics professor Donald Olson said in a university news release. "It was an Earth-grazing meteor procession."

Whitman's poem, which appears in his masterwork "Leaves of Grass," was the mid-19th-century equivalent of a YouTube mash-up: It combined references to current events (such as abolitionist John Brown's 1859 execution and the 1860 presidential campaign, which he called the "19th Presidentiad") with astronomical observations.

One such skywatching highlight was the "Great Comet of 1860," which Whitman refers to as a "comet that came unannounced out of the north." That well-known dazzler became visible in June of that year and sparked a worldwide sensation. But Whitman also mentioned the strange meteor procession, "dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads." What was that all about?

That was a perfect puzzler for Olson and his colleagues, who have solved other historical mysteries ranging from the running of the first marathon to the vantage point used by photographer Ansel Adams for his famous "Autumn Moon" picture.

In the decades since Whitman wrote his poem, readers have speculated that he was perhaps referring to an 1833 Leonid meteor storm, or the 1858 Leonids, or a famous fireball fall in 1859. None of those was a close match for the kind of procession that the poet described, however. Olson was sure that Whitman was instead referring to an Earth-grazing meteor, which streaks into the upper atmosphere and back out without falling to the ground. Earth-grazers can create a procession of fireworks when they break up into pieces during the flight.

"Meteor processions are so rare most people have never heard of them," Olson said. "There was one in 1783 and a Canadian fireball procession in 1913. Those were all the meteor processions we knew of."

Until, that is, Olson followed up on Church's painting. He had seen a picture of the work, titled "The Meteor of 1860," on the back cover of an exhibition catalog. The scene paralleled Whitman's description of the strange procession, and the catalog gave July 20 as the date of Church's observation.

When Olson and his colleagues did further research, they found out that Church and his wife were honeymooning that summer beneath the same skies that Whitman saw. "We went to a small research library and found old diaries of Theodore Cole, a friend of Church's, from July of 1860," said Texas State student Ava Pope, one of Olson's collaborators. "They tell us Church was, in fact, in Catskill, New York, so he wasn't off in some far distant land."

Further confirmation came when the team went through newspapers from that summer, and found numerous reports about a large Earth-grazing meteor that broke apart on the evening of July 20, 1860, creating a train of fireballs that was visible from the Great Lakes across New York state.

"From all the observations in towns up and down the Hudson River Valley, we're able to determine the meteor's appearance down to the hour and minute," Olson said. "Church observed it at 9:49 p.m. when the meteor passed overhead, and Walt Whitman would've seen it at the same time, give or take one minute."

For Whitman, the short-lived, dazzling meteor encapsulated the age: a year of Southern discontent and Northern foreboding that was "transient and strange."

"Its appearance, right before the Civil War, at a time of growth and anxiety for America, made it a metaphor and a portent in the public imagination," said Marilynn Olson, a Texas State professor of English literature. She and physicist Russell Doescher rounded out the forensic-astronomy team.

Are we in the midst of another "transient and strange" year, "all mottled with evil and good"? If so, prime meteor season is coming up. You can look forward to the Lyrids (peaking June 14-16), the Delta Aquarids and the Capricornids (July 28-30) and one of the best-known meteor showers of the year, the Perseids (peaking Aug. 12-13). Watch out for those Earth-grazers!

Further frontiers in forensic astronomy:

• Science of 'The Scream'
• Van Gogh "Moonrise" mystery solved
• Astronomers revise date of Marathon battle
• New light on Ansel Adams' moon masterpiece
• NPR: Scientist looks to stars for answer on Caesar

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The masterminds behind the Mentos/Coke geysers are back, and this time they're in 3-D!

They're also harnessing the chemical reaction between Mentos mint candy and Coke Zero soda pop to send a rocket car rolling out of a hangar, to a distance mark of 221 feet. EepyBird's Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz made the Mentos/Coke combination famous four years ago when they combined the ingredients to create increasingly ornate fountain displays. Since then, the stunt has generated loads of viral buzz - and even a scientific paper explaining why the combination sets off so much fizz. (It has to do with the sudden mixture of ingredients as well as the bubble-stimulating surface of the mints.)

For "Experiment #321," Grobe and Voltz built a three-wheeled bike-trailer contraption with 108 two-liter bottles of Coke Zero and 648 Mentos tablets. Their team brought the vehicle to a blimp hangar in Tustin, Calif., pulled a lever to fire up the fountains, and let the CO2 spray push the darn thing across the concrete. Grobe and Voltz celebrated the end of the experiment by clinking champagne glasses filled with Coke Zero.

This video sets a new standard for technique: It was directed by Rob Cohen of "The Fast and the Furious" - which led Grobe to joke that their latest effort should be called "The Fizz and the Furious." Moreover, it was made available in 2-D as well as 3-D.

So what's next? According to The Orange County Register, the Maine-based team is heading to Germany for a record-setting display of 2,000 Mentos/Coke geysers. Why do these things? Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. "We're really looking for the limits of what's possible," Grobe told the Register.

When thousands of Internet users helped astronomers classify types of galaxies through a project called Galaxy Zoo, some of them may not have realized that they were training a machine to do their job.

British astronomers say they used data from the project to develop a software algorithm for galaxy classification that matched the human-generated results 90 percent of the time. Such robot astronomers may well do the bulk of the work in future all-sky galactic surveys. But the research team's leader says we need not fear the rise of the machines: The point of the exercise is to liberate us humans to do the more interesting tasks.

The University of Cambridge's Manda Banerji explained that celestial surveys to come will have to analyze hundreds of millions of galaxies. Banerji herself is involved in one of those surveys, the Dark Energy Survey, which will look at 300 million galaxies over five years, starting in 2011. Another project known as the VISTA Hemisphere Survey will take pictures of galaxies over the entire southern celestial hemisphere.

"We're getting to that age where we can't viably do these things using the human eye," Banerji told me today.

In the coming age, improved image-classification software could handle the no-brainers first. "The idea is that if we can eliminate all the things that are pretty standard, and we can give humans just the 10 percent that's left, then we're only bothering the humans to look at the interesting objects," Banerji said.

Galaxy Zoo's organizers were co-authors on the latest study, which is already available in preprint and is set to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. So it doesn't come as any surprise to them that the fruits of their labors are being used to build better software. Thanks to Internet tools, 250,000 users of the Galaxy Zoo website have already checked 60 million galaxies and contributed to 16 scientific papers. In some cases, Galaxy Zoo users have even been listed as co-authors of those papers.

Getting a statistical handle on the cosmic distribution of galaxies is one of the big challenges for astrophysics today: How many are elliptical, or spiral, or clumpy and irregular? Does that distribution change with age? What other characteristics can be correlated with galaxy structure? Such questions could lead to hugely important answers: For instance, the Dark Energy Survey is designed to look for clues in galactic data that could help solve the mystery surrounding the universe's accelerating expansion.

The software developed by Banerji and her team attacks the galaxy-classification challenge using a method that's different from the tried-and-true human approach. Instead of merely eyeballing the shape of a specific galaxy, the algorithm looks at qualities such as color, brightness variations and texture. A reddish galaxy is more likely to be an elliptical, for example, while a bluish galaxy is more likely to be a spiral.

The researchers fed the software a database of galaxies with known shapes, and trained the software to match up those shapes with the other qualities. The fully trained software was then used to classify a bigger database of galaxies on its own, and the machine's verdict matched the humans' verdict more than 90 percent of the time. The other 10 percent tended to be relative oddballs - for example, a bluish galaxy that for some reason is elliptical.

The next step is to figure out what other qualities can be used to classify the oddballs correctly, and then upgrade the software. Or just outsource the job to a human.

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In addition to Banerji, the authors of the paper appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, "Galaxy Zoo: Reproducing Galaxy Morphologies Via Machine Learning," include Ofer Lahav of University College London, Chris J. Lintott of the University of Oxford, Filipe B. Abdalla (UCL), Kevin Schawinski (Yale), Steven P. Banford (University of Nottingham), Dan Andreescu (LinkLab), Phil Murray (Fingerprint Digital Media), M. Jordan Raddick (Johns Hopkins), Anze Slosar (Brookhaven National Lab), Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins), Daniel Thomas (University of Portsmouth) and Jan Vandenberg (Johns Hopkins).

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The dwarf galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud is a favorite destination for astronomers, with lots of attractions to offer. Just last month we featured one of those attractions, the ribbony supernova remnant known as N49. But most folks don't get a chance to see the bigger picture when it comes to the cloud ... so today's image of the whole dwarf galaxy serves as a welcome tour of the neighborhood.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite of our own Milky Way, a mere 160,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Dorado (the Swordfish). It's less than a tenth as massive as the Milky Way, and measures 14,000 light-years across (compared with the Milky Way's breadth of 100,000 light-years). The LMC and its smaller sibling, called the Small Magellanic Cloud, are thought to have morphed from the classic spiral shapes to their current chaotic state due to tidal interactions with our own galaxy.

This new mosaic was created using data from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. Take this opportunity to know your galactic neighbor:

• ESO: A cosmic zoo in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Zoomable, annotated image of the entire dwarf galaxy
• Video: Zooming in on the Large Magellanic Cloud
• 'Hobbit' galaxies discovered around Milky Way
• Previously on Cosmic Log: A canvas for creation

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