M. Showalter / SETI Inst. / NASA / ESA

Hubble imagery from June 28 and July 3 show the changing positions of Pluto's four known moons, including a newly discovered satellite temporarily designated P4.

Astronomers looking for rings around Pluto have instead made an unexpected find: a fourth moon circling the dwarf planet.

The object, temporarily designated P4, is probably the most dwarvish of Pluto's moons: It's estimated to be just 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 kilometers) in diameter. In comparison, Pluto's diameter is about 1,400 miles, and its other three moons range in diameter from 648 miles (for Charon) to between 20 and 70 miles (for Nix and Hydra, discovered in 2005). The newfound moon orbits in a region between Nix and Hydra, and makes a complete circuit roughly every 31 Earth days.

P4 was detected in June, during a round of Hubble Space Telescope observations aimed at looking for rings or other potential hazards for NASA's New Horizons probe, which is due to zoom through the Pluto system in 2015. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Regional Institute who heads the $700 million New Horizons mission, told me in an email that the discovery was a testament to the dwarf planet's continuing ability to surprise.

"Pluto's satellite system is truly knocking our socks off with surprises — it's magnificently complex, and getting more crowded all the time. I can't wait till we get there to see what other surprises this planet and its moons have in store for us!" he said.

The find is also a testament to Hubble's amazing vision. The object was spotted on June 28 using the space telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, and its existence was confirmed through follow-up observations this month as well as a search through archived imagery. The moon was not spotted in earlier imagery because the exposure times were shorter.

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," Mark Showalter of the California-based SETI Institute, who led the Hubble observing program, said in today's announcement from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

P4 and Pluto's other moons are thought to be the result of a cosmic collision between the dwarf planet and another celestial body early in the solar system's history. Astronomers believe a similar smash-up gave rise to Earth's moon.

Pluto has gotten a bad rap in the past few years, due to its reclassification by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 as a dwarf planet rather than one of the solar system's major planets. Stern sees Pluto as just a different kind of planet rather than an also-ran, and I tend to agree with him. In any case, the fact that the world has a thin atmosphere, changing seasons and more known moons than Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars combined demonstrates conclusively that you don't have to be one of the big planets to be fascinating. And there may be more to come as New Horizons closes in for its 2015 rendezvous.

"Pluto can retain moons out to almost 100 times the distance of Charon," Stern pointed out.

Update for 10:30 a.m. ET: Although having moons is certainly cool, that doesn't automatically qualify a celestial body to be a planet. A fair number of craggy asteroids possess a moon, or even two. The way the IAU sees it, a "planet" is a roundish celestial body that circles the sun and has "cleared the neighborhood of its orbit," which is widely seen as a deficient definition. A "dwarf planet" is a sun-orbiting celestial body that's big enough to crush itself into a roundish shape, but hasn't cleared out its neighborhood. The way I see it, dwarf planets are planets, too. But I realize a lot of smart folks see it differently. 

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Courtesy of Robert Z. Pearlman

A collection of shuttle mission patches, including patches representing STS-1 (the first mission) and STS-135 (the last), can be an inexpensive way to keep spaceflight memories alive.

Space shuttle memorabilia may never be as highly prized as a spacesuit patch sprinkled with moondust — or a lock of Neil Armstrong's hair — but items from the 30-year space program are likely to rise in value as the shuttle era fades into the history books.

Moon-mission memorabilia will always get the top rating on the space souvenir scale, said Robert Pearlman, editor of CollectSpace.com, a website that tracks space history and artifacts as well as modern-day missions. "The peak item among all space history is something that's been to the moon, and in the process of that, picked up moondust," he told me.

Most of the material from the moon — ranging from rocks to dust-laden spacesuits and gloves — is held by NASA for research or by museums for display. Such objects are closely watched, and lunar larceny always makes for a good story: The recently published book "Sex on the Moon" tells the tale of a NASA intern who stole 17 pounds of Apollo moon rocks from Johnson Space Center to impress his girlfriend, and then there's the brouhaha over moon rocks that were given to the state of Alaska but ended up in the possession of a vessel captain who says he fished them out of the trash.

Items that come up for legitimate sale — the occasional spacesuit patch, or wrist-worn checklist, or even a strip of cloth that was torn from a flag before it flew to the moon — can go for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even a well-placed autograph by an Apollo astronaut fetches big bucks  — particularly if that astronaut is Neil Armstrong, who set down on the moon exactly 42 years ago today. Among the top sellers: a page from an Apollo 11 flight plan inscribed by Armstrong ($152,000), and one of Armstrong's signed checks from 1969 ($27,350).

In contrast, autographs from space shuttle astronauts generally go for $10 to $20 on the secondary market, Pearlman said. "Or you can get them for free, if they're still with the program," he said. Just send a request to your favorite astronaut in care of NASA Johnson Space Center, CB/Astronaut Office, Houston, TX 77058, and you'll get an autographed photo in reply.

Here are a few other categories of items that Pearlman recommends for a shuttle-era collection:

Mission patches: It's relatively easy to come by the same types of patches that the astronauts wear. A-B Emblem makes the patches used by NASA as well as the "official" shuttle mission patches offered by many hobby shops and mail-order websites. They generally run $5 per patch. Collecting all 135 isn't out of the question (um, that would be $675 or so). Patches that were actually flown in space (or better yet, worn by the astronauts) are harder to come by and more expensive.

Postal mementos: "For the price of a stamp you can get a memento of the last landing, or still the last launch," Pearlman said. Actually, make that two stamps. You can send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Postmaster, NASA Kennedy Space Center, FL 32899, and ask to have the envelope, also known as a cover, hand-canceled and sent back to you with the date of launch or landing. Pearlman said U.S. Postal Service rules allow the postmaster to back-date such cancellations up to 30 days, so you're still in the clear for Atlantis' July 8 launch. To make the memento more special, some folks decorate the envelopes with space-themed artwork, and use spacey stamps like the Mercury stamps issued this year. (But make sure the stamps provide the proper postage.)

Flown items: Bucketfuls of mementos have been flown up on shuttle missions and brought back down to Earth. After the missions, they're kept by the astronauts as souvenirs, or given away to VIPs, museums and schools. Some historically significant items have been flown on behalf of institutions: For the last Hubble servicing mission, the crew brought up a basketball that was used by astronomer Edwin Hubble when he was on the University of Chicago's championship team. Atlantis' mission is no different. "This flight has 22,000 American flags on board," Pearlman said. Such flags do turn up for sale, and "in theory it'd be possible to put together a collection of American flags from each of the 135 missions," he said. An alternative would be to snag one of the 10,000 flags that was flown on the first shuttle mission in 1981, and pair it with one of the thousands being flown on Atlantis to mark the shuttle era's beginning and end.

Mission 'mistakes': Just as flawed stamps and coins go for a premium, "mistaken" mission memorabilia will sometimes be more collectible than your run-of-the-mill shuttle stuff, depending on the rarity of such items. For example, an authentic mission patch for STS-61E, a flight that was canceled due to the 1986 Challenger explosion, can go for hundreds of dollars. Something similar could conceivably happen with memorabilia related to last year's flight of Atlantis, STS-132, which was touted at the time as Atlantis' final flight. Later, NASA decided to add one more flight of Atlantis, meaning that STS-132 is no longer the last. "That's now viewed as a mistake," Pearlman said.

Shuttle parts: Space shuttle tiles have been popular collectibles through the years, Pearlman said, but with the shuttle era winding down, "NASA has made them more and less available at the same time." The space agency has clamped down on distribution of the discarded tiles through surplus sales. The tiles that have been removed from the shuttles during processing are buried in disposal sites — and in fact, a former shuttle worker was arrested in February for rescuing tiles from the trash and selling them. Over the past few months, NASA has been getting rid of thousands of unused tiles and other castoffs by distributing them to museums and educational institutions. If you qualify, you pay a nominal amount for shipping and handling — less than $25 for a tile. But if you're just a collector, you'll have to turn to the secondary market. Just make sure it's legit.

Will shuttle memorabilia ever rank as high as Apollo memorabilia? Not likely. Two of the prime factors behind collectibility are rarity and an artifact's ability to fire the imagination — and it's hard to beat the Apollo moon missions on that score. Less than 40 men went into space during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, including 12 who walked on the moon. In comparison, 355 astronauts flew on 135 shuttle missions to low Earth orbit.

"One hundred and thirty-five missions may scare away collectors, because it was such a large program," Pearlman said.

But when you look beyond the trinkets, it's hard to escape the sense that appreciation of the space shuttle program will grow in time, as Americans reflect on its accomplishments (building the International Space Station and fixing Hubble) rather than its failings (high cost and high risk, including the loss of 14 astronauts).

"There is a shuttle generation that hasn't yet grown old enough to pine for their youth," Pearlman said, "but that will come in; the next 20 or 30 years. The space shuttle will be part of those childhood memories. The program is ending a bit prematurely for that generation. To be honest, it's ending prematurely for any generation. But they say that you should go out at the top ... well, the shuttle certainly seems to be going out at its peak."

How will the shuttle era be remembered? As that era heads into its final day, feel free to reminisce and reflect in the comment space below. 

More tales of space souvenirs:

• Ex-astronaut tries to sell camera from moon trip
• Buzz Aldrin sues trading-card company
• Confederate flags on space station draw ire
• Missing moondust returned to NASA
• Apollo 12 'Playboy' stowaway auctioned
• Vintage Soviet space capsule sold for $2.9 million

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech

The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope provides an infrared view of a twisted ring at the center of our galaxy.

If you look for signs and portents in the skies, you can't do much better than this: The Herschel Space Telescope has provided the best view yet of an infinity sign at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

"This is what is so exciting about launching a new space telescope like Herschel," Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in Rome said in an image advisory issued today. "We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy."

Molinari is the lead author of a research paper on the twisted ring, appearing in a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Portions of the ring have been spotted before, but Herschel's image cuts through the dust at the galactic center to reveal the full structure in submillimeter wavelengths. This version of Herschel's view highlights the shape of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years:

ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech

This version of the Herschel image highlights the infinity sign or twisted ring at the Milky Way's center.

"We have looked at this region at the center of the Milky Way many times before in the infrared," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, one of the paper's co-authors. "But when we looked at the high-resolution images using Herschel's submillimeter wavelengths, the presence of a ring is quite clear."

Astronomers say the ring is a dense, twisted tube of cold gas mixed with dust — and a cradle for infant stars. They used readings from the ground-based Nobeyama Radio Observatory in Japan to determine how fast gas was circulating around the ring. The radio observations showed that the ring is rolling as a unit, at the same speed as the rest of our galaxy.

The main mystery has to do with how the ring got twisted. The origins of the structure of galactic centers are not well understood, but astronomers suspect that our Milky Way's shape may have been affected by gravitational interactions with nearby galaxies — perhaps including the Andromeda Galaxy, our big celestial neighbor.

There's another mystery as well: The center of the twisted ring does not correspond with the actual center of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A*. Noriega-Crespo said it's not clear why the centers don't match up.

"There's still so much about our galaxy to discover," he said.

Amen...

More about Herschel and our bent-up galaxy:

• Greatest hits from Herschel
• Is Milky Way bent like a sombrero? Si!
• Telescope witnesses Milky Way starbirth
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures

In addition to Molinari and Noriega-Crespo, authors of "A 100-Parsec Elliptical and Twisted Ring of Cold and Dense Molecular Clouds Revealed by Herschel Around the Galactic Center" include J. Bally, M. Compiegne, J.P. Bernard, D. Paradis, P. Martin, L. Testi, M. Barlow, T. Moore, R. Plume, B. Swinyard, A. Zavagno, L. Calzoletti, A.M. Di Giorgio, D. Elia, F. Faustini, P. Natoli, M. Pestalozzi, S. Pezzuto, F. Piacentini, G. Polenta, D. Polychroni, E. Schisano, A. Traficante, M. Veneziani, C. Battersby, M. Burton, S. Carey, Y. Fukui, J.Z. Li, S.D. Lord, L. Morgan, F. Motte, F. Schuller, G.S. Stringfellow, J.C. Tan, M. A. Thompson, D. Ward-Thompson, G. White and G. Umana.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

An artist's conception shows NASA's Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, which is about the size of a Mini Cooper automobile.

After years of deliberation, NASA says it will announce the destination for its next Mars rover on Friday at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.

Earlier this month, the choice was whittled down to two: NASA said the Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, would be launched either to Eberswalde Crater or Gale Crater. Today's announcement signals that a decision has been made.

Curiosity is already at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, undergoing final preparations for launch as early as Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving. The car-sized rover is scheduled to arrive at Mars in August 2012 to begin a primary scientific mission scheduled to last at least one Martian year, or roughly two Earth years.

Among the questions the $2.5 billion mission could answer: Were there areas on the Red Planet that could have been favorable for supporting microbial life? Could "molecular fossils" preserve the evidence of such life? Past missions have turned up evidence that ancient Mars was warmer and wetter than it is today, but how long did those life-friendly conditions last?

NASA

Eberswalde Crater, at left, features what appears to be a river delta where scientists believe water once flowed. Gale Crater, at right, features a mound of minerals that could chronicle Mars' geological history.

Both Eberswalde and Gale are places where scientists believe water once flowed. Eberswalde contains the remains of an ancient delta with clay-like minerals called phyllosilicates, which tend to form during long-term contact with water.

Gale features a 3-mile-high mound with layers of phyllosilicates toward the bottom and sulfates higher up the slope. The sulfates are thought to have formed in more acidic water — which suggests that Gale might preserve a billion-year stretch of Mars' geological history. Curiosity would have to climb up the slope to document that history fully, which makes Gale a somewhat riskier destination.

Care to hazard a guess as to where Curiosity will go? Cast your vote, or discuss your druthers in the comment section below. Then tune in at 10 a.m. ET Friday to learn more about NASA's next Martian adventure.

NASA

A color-coded elevation map of Mars indicates the location of previously landed probes as well as candidate sites for the Curiosity rover, including Gale and Eberswalde craters.

More about Mars:

• Slideshow: Mars rover preps for duty
• How a long mission to Mars could kill you
• Cosmic Log archive for posts about Mars 
• Mars resource page at msnbc.com

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Manos Tentzeris displays an inkjet-printed rectifying antenna used to convert microwave energy to DC power

Researchers have created a device to capture and harness energy in the air transmitted by things such as radio and television networks, cell phone towers, and satellite communications systems. 

"There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it," Manos Tentzeris, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said in a news release. 

Communications devices transmit energy in many different frequency ranges, or bands. The team's scavenging devices can harvest this energy, convert it from AC to DC power, and then store it in batteries. 

Previous work on this concept has produced devices that can harvest energy from a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as ambient WiFi signals. The new technology captures frequencies ranging from FM radio to radar, spanning 100 megahertz to 15 gigahertz, according to the researchers. 

The energy captured is minute — measured in microwatts and milliwatts, not megawatts — but is sufficient to help power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors, and communications chips. 

The technology could be used, for example, at airports where radar and communications sources put out plenty of ambient energy to harvest and power wireless sensors that could detect explosives or nuclear material. 

Sensors on food could scan for chemicals that indicate spoilage and send out an alert when detected, increasing food safety. 

Tentzeris and his team are using inkjet printers to combine sensors, antennas, and energy scavenging capabilities on paper or flexible polymers. 

To print electrical components and circuits, the researchers use a standard materials inkjet printer, but use a special recipe containing silver nanoparticles in an emulsion. 

The approach enables the team to print RF components and circuits as well as sensing devices based on nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes. 

Scavenging experiments utilizing TV bands have yielded power amounting to hundreds of microwatts and multiband systems are expected to yield one milliwatt or more. That amount of power is enough to operate small electronic devices, such as sensors. 

The team successfully operated a temperature sensor using electromagnetic energy captured from a television station that was a third of a mile away. Self-powered, wireless paper-based sensors will soon be available at very low cost, they said. 

The technology was demonstrated July 6 at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium in Spokane, Wash.

More on energy harvesting technology:

• Tiny solar powered sensor runs almost forever
• How flying a kite could power your home
• Device powers cell phone using car's wake
• Flowing blood could power cell phones

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

NASA file

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket blasts off with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory in February 2010.

United Launch Alliance, the venture that sends most of America's robotic spacecraft into orbit and beyond, has struck a deal with NASA to find out what it will take to make ULA's Atlas 5 rocket ready for NASA's astronauts.

No money is changing hands under the terms of NASA's Space Act agreement with United Launch Alliance, announced today. But Ed Mango, NASA's program manager for commercial crew development, said the space agency would study the launch venture's record over the next six to nine months to assess what risks would be involved in launching humans to the International Space Station on the Atlas 5.

United Launch Alliance, meanwhile, will spend "a significant amount of money, ULA internal funds" to make the Atlas system more crew-worthy, said George Sowers, ULA's vice president for business development. United Launch Alliance is a joint venture involving Lockheed Martin (which makes Atlas rockets) and The Boeing Co. (which makes Delta rockets).

ULA launches most of the U.S. military's satellites and U.S. commercial satellites, as well as NASA unmanned probes ranging from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the Mars rovers and the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft. But NASA has never cleared either the Atlas or the Delta to launch humans into space.

Mango said one reason for that was the space shuttle. As long as the shuttles were flying, there was no need to certify other rockets as having a "human rating." Now that the shuttle era is ending, NASA will have to certify new launch vehicles as well as new spaceships.

"It could have been done years ago ... but from an overall policy for NASA, now is the right time to do it," he told journalists.

The agreement announced today marks just one small step toward human-rating the Atlas 5. NASA and ULA are focusing on that rocket because it's the chosen launch vehicle for two of the companies receiving tens of millions of dollars from the space agency to develop new spaceships — namely, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Blue Origin. Boeing is also considering the Atlas as the initial launch vehicle for its CST-100 commercial spaceship. The fourth company in the NASA-funded commercial spaceship race, SpaceX, plans to use its own Falcon 9 rocket to launch its Dragon capsule.

During NASA's last shuttle mission, Atlantis' astronauts gave the space station's crew members a U.S. flag that had flown aboard the first shuttle mission in 1981 and asked them to keep it safe for the first crew to visit the space station aboard a commercial spacecraft. Mango said NASA was still aiming for that first flight to occur around 2015 — although he acknowledged today that the date was "a little bit soft," due in part to funding concerns. NASA had earlier signaled that $850 million would be set aside for the next phase of the commercial crew development project, but that funding level is under congressional scrutiny.

Sowers contended that the Atlas 5's track record, with 26 straight successful launches, made it a front-runner to carry astronauts in the future — and he said the rocket could be ready by the time any spacecraft was ready to fly on it.

He said the key enhancements yet to be added to the Atlas launch system included an Emergency Detection System, which would monitor the rocket's telemetry for any warning signs, and issue alerts or abort commands to the crew if anything went wrong. NASA gave $6.7 million to ULA during the first phase of the commercial crew development program to work on the detection system, and ULA said it spent another $1.3 million on its prototype test bed.

Sowers also said ULA would work on the infrastructure for getting astronauts on and off an Atlas launch pad.

The next phase of NASA funding for commercial crew is expected to go forward around the middle of next year, and would focus on the integrated design of launch vehicles, spacecraft and mission operations, Mango said. ULA could be in the running for further funding at that time.

Mango emphasized that human-rating certification was still years away — and that such certifications would have to cover complete systems, rather than the rocket and the spaceship separately. Nevertheless, he said today's agreement should be seen as a positive sign for U.S. human spaceflight as the space shuttle program is winding down.

"It's a good day for the commercial crew program ... It's a very good day for ULA, and overall it's a very good day for Americans to know that we're continuing our efforts in space," Mango said.

That sentiment was seconded in a statement from Mango's boss, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

"I am truly excited about the addition of ULA to NASA's commercial crew development team," Bolden said. "Having ULA on board may speed the development of a commercial crew transportation system for the International Space Station, allowing NASA to concentrate its resources on exploring beyond low-Earth orbit."

Other angles to the deal:

• Sowers noted that the Atlas 5 was also being considered by Bigelow Aerospace, along with Boeing's CST-100 capsule, as the means for carrying passengers to and from the commercial space stations that it's planning to put in orbit in the 2015 time frame.
• Mango noted that ULA's other big rocket, the Delta 4, was being considered as a potential launch vehicle for NASA's Orion crew vehicle, also known as the multipurpose crew vehicle or MPCV. NASA plans to use the Orion for exploration beyond Earth orbit, starting in the 2017-2020 time frame. However, beyond-orbit trips will require the development of a new heavy-lift rocket currently known as the Space Launch System or SLS. The Delta 4 could be used for less ambitious trips — for test flights or trips to the space station, for example. Although ULA's work under the Space Act agreement did not directly apply to the Delta, Sowers said the development of the Emergency Detection System could benefit efforts to win a human rating for the Delta 4 as well.

More perspectives on the post-shuttle era:

• Is the space effort dying, or evolving?
• Boeing runs hard in new space race
• Sierra Nevada chases NASA's dream
• SpaceX chief sets his sights on Mars
• After the shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Shuttle's legacy: Soaring in orbit and costs 
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race

Connect with the Cosmic Logcommunity by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Few companies are as connected to the history of U.S. spaceflight than Boeing. The company can trace its lineage back to Apollo and the Saturn 5. It's the prime U.S. contractor for the International Space Station, and a partner in the joint venture that manages the space shuttle program for NASA.

But now the company is running in a new space race for the post-shuttle era, with a business model that will treat Boeing spaceships more like Boeing airplanes.

NASA has committed more than $110 million so far to the development of Boeing's CST-100 capsule for ferrying up to seven astronauts to and from the space station, beginning as early as 2015. Boeing is partnering with "new space" companies such as Bigelow Aerospace and Space Adventures on its bid. It's even playing a supporting role on Sierra Nevada's rival project to build a winged mini-shuttle for NASA's use.

When Atlantis lands at the end of its current mission, that will spell the end of the 30-year space shuttle program — and the beginning of a years-long hiatus in NASA's capability to launch humans into orbit. Thousands will be losing their jobs, including employees at Boeing and at United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture that's the main shuttle contractor. Work on the CST-100 will only partially close the employment gap.

Just today, Florida Today reported that Boeing was involved in negotiations with NASA and Space Florida on the use of facilities at Kennedy Space Center and its environs in Florida for CST-100 development. One option would be to use the orbiter processing facility that once housed the shuttle Discovery. That shuttle was towed to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building this week for further work to turn it into a museum piece for the Smithsonian.

John Elbon, the Boeing manager in charge of the CST-100 project, says the company expects to decide which rocket would be used to launch the spaceship in the next two or three weeks, and to identify a manufacturing site in a couple of months. "Space Florida and the state and the center have been very good to work with through this process," he told Florida Today's James Dean. "They've been very responsive, and I know they're working hard to get an offer on the table here, so we'll see how it plays out."

This week I chatted with Elbon about Boeing's perspective on the post-shuttle era and the commercial space race. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: Boeing has been involved with the shuttle and station programs for so long. What does the end of the space shuttle era portend? Some people are saying this could be the end of U.S. human spaceflight. How do you see the next chapter unfolding?

John Elbon: The shuttle is the icon of human spaceflight. For lots of people alive today, the shuttle has been around their whole life. There are a lot of people who have worked for their whole career on the shuttle. So it's an emotional thing to get to the end of such a successful program. It's a sad thing to think about. But it's a transition, I think, as opposed to the end of human spaceflight.

Boeing

John Elbon is vice president and program manager for commercial crew program at Boeing Space Exploration.

There are two big objectives going forward: The first objective is that there's a very significant investment that's been made in the space station. We can predict that there will be Americans on the space station through 2020, and so that's human spaceflight, and it's ongoing. But it's really important that we use the logistics system that's in place so we can use the station the way it was intended at least through 2020, and there's no technical reason why we couldn't use it beyond that date, to 2028 or so.

The second thrust is to take human exploration beyond the confines of low Earth orbit again, and even beyond the moon. Developing the capability, the spacecraft and the launch vehicles to take us back to the moon, to Lagrangian points, asteroids and finally to Mars — and using those missions as drivers for the technologies that are necessary to go to Mars — that's the second big focus.

Here's the way commercial crew fits into this: We're not developing a capsule and putting it into low Earth orbit just for the sake of doing that. We've been doing that for 50 years, since John Glenn went up. But we want to develop systems that can go to low Earth orbit in a very affordable way, so that we can use the station, use these systems to transport people to station, and still have funding left within NASA's budget to develop the capability for exploration beyond low Earth orbit.

So it's important, I think, to look at commercial crew as an enabler for the utilization of station and the development of capabilities for exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Plus, once we have affordable access to low Earth orbit, hopefully a commercial market develops in low Earth orbit. And, boy, that's when this thing can really jump-start.

Q: Some people have asked if commercial spaceflight is the way to go, why is NASA having to put in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting this? Is it truly commercial if NASA has to pay so much to have these new spaceships developed?

A: There's a lot of debate over this definition of "commercial." I can explain, from Boeing's perspective, what the market is like and what the business case needs to be. From our perspective, there's not a very definite market at this point beyond flying NASA astronauts to the space station. We think that clearly there is a market. I'll give you two examples: Space Adventures, who we're teamed with, has proven there's a market by flying seven people to space station on Soyuz craft, one of them twice. Clearly there are some numbers of folks who are willing to pay for that transportation.

And a little over a year ago now, we traveled with Robert Bigelow to the Farnborough Airshow, and we met with several of his potential customers. They are countries around the world who can't afford the infrastructure for their own space program, but certainly have the resources to rent one of his modules on orbit for some number of months, train their own astronauts. Assuming there's some form of transportation like the one we're working on, they can take those astronauts up to Bigelow's space complex and do research. From those meetings, I can tell you that there are countries that are serious about doing that, assuming that there's a safe and reliable transportation system and that Mr. Bigelow gets his space complex up there.

Those markets are there, but to define how deep those markets are and put a business case together that warrants the investment it takes to develop a transportation capability ... from our perspective, that business case doesn't close. So because this is a new market, it's important that there is government funding to assist developers in producing this capability, and then that there is a government use of this system to be the foundation of the market. In fact, we can close our business case around that NASA business, and then look at the commercial market beyond that as a significant potential upside.

It's a model similar to the way airmail delivery was used as a government effort to help fund the early endeavors in the commercial airplane arena.

Q: Another point of debate is the balance of money going to commercial crew as opposed to NASA's beyond-orbit exploration effort. What's the proper balance?

A: The technologies that it takes to go beyond low Earth orbit are much more involved and less existent than the capabilities to go to low Earth orbit. We understand that mission, we've got the technology to do that. It's more about running the business than developing the technology. But going to Mars, for example, is a big deal. It's a long mission, so the vehicles have to be more reliable. You can't come home on a moment's notice. Logistics are a huge consideration. There are issues around radiation in deep space. Mars has an atmosphere, so entering and landing on Mars is different from landing on the moon or making a rendezvous with an asteroid. You have a communications delay, so the crew has to be able to operate independently from the ground.

All that needs to be worked out. Those issues are not well understood. So it's important that those missions are developed and executed through government-led programs. That's such a grand adventure that it will probably require an international approach.

We are able to do commercial crew right now, and so are others in this game. In our case, we have the experts in the shuttle and station programs, and we can transfer them over to work on commercial crew. Others are hiring that expertise. But if we don't continue government-led programs, working on these new technologies so that we're developing the skills that can feed that pipeline for commercial activity, sooner or later that dries up.

Q: That raises a potential problem: Thousands of people are going to be laid off from the shuttle program soon after Atlantis lands, and that could lead to an employment gap in aerospace. What's the strategy for retaining workers so that they feel as if there's a place they can go?

A: I think the most important thing is to get on with it. The authorization bill that was passed said that we had to develop a multipurpose crew vehicle and a Space Launch System, and that we should use the existing Constellation contracts to the extent we can to do that. So the best way to retain the skills here is to get on with Orion and get on with SLS. It's not going to take much of a lull between now and when those programs really get going for those skilled workers to find other jobs, and then it becomes difficult to recover that expertise.

Q: Has there been a learning curve for Boeing to get accommodated to the new environment for spaceflight? Are there new lessons that have to be learned?

A: There are, but fortunately Boeing's got that kind of experience in-house. Not only do we have experience from the human spaceflight side, we also have a lot of experience on commercial aerospace vehicles — like Boeing airplanes, commercial launch vehicles, Delta 4 and Sea Launch, and commercial satellites. So there's a lot of experience working on commercial programs as well as experience working on human spaceflight. I think we're in a unique position, being able to combine those two and put together a team that can really focus on something safe and reliable, because of our human spaceflight experience; and also affordable and available soon, because of our commercial experience.

Q: Do you have any personal thoughts about the future? We asked people to tell us in an online poll whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about future spaceflight, and about two-thirds said they were pessimistic. Where do you stand?

A: I'm an optimist by nature.

This is what it is. The shuttle program is ending, and we need to look at this transition as an opportunity and turn it into something. You can't move on to the next step without letting go of what's behind us. As I said, the shuttle is an incredibly capable vehicle, it's an incredibly successful program — but like it or not, we're moving on to the next phase. So we need to figure out how to make the most of it, and grow into the next phase. It's a mourning process. We need to let go of the past and embrace the future.

More perspectives on the post-shuttle era:

• Sierra Nevada chases NASA's dream
• SpaceX chief sets his sights on Mars
• Is the space effort dying, or evolving?
• After the shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Shuttle's legacy: Soaring in orbit and costs 
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race

Correction for 3 p.m. ET July 18: An earlier version of this posting incorrectly stated that XCOR Aerospace was on Boeing's team for its commercial crew development bid.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

The greenish glow of an auroral display sweeps around Earth's south polar region in this photo, captured from a vantage point on the International Space Station. The shuttle Atlantis and its robotic arm, as well as one of the station's solar arrays, loom up in the foreground.

The pilot for NASA's last space shuttle flight, Doug Hurley, says one of the highlights of Atlantis' trip to the International Space Station was seeing an "incredible" display of southern lights — and after seeing these pictures, I'd have to agree with him.

This photo from the space station shows the greenish auroral glow sweeping around the south pole, following the edge of the atmosphere. Atlantis is in the foreground with its robotic arm extended into the center of the frame, and one of the station's gold-colored solar arrays juts in the right edge. You can even see the stars hanging in the night sky.

 Another picture provides a more detailed view of the shimmering lights, with Atlantis' inspection boom poking through the frame.

NASA

Thursday night's southern lights shimmer in a picture taken from the International Space Station, with Atlantis' inspection boom angling through the picture.

The southern lights, like the northern lights, are sparked when electrically charged particles from the sun interact with Earth's magnetic field. For more amazing views of Atlantis' auroras, check out NASA's photo gallery for the shuttle mission, as well as Space.com's report about the pictures.

More marvelous views from Atlantis' mission:

• Father and son see shuttle's start and end
• Space station takes center stage
• Aircraft captures unique view of launch
• Students reach high for amazing launch photos
• Last shuttle launch marks the end of an era
• Crowds flock to Atlantis' last countdown
• Shuttle Atlantis' last trek to liftoff
• NASA's last shuttle seen from space

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

NASA likes the idea of a mini-shuttle spaceship so much that they're paying Sierra Nevada Corp. $100 million to start developing it. The result is a case of deja vu all over again: Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane is based on a design NASA considered more than 20 years ago.

Sierra Nevada is updating the HL-20 lifting-body design for the 21st century, using carbon composite construction techniques and state-of-the-art avionics. If NASA likes what it sees and provides further funding, the Dream Chaser could be ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station as early as 2015. Three other companies — SpaceX, the Boeing Co. and Blue Origin — are also receiving development money from NASA as part of the agency's commercial crew development program.

Sierra Nevada is the only company of the four that is working on a winged vehicle like the shuttle, and it plans to capitalize on the parallels. Just last week, Sierra Nevada Space Systems' chairman, Mark Sirangelo, signed an agreement with NASA to use facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the development and launch of the Dream Chaser.

NASA

Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Mark Sirangelo holds a model of the Dream Chaser mini-shuttle during a signing ceremony at Kennedy Space Center. Center director Bob Cabana is at left, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is at right.

After the signing ceremony, Sirangelo said he hoped to hire shuttle workers to become part of a public-private team at the space center, starting out with dozens and eventually growing to hundreds. "We don't need as many people [as the shuttle program employed], but some of the people have the kids of skills that we would need," he told me.

Time is of the essence, however. And so is money. Sirangelo noted that Sierra Nevada's current timetable called for suborbital test flights starting in 2013 and orbital tests in 2014.

"We have to start now to get ready for that ... and having some predictability from NASA and Congress as to what this program is going to look like will help us hire sooner and more," he said. "If they come in and say the president's budget is accepted, then we're going to hire fairly aggressively. If they come in and say there's no money, then that's going to have an effect on us as well."

On the eve of the shuttle program's last launch, I sat down with Sirangelo at Kennedy Space Center to discuss Sierra Nevada's perspective on the post-shuttle era. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: One of the concerns that comes up is that commercial providers won't provide the level of safety and reliability that NASA has achieved, and the attention to safety is why spaceflight has been so expensive. How do you respond to that concern?

Mark Sirangelo: I'll respond by saying that NASA is creating the safety standard. We have to pass, otherwise we don't fly. It's like the FAA and its standard for commercial aircraft. If you don't pass it, you don't fly your new commercial aircraft. So the presumption is that if NASA creates the standard and we pass it ... we would have passed what they needed us to pass.

The second part of the answer is that we have a team of 10 companies, all of whom have been in human spaceflight almost from the beginning. This idea that this is a separate industry is really a misnomer. NASA has never built a vehicle on its own. It's always had commercial partners. The only difference is in the contract method — and the fact that we're investing alongside NASA. We have Boeing on our team, we have Aerojet on our team, we have Draper Lab. We're using Lockheed's rocket [the Atlas 5]. These are not novices building Tinker Toys. These are companies that have been in business for a long time.

What's different is that instead of NASA owning the vehicle, the company owns the vehicle, and NASA's getting a service. But that's exactly what they're doing right now. They're buying a service from Russia. NASA doesn't own the Soyuz, they're buying a seat. And they have less insight, less oversight, less involvement with the whole Russian space program than they have with our program.

Q: Why do you think it is that spaceflight has been so expensive? Why can the commercial sector do it for less?

A:I think the mission is simpler. The shuttle has a very complex mission. Our vehicle is shuttle-like, but we're one-fortieth the size. We're like an SUV as opposed to a big trailer truck. We have a purpose: We want to take seven members of your family on a trip with luggage, and we want to bring them home safely. That's a lot less complex to design than a big trailer truck with all the equipment that's required. With the shuttle, NASA had to have a program that could do everything. The shuttle had to take huge amounts of cargo, it had to take very complex modules, it had to transfer people. When you look at that, you understand why it was so expensive. But this is a very direct, point-based solution.

We're going to follow all the same safety requirements that apply to other NASA vehicles. Interestingly enough, those safety standards don't apply to the Soyuz. It's not a human-rated vehicle. There's not a human-rated vehicle in the world.

Q: When do you think the human-rating standards will be drawn up?

A: The important thing for all of us is that we work together to do that sooner rather than later. It's a big challenge, because this is not a cost-plus contract. If somebody makes a design change three years from now, there's not a pot full of money to go into and say, let's just keep going. What we're encouraging everybody to do is sit down and have those discussions today so we can all design what's necessary for safety into the vehicle, during the design phase rather than the production phase.

We've seen the draft safety standards. We're designing to those right now. There's nothing in them that we don't think we can meet.

Q: Do you have a fix on the per-mission cost for sending crew up to the space station?

A: We're not publishing prices, but we believe we can come in at less than the cost to the Russians. We think substantially less. [The Russian price per seat is rising to almost $63 million in 2014.] Part of it depends on how many flights there are. Our vehicle is a fully reusable vehicle. If we can look at 20 flights or 30 flights, it drops the cost down significantly. If it's two or three, then we'll have to deal with that. But because our vehicle reusable and because it's made of composite material, we've already got all the molds built and we can actually make additional vehicles.

Q: Is that where Virgin Galactic enters the picture? There might be flights outside the NASA contract that the Dream Chaser would be able to capitalize on.

A: There are three areas where we would work with Virgin Galactic. One is that we're working with them on potentially using the WhiteKnightTwo for drop tests of the vehicle, atmospheric testing.

They are a very good marketer, and we have a vehicle that has seats and can go to space. They have a big cadre of people who will fly suborbitally, some of whom want to climb the next, bigger mountain. That's human nature, and we're excited about that. If they have thousands of people who go suborbital, maybe 5 percent, 10 percent will want to take the next step and go orbital. That's a very natural progression. The vehicles are very similar, they're composite, and there would be a consistency of approach.

Q: And the third area?

A:We think that as we look toward other potential destinations beyond the space station, be it Bigelow Aerospace or someone else, there might be transportation systems necessary for that. So we could see a three-way partnership involving the station owner, Virgin Galactic and ourselves to market this experience.

Q: Is it possible that the Dream Chaser could just do several orbits and come back down without going to an orbital destination?

A: Yes, you could imagine an experience — it'd be a pretty cool experience  — where you get to spend a few days in space, and maybe you fly toward the space station but you don't go on it. For those who have that interest, it could be a pretty interesting trip.

And there are more practical things beyond space tourism. We built this big laboratory, the space station, but there's no way to get anything home. What people forget is that the shuttle was the return vehicle. The European or Japanese cargo transfer vehicles can't come home. The only vehiclethat comes home is the Soyuz, and if you've ever seen the Soyuz, you know that you can barely get three midsize people in there.

So we have a problem. We built this wonderful laboratory in space, and we didn't build it just to send a few humans to sit there, we built it to do work. To do science, and take that work home. That's what prompted me to get into this, actually. Beyond the work with NASA, there are all these other things that are necessary. If you are spending a lot of money doing bioscience with critical experiments in space, and you want to bring them home, would you rather fly them home with less than 2 G's, land on a runway and be able to walk up to the vehicle as soon as it stops, put the experiments in a refrigerated vehicle and get them to the lab ... or would you want them to go bobbing around in the Pacific Ocean somewhere?

We think that's a very important market. The more trips we make to the station, the more likely it is that more science gets done. And that's why we built the space station in the first place. We didn't build it to use as an observatory, we built it to do work.

Another way we see this vehicle is as a servicing vehicle. Personally, if I were writing a history of the shuttle program, one of the things I would put right at the top is the fact that it fixed the Hubble Space Telescope. We're getting so much value in science, and we're advancing our knowledge of the universe in ways we never thought possible. That's because the shuttle went up and fixed the mirrors, and it did the repair work that it needed to do. If we didn't have that, that whole telescope would have been toast. We would have had none of the knowledge we have now. We think that having a vehicle that could do servicing in space — moving satellites or fixing things in space — would be really useful.

Q: Do you have any aspirations beyond Earth orbit?

A: No, we don't. We've got a pretty big job in front of us. A lot of people don't know much about us. We have 2,200 people in our company. We've been around for 40 years. We're owned and run by the management of the company.  We don't have outside ownership. We've been growing every year for the last 14 years, and we're profitable. We've been in space for 400 missions now. All this is just to say that we know how hard it is to build a business. We've succeeded because we're disciplined. We know what we do well, and we know what we don't do well.

That's why we have such a big team. We looked around and said, "What are the things in this mission that we can do, what else needs to be done, and who do we find to do all these other things?" We went out and found the best companies in the space industry, and said, "Hey, this is what we're doing, we're leading it, do you want to come join us?" That's how we think space gets done.

Q: A lot of people look at the space effort nowadays and ask, "What's the point, when there are so many problems here on Earth?" Do you see any of that?

A: I hear that, but it doesn't manifest itself so much. I'll give you an example:We have a mockup of the vehicle on the campus of the University of Colorado, and people have told me that the most interesting thing is the ability to reach out and touch a space vehicle. Look at how many people see science-fiction movies, or space movies at an IMAX theater. People are given a passion — maybe it was a destination, or an experience, or seeing the Mars rovers. Something that people can relate to on a personal level.

What we have lacked is the emotion behind the space program. And what we're trying to do is put some of the emotion back. Let's say, for example, we have the ability to land this vehicle on any runway. That's a technical ability, but it could be a passion ability, too. Suppose we intentionally land in Denver, so that all those kids in Colorado can see a space vehicle land, and can come up and see it and touch it. Less than 1 percent of the people in this country have ever even seen a space vehicle in a museum. What would the kids of tomorrow think if we landed in 15 different cities around the country, and everybody got a chance to come and see a space vehicle at an air show? How many of those kids would go out and say, "I want to go to space, I want to be a designer, I want to be an engineer"? That's what our generation did. What we need is that kind of passion.

More perspectives on the post-shuttle era:

• SpaceX chief sets his sights on Mars
• Is the space effort dying, or evolving?
• After the shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Shuttle's legacy: Soaring in orbit and costs 
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Warner Bros.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and the goblin banker Griphook (Warwick Davis) are concealed beneath an invisibility cloak in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2."

Harry Potter's invisibility cloak comes in handy for the final installment of the boy wizard's film saga, but real-life invisibility technologies might well be at least as useful — even if they aren't as cool as Harry's cloak.

For the foreseeable future, the benefits provided by the real-life gizmos that have come to be called "invisibility cloaks" or "cloaking devices" really won't have much to do with the kind of tricks you'll see in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2." Sorry to disappoint, but you won't be able to throw a high-tech fabric over your head and disappear from the scene when the bad guys come looking for you.

However, it is conceivable that scientists could look at viruses and protein molecules directly, using new breeds of ultra-high-resolution "superlenses." Physicians might have more accurate ultrasound scanners at their disposal. Acoustical cloaks could hide ships or underwater assets from sonar detection. And offshore facilities could be engineered to soften the effects of wave erosion on the shore ... or amplify ocean waves for generating renewable power.

All this magic could come about through the power of metamaterials. These are materials that are specially structured and shaped to bend electromagnetic waves or acoustical waves in weird ways. Real-life invisibility cloaks, for example, are actually devices or layers of material designed to divert light around the object that's concealed.

This month's issue of Physics World delves into the past, present and future of invisibility — and the best part about this particular  issue is that you can download it for free as a PDF file. 

One of the limiting factors for invisibility cloaks has to do with wavelength. Shorter wavelengths require smaller structures in order to produce the bending effect. That's why bending sound waves is easier than bending electromagnetic waves, and why bending microwaves is easier than bending visible light. Scientists have been able to develop "invisibility carpets" that can render bumps in the carpet undetectable — but the bumps have to be so tiny that you couldn't see them with the naked eye anyway (on the order of a millionth of a meter), and the invisibility effect only works for near-infrared wavelengths.

A different research team came up with a way to hide objects in a region about three-quarters of an inch wide, using calcite crystals, but the invisibility effect is produced only with respect to light of a specific polarization.

"While what has been so far achieved in invisibility science has been a tour de force of physics and engineering, our children will probably still have to wait some time for that real Harry Potter cloak," Stanford University's Wenshan Cai and Purdue's Vladimir Shalaev write in Physics World.

Metamaterials aren't the only way to achieve invisibility, however. There are also active-camouflage techniques, ranging from video projection to a high-tech light-emitting matrix that's inspired by a squid's skin.

The latest scientific buzz focuses on space-time cloaking, which involves using "time lenses" to compress and then decompress light. This would result in an apparent time gap during which an event could go unobserved. Scientists have discussed time cloaking as a theoretical possibility for quite some time (so to speak), but researchers led by Cornell University physicist Moti Fridman say they actually created a "time hole" that lasted 15 trillionths of a second. The Guardian, the Physics arXiv Blog and Science News delve into the details.

For much, much more about metamaterials, event cloaking, active camouflage and other real-life magic spells, check out Physics World's special issue as well as these links:

• Cloaking device edits out space-time events
• Military studies squid camouflage
• Get set for invisible war machines
• Invisibility cloak made of silk and gold
• How to make an invisibility cloak
• Harry Potter's hallowed high-tech

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stands alongside rocket models at the National Press Club as he announces plans to build the Falcon Heavy rocket. Observers say the heavy-lift launch system could send an 11-ton payload to Mars.

Don't expect to hear any nostalgia about the soon-to-end space shuttle era from Elon Musk, the millionaire founder of Space Exploration Technologies. Musk isn't prone to look to the past, but rather to the future — to a "new era of spaceflight" that eventually leads to Mars.

SpaceX may be on the Red Planet sooner than you think: When I talked with him in advance of the shuttle Atlantis' last liftoff, the 40-year-old engineer-entrepreneur told me the company's Dragon capsule could take on a robotic mission to Mars as early as 2016. And he's already said it'd be theoretically possible to send humans to Mars in the next 10 to 20 years —  bettering NASA's target timeframe of the mid-2030s.

You can't always take Musk's timelines at face value. This is rocket science, after all, and Musk himself acknowledges that his company's projects don't always finish on time. But if he commits himself to a task, he tends to see it through. "It may take more time than I expected, but I'll always come through," he told me a year ago.

Since that interview, a lot of things have come through for SpaceX. The company has conducted successful tests of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. Before the end of the year, another test flight is expected to send a Dragon craft all the way to the space station for the first time. If that test is successful, SpaceX can start launching cargo to the International Space Station under the terms of a $1.6 billion NASA contract.

The company is also in line to receive $75 million more from NASA to start turning the Dragon into a crew-worthy space taxi for astronauts by 2015 or so. And just today, the company broke ground on a California launch pad that could be used by the next-generation Falcon Heavy rocket starting in 2013.

Once the Dragon and the Falcon Heavy are in service, the main pieces would be in place for a Mars mission, Musk said.

"One of the ideas we're talking to NASA about is ... using Dragon as a science delivery platform for Mars and a few other locations," he told me. "This would be possibly be several tons of payload — actually, a single Dragon mission could land with more payload than has been delivered to Mars cumulatively in history."

SpaceX is working with NASA's Ames Research Center in California on an interplanetary mission concept that could theoretically be put into effect for a launch "five or six years from now," Musk said.

By that time, astronauts will once again be riding on U.S.-made spaceships to the space station, including the Dragon — that is, if the current schedules hold true. But there's a lot of doubt surrounding those schedules. As you'd expect, the end of the space shuttle program and the shape of spaceships to come were major themes in my conversation with Musk. Here's an edited version of the Q&A on those subjects:

Cosmic Log: A lot of people are saying that when the space shuttle stops flying, that might be the end of the American space program. The idea is that commercial spaceflight providers are not going to be able to do the job, and there won't be sustainable interest in building the beyond-Earth-orbit rocket that NASA has on the drawing board. What's your response to the claim that this is really the end?

Elon Musk: It flies in the face of the facts. Six months ago, we had the second launch of the Falcon 9 and the first launch of the Dragon. The Dragon orbited Earth twice, it performed orbital maneuvers, it made a precision re-entry under the control of thrusters, and it landed within a mile of our target. We brought the Dragon back, and it was actually in good enough condition that we could fly it again if we wanted to.

SpaceX

SpaceX's Dragon capsule sits on the deck of its recovery ship after its successful orbital flight in December.

So as far as I'm concerned, it's not the death of anything. What we're really facing is quite the opposite. I think we're at the dawn of a new era of spaceflight, one which is going to advance much faster than it ever has in the past.

The space shuttle was designed in the '70s, and it really didn't improve after almost 40 years. They've upgraded the electronics here and there, but that's about it. That's incredibly static when you consider how other fields of technology have improved.

Now, with the public-private partnership that NASA has established with SpaceX, and the efforts made by other companies, we're actually going to see dramatic improvements in spaceflight technology for the first time since the '60s. The Dragon is taking technology to a whole new level beyond the shuttle.

The shuttle is fairly constrained because it's a winged vehicle with a landing gear. It can't land anywhere except Earth, and even on Earth, it can land only on certain runways. It doesn't have any ability to go beyond Earth orbit. But because the Dragon has a propulsion-based landing system and a much more capable heatshield than the shuttle's, it can land anywhere in the solar system with a solid surface — as long as you can throw it there. The Falcon Heavy can throw it pretty much anywhere in the solar system.

Q: The Dragon certainly looks different from the shuttle, and some people might get the impression that it's a step backward, back to the days of Apollo.

A: I've heard that. But I hope we can make it clear that this is actually a big step forward from the shuttle. It can do all sorts of things that the shuttle can't do. People look at something like wings and say, yeah, that's how a spaceship should look. But let's say you had a boat, and you put wheels on it and drove it down the road. It'd look pretty silly, right? Well, why do you have wings in a vacuum?

Q: One of the issues that always comes up when discussing commercial involvement in NASA spaceflight is the safety issue. A lot of the critics of your program have focused on that concern as the sticking point. NASA certainly devotes a lot of attention to safety assurance, and some say that's why it's so expensive to put humans into space. Any attempt to cut corners on that would make the whole enterprise look questionable. How do you respond to that?

A: Well, first of all, I suspect that the people saying that wouldn't have a problem flying on Southwest Airlines or driving a car or taking other types of transport that are not government-operated. The government does have a role in safety oversight, and anything we do for NASA goes through an extremely rigorous safety and liability examination. But I think what actually needs to happen is a dramatic improvement in safety. The current state of affairs with the shuttle is not acceptable at all. The shuttle's accident rate is not OK. Who would get on an airplane if you had a 1.5 percent chance of dying?

Q: Do you see any sign that NASA has different standards for oversight of commercial operations and for the shuttle program? After all, there's a whole army of engineers dealing with shuttle operations and processing.

A: I do think there are different standards. For us, the standards are higher. The shuttle, for example, has no escape system. We would not launch [astronauts on] our vehicle without an escape system, nor would NASA want us to. Also, with our vehicle, there's far less to go wrong on any given flight. With the shuttle, if anything serious goes wrong with this extremely complex vehicle, it's curtains. There's no escape. If the shuttle's level of reliability was acceptable, we could fly astronauts this year.

Q: Do you think NASA has the right vision for spaceflight? The idea is that space station resupply in low Earth orbit would be left to commercial ventures, freeing NASA up to develop the heavy-lift Space Launch System for exploration beyond Earth orbit. Some people have wondered whether the Space Launch System is really going to be necessary.

A: Personally, my view is that space transport overall should be much more of a private-public partnership, and that applies to heavy lift as well. The best use of NASA's resources is to focus on the unique scientific instruments and payloads that are truly one-off items. That's actually how it works right now for Earth-observing and space science missions. They launch the spacecraft primarily on United Launch Alliance rockets, a Delta or an Atlas. If it's a probe to Mars, or to the asteroid belt, or it's a weather satellite, it'll go up on a United Launch Alliance rocket. Obviously, in the future, they'll go up on our vehicles as well. I think that works pretty well, and I think it makes sense to extend that model to all sizes of rockets.

Q: So it sounds as if you see a role for SpaceX in exploration beyond Earth orbit. Do you see any scenario where a mission to the moon or Mars could be completely private-sector?

A: It's not out of the question. I do think missions like that are ideally handled as public-private partnerships. There are questions about how you'd pay for the missions. But the absolute goal of SpaceX is to develop the technologies to make life multiplanetary, which means being able to transport huge volumes of people and cargo to Mars. So we'll do whatever is necessary to achieve that goal.

Previously:

• Is the space effort dying, or evolving?
• After the shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Shuttle's legacy: Soaring in orbit and costs 
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Indraneil Das

The head of an adult female Borneo Rainbow Toad, also known as the Sambas Stream Toad, is seen in profile.

Conservationists report that the Sambas Stream toad, one of their top 10 "lost" amphibian species, has been rediscovered in Malaysian Borneo 87 years after it was last sighted.

The find was made by scientists from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak who spent months looking for the toad in the remote Gunung Penrissen mountains of Western Sarawak, a natural boundary between Malaysia's Sarawak State and Indonesia's Kalimantan Barat Province on the island of Borneo. (Just writing those names makes me feel like Indiana Jones.)

Conservation International reports that the initial search was fruitless — so the expedition team, led by Indraneil Das, moved up to higher elevations and resumed the hunt. Eventually there came a night when one of Das' graduate students, Pui Yong Min, spotted a small toad sitting 6 feet (2 meters) up a tree.

Das could hardly believe what he was seeing.

Indraneil Das

This picture of an adult female explains why it's called a Bornean Rainbow Toad. The amphibian measures about 2 inches (51 millimeters) in size.

"Thrilling discoveries like this beautiful toad, and the critical importance of amphibians to healthy ecosystems, are what fuel us to keep searching for lost species," Das said in a news release from Conservation International.  "They remind us that nature still holds precious secrets that we are still uncovering, which is why targeted protection and conservation is so important. Amphibians are indicators of environmental health, with direct implications for human health. Their benefits to people should not be underestimated."

That's the whole idea behind the "Search for Lost Frogs" campaign, which was launched a year ago by Conservation International and the International Union for Conservation of Nature's SSC Amphibian Specialist Group. The groups drew up a "Ten Most Wanted" list in hopes of inspiring researchers to intensify the search for amphibians that have not been seen for decades.

Fieldiana Zoology

For decades, this black-and-white sketch was the best-known visual record of the Bornean Rainbow Toad.

The Sambas Stream toad is also known as the Bornean rainbow toad, with the scientific name Ansonia latidisca. The long-legged, multicolored toad was described by European explorers in the 1920s, and was last seen in 1924. Das' team identified three individuals — an adult female, an adult male and a juvenile, ranging in size from roughly an inch to 2 inches (30 to 51 millimeters).

Each of the toads was found in a different mature tree, in a region of the Penrissen range that's outside Sarawak's system of protected areas. The precise location is being kept secret in hopes of keeping pet collectors from going after the rainbow toads.

The toads are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, and Conservation International said they may be eligible for protection under Sarawak's wildlife ordinances.

Conservation International's Robin Moore, an expert on amphibians, said he was amazed to hear of the discovery.

"When I saw an email with the subject 'Ansonia latidisca found' pop into my in-box, I could barely believe my eyes," he said in the CI announcement. "Attached was an image — proof in the form of the first-ever photograph of the colorful and gangly tree-dwelling toad. The species was transformed in my mind from a black-and-white illustration to a living, colorful creature.”

Moore said he considered it a privilege to be among the first to see the pictures of the toad.

"It is good to know that nature can surprise us when we are close to giving up hope, especially amidst our planet’s escalating extinction crisis," he said. "Amphibians are at the forefront of this tragedy, so I hope that these unique species serve as flagships for conservation, inspiring pride and hope by Malaysians and people everywhere."

The rainbow frog is the second of the "Ten Most Wanted" amphibians to be rediscovered. The first was the Rio Pescado stubfoot toad (Atelopus balios), a species native to Ecuador that is critically endangered.

Two down, eight to go ... the search continues.

More species lost and found:

• Froggy finds raise hopes for Haiti
• Three new frogs leap into spotlight
• Amphibians wanted ... alive
• Biological gems found in Philippines
• Madagascar offers hundreds of new species
• Scientists spot biological beauties in Bali
• RAP stars rock the animal world
• New species from New Guinea
• Scientists finish first sea census
• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• The top 10 new species from 2010
• Beautiful biodiversity in Brazil
• New Guinea's 'Lost World' revisited
• Indonesia's 'Garden of Eden'
• Papua New Guinea's new species
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Biological treasures from Borneo
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• The strange species of Suriname
• Vulnerable new species in Brazil
• Discoveries from Vietnam's 'Green Corridor'
• Endangered species of the Mekong Delta
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths
• Hundreds of new species amid the Himalayas
• New species found Down Under ... underground
• Eight 'extinct' species found alive and kicking  

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA file

A fish-eye view of the International Space Station, captured by NASA spacewalker Ron Garan, features the recently delivered Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in the foreground. A Russian Progress cargo ship and a Soyuz crew capsule are docked on the left end of the station. The structure to the left of the AMS is a radiator. One of the station's gold-colored solar arrays is visible in the background. And off to the right, the shuttle Atlantis is docked to the station's Harmony node.

After the space shuttle Atlantis lands, the focus of the U.S. space program shifts to the International Space Station — so it’s fitting that NASA spacewalker Ron Garan took a moment to capture this eye-filling wide-angle view of the station at the end of this week’s final outing of the space shuttle era.

This wasn't the last spacewalk by any means. The 500-ton space station is as big as a football field and as roomy as a five-bedroom house, and it's going to need plenty of exterior upkeep over the next decade of operation. But it was the last opportunity for astronauts to take pictures of a space shuttle in outer space ... from outer space.

"Only one problem with this image — the tendency to make you stop whatever you're doing, stare at it, lose your concentration and drool uncontrollably," NBC News space analyst Jim Oberg says in an email. "At least that's how it affects me."

'Big deal' for space station science
It's also fitting that NASA has finally revealed how scientific experiments will be managed aboard the space station in the years ahead. Today the space agency announced it has selected a Florida-based nonprofit group known as the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS, to take charge of research operations that use the U.S. portion of the space station as a national laboratory. The center will be located at the Space Life Sciences Laboratory, near NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

The U.S. segment of the space station was given national-lab status in 2005, and over the past few months, NASA has been evaluating potential partners for managing the lab operations. CASIS will be in charge of maximizing the station's research return for non-NASA applications — based on scientific peer review, analyses of the economic and technological value of potential projects, and the availability of funding. NASA said CASIS will also raise the station's profile as an educational platform.

The cooperative agreement initially will have a value of up to $15 million per year, NASA said in its news release.

"The space station is the centerpiece of NASA's human spaceflight activities, and it is truly an national asset," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was quoted as saying. "This agreement helps us ensure the station will be available for broad, meaningful and sustained use."

CASIS is a consortium of organizations spearheaded by Space Florida. "CASIS is a perfect fit with the state's strategy to support the space, science and technology industries through strategic collaboration and partnerships," Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, the chair of Space Florida's board of directors, said in a statement. "By making the space environment more widely accessible to industrial and academic research, the ISS National Lab will help strengthen and diversify the U.S. economy and inspire the next generation."

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew on the shuttle Columbia in 1986, said today's announcement was "a big deal."

"It's going to bring money, jobs and industry to diversify an area hard-hit by retirement of the shuttle program," Nelson said in a news release.

Breakthrough or multibillion-dollar bust?
The space station has long been criticized for providing less research value than scientists had hoped. We'll have to see if that criticism fades now that the station is out of its construction phase.

During a briefing conducted before Atlantis' launch, Mike Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager, said the initial goal was to devote 35 hours of the astronauts' time to research on a weekly basis, plus whatever they wanted to do during their off time. "We find that crews give quite a bit of their weekends to research," he said.

One of the space station's marquee science projects is a long-running investigation of how microgravity affects the virulence of pathogens such as the microbes that cause salmonella poisoning or MRSA. Scientists involved in the project, which could result in new vaccines, have an experiment aboard Atlantis for the last shuttle mission.

"We're close to some groundbreaking news here, so this could be a good one," Joe Delai, payload manager for Atlantis' STS-135 mission, told journalists.

It'd be nice if the post-shuttle era came to be remembered as a golden age for space station science — but what do you think? Is the station suited for science, or will it turn out to be a shiny $100 billion white elephant? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below. And while you're contemplating your comments, feast your eyes on these additional images from Tuesday's spacewalk:

NASA via Reuters

Spacewalker Ron Garan rides on the International Space Station's robotic arm as he transfers a failed pump module to the cargo bay of space shuttle Atlantis.

NASA via Getty Images

NASA spacewalker Mike Fossum takes a picture while attached to the International Space Station's robotic arm on Tuesday. California's Central Valley can be seen far below as a green swath running from left to right, with Mono Lake shining like a tiny blue jewel.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

John Frassanito & Assoc. via NASA

An artist's conception shows a future Orion crew vehicle on a Red Planet mission.

Pessimists are bemoaning the end of U.S. human spaceflight, but optimists see the next few years as a transition to a new paradigm that will energize commercial ventures and get astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time since the Nixon administration. Which way do you see it?

There seems to be plenty of gloom to go around as the space shuttle program nears its end. Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson, a former member of the NASA Advisory Council and other commissions sizing up the space effort, had this to say via Twitter: "Apollo in 1969. Shuttle in 1981. Nothing in 2011. Our space program would look awesome to anyone living backwards through time."

One of the astronauts on the first space shuttle flight in 1981, Bob Crippen, told me that he was disappointed that the shuttle program's end would leave NASA "without the capability to put our astronauts in orbit ourselves." And he questioned whether NASA had the right vision for future exploration. "I personally favored going to the moon," he said.

The frustration flared up today during a House committee hearing with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden as the sole witness, or sole target. "We have waited for answers that have not come," Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Ralph Hall, R-Texas, told Bolden. "We have run out of patience. ... I would like to point out today that the committee reserves the right to open an investigation into these continued delays and join the investigation initiated by the Senate."

Bolden, a retired Marine general, took the hostile fire. "You have the right guy here to criticize," he said. "I am the leader of America's space program."

He laid out the main points of the post-shuttle plan:

• Rely on the Russians and other partners for resupply of the International Space Station, at least until U.S. companies can finish work on the space vehicles they're developing with NASA's backing. The first commercial cargo craft could be flying to the station by the end of this year, and U.S.-made "space taxis" could be taking on astronauts by 2015.
• Continue work on the Orion crew vehicle, which should be capable of carrying four astronauts on more ambitious trips beyond Earth orbit. Orion had been canceled as part of the Constellation back-to-the-moon program, after $5 billion had been spent on the program, but it was essentially resurrected as NASA's "multipurpose crew vehicle," or MPCV. 
• Build a new Space Launch System, or SLS, which will be based on shuttle-era and Apollo-era rocket technology. The design for the SLS has not yet been announced, which is why members of Congress are so frustrated. Bolden said it could take until the end of summer or even longer to get the SLS plan through its financial review. Congress passed a law calling for the MPCV spaceship and the SLS rocket to be ready by 2016, but Bolden said the 2017-2020 time frame was more realistic.
• NASA is aiming to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, and to Mars and its moons by the mid-2030s. Other stopovers, ranging from the moon to gravitational balance points in outer space, may be added along the way.

"We are not abandoning human spaceflight," Bolden said. "American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half century because we have laid the foundation for success."

So there is an evolving plan for the future ... just as there was an evolving plan for the space shuttle system in the early to mid-1970s when the Apollo program came to an end. Under the best-case scenario, that plan will lead to actual flights within four to six years, which is less time than it took between the last Saturn 5 and the first shuttle launch. But there are lots of questions surrounding the post-shuttle plan:

• How much money will NASA get? A draft report from the House Appropriations Committee calls for trimming the space agency's budget by roughly 10 percent. (For details, check Space Policy Online, Parabolic Arc and Space News.) NASA officials as well as commercial spaceship developers say that budget reductions will slow down the transition to post-shuttle spaceflight even more.
• Will the commercial sector succeed? Right now, NASA is committed to paying the Russians $56 million for each seat on a station-bound Soyuz craft, and the price is due to go up in 2014. Commercial providers such as SpaceX, Sierra Nevada and the Boeing Co. say that they can beat that price, but that they need NASA's money to help cover development costs. Shuttle program veterans say the commercial providers still have to prove that their craft will be safe and reliable.
• Will the commercial space taxis for low Earth orbit and the Orion MPCV/SLS system for going beyond Earth orbit complement each other the way NASA hopes? Larry Price, Lockheed Martin Space Systems' deputy manager for the Orion program, told me that the two-track system served as an insurance policy for the post-shuttle space effort. "There's a little bit of competitive pressure," he acknowledged. "If the commercial guys run into any problem or delay for any reason, then we could back them up. And similarly, if we don't meet our milestones, the commercial guys could evolve into our niche."

After 30 years of grand successes, tragic failures and unfulfilled promises, the era of the space shuttle is ending. We may not yet know exactly what kind of American spaceship will be the next to fly. And because of that, thousands of people will be laid off by NASA and its contractors in the weeks ahead. But we're not witnessing the death of the American space program. At least that's the way Elon Musk, the millionaire founder of SpaceX, sees it.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's not the death of anything," he told me. "What we're really facing is quite the opposite. I think we're at the dawn of a new era of spaceflight, one which is going to advance much faster than it ever has in the past."

Now why would he say that? Over the next few days, we'll be presenting a series of Q&A interviews with Musk and other folks involved in shaping the post-shuttle era. What they've told me runs counter to the gloom-and-doom talk, but you might well have a different opinion. Feel free to weigh in with your comments.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

iWalk Inc.

A new design for a prosthetic foot comes close to letting wearers walk normally.

A bionic foot with a battery pack could put the spring back in the step of people who wear leg prostheses. 

Prosthetics company iWalk and an MIT team have designed a bionic ankle that uses energy from a battery to push the foot forward as the person wearing it takes a step.

When people walk, their calves and ankles do 80 percent of the work. As the pace picks up, muscles in the ankles take on more of the load, to push the leg away from the ground and move the body forward. 

But the prostheses that people with leg amputations wear today are only designed to support the weight of the body. They're more of a prop than a pusher, and the wearers burn more energy while walking than they would with a natural leg. While this makes for a good workout, it makes walking slower.

The spruced-up foot design from the MIT Media Labs' Biomechatronics Group contains a battery that's activated while the person wearing it takes a walk. It builds on previous designs of the powered ankle that the lab and others have built, but "one of the biggest steps forward is that now it's condensed down into a small size," Alena Grabowski, who worked on the project, told me.

In earlier versions of the fake foot, all the electronics and batteries were carried separately in a backpack. But this foot is about the size and shape of a real leg. It weighs 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms), the average weight of the leg of a person who weighs 176 pounds (80 kilos). 

So far, people who wear it like it. "They seem very excited and thrilled about it, and that's a very fun thing," Grabowski said.  

Grabowski tested the prosthesis with several test subjects who usually wear commercial non-automated prostheses, to see how fast people walked, and how comfortably and easily they could do it. The results of the study are published in Wednesday's issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "We could confirm with statistical power that the prosthesis was doing what it was supposed to do," Grabowski says.

Further work will go toward making the bionic foot lighter and more stable, but in the meantime, iWalk is making plans to manufacture and sell this design.

More about bionic body parts: 

• Bionic arms are spreading wider
• Stretchy solar cells to power e-skin
• Robot walks 4.5 miles non-stop

Grabowski's co-author on the research paper, "Bionic Ankle-Foot Prosthesis Normalizes Walking Gait for Persons With Leg Amputation," is MIT's Hugh Herr, chief of the Biomechatronics Group and co-founder of iWalk.

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter or Google+, and join our conversation on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

NASA / ESA / STScI

Four images of Neptune, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope at four-hour intervals on June 25-26, provide a full view of the ice giant planet as it turns through its 16-hour day. It takes 164.8 years for Neptune to make a full circuit of the sun. Clouds of methane ice crystals in Neptune's atmosphere show up as pink streaks.

For Earthlings, it’s been nearly 165 years since Neptune was found in 1846, "at the point of a pen." But for Neptune, it’s been just one circuit around the sun. To mark the first Neptunian anniversary of the discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope is releasing these latest views of the blue-green ice giant.

Hubble's near-infrared views, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on June 25-26, highlight the planet's pinkish high-altitude clouds of methane ice crystals, streaked throughout the predominantly hydrogen-helium atmosphere. These four pictures were taken four hours apart, providing full coverage of the eighth big rock from the sun as it turns through its 16-hour day.

Because Neptune is tilted 29 degrees on its axis, it has seasons analogous to Earth's — but because Neptune's year lasts 164.8 Earth years, each of its four seasons lasts about 40 years. Right now it's early summer in the southern hemisphere, and winter in the north. These pictures indicate that the cloud activity is shifting from south to north, apparently due to the seasonal change.

Today's image advisory from the Space Telescope Science Institute draws attention to the faint dark band near the bottom of the southern hemisphere, which is probably caused by a decrease in hazes in the atmosphere that scatter blue light. The band may be linked to high-velocity winds that sweep around that near-polar region.

The planet's turbulent weather is thought to be due to the significant difference between Neptune's strong internal heat source and its chilly cloud tops.

Neptune's history is as peculiar as its weather: It was first identified by the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, who figured out that something big had to be causing the gravitational perturbations that astronomers were seeing in Uranus' orbit. British mathematician John Couch Adams was also rushing to pinpoint the mysterious planet's location — but Le Verrier won the race and sent the predicted location to an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory, Johann Gottfried Galle. On the night of Sept. 23-24, 1846, Galle found Neptune and reported to Le Verrier that "the planet whose position you indicated really exists." That led Francois Arago, director of the Paris Observatory, to hail Le Verrier as "the man who discovered a planet with the point of his pen."

The discovery made Neptune, which orbits the sun at a distance of 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers, or 30 times Earth's distance), the farthest-out known object in the solar system.

Le Verrier's success led others to predict that other planets would be found on the rim of our solar system, as detailed in my book, "The Case for Pluto." Following up on such predictions, Lowell Observatory astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, just a little more than half a Neptunian year after Le Verrier. It turned out that the predictions pointing to Pluto were actually based on inaccurate data, and that Pluto was much smaller than it was initially thought to be — so small, in fact, that some people questioned whether it should be considered a planet at all.

Today, after the passage of another Neptunian half-year, the planetary picture has become a lot more complex: Astronomers now suspect that there are hundreds of dwarf planets similar to Pluto on the solar system's edge. Could there also be a "Planet X," as big as Neptune but hundreds of times farther out? It's unlikely, but not impossible. The one-year Neptunian anniversary serves as a reminder that you can't discover anything unless you keep looking.

More about the solar system's frontier:

• Observations suggest comet hit Neptune 200 years ago
• Pluto debate is about more than one little world
• The outer solar system remains mysterious
• Join the online search for icy worlds
• Interactive: The new solar system

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Herb Terrace, Columbia University

Nim Chimpsky gets a kiss on the cheek from one of his chimp-sitters.

"Project Nim," a documentary by Oscar-winning director James Marsh, is a heartwarming and heartbreaking story about a home-bred, pot-smoking, cookie-chomping chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky. Nim was the star player in a controversial language experiment that failed ... but nevertheless laid the foundations for research into primate communication. 

In the early 1970s, Herb Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist, adopted a 2-week-old chimpanzee. Nim Chimpsky (named after linguist Noam Chomsky) was to be the star of an experiment to see if non-human animals could be taught the elements of language. At the time, linguists and psychologists were locked in a shouting match about the true nature of our chatty brains and the origins of human language. Terrace hoped Nim would end the raging debate about how and why human language evolved. 

The behaviorists led one camp, and said that language could be taught and learned by other intelligent, non-human species. The opposing camp, led by Chomsky, insisted that language was a human product and there were parts of it that non-human species could never ape. 

Terrace, who still does research on primate intelligence at Columbia, had heard stories about another precocious chimpanzee named Washoe, who lived with her scientist "parents" at the University of Nevada in Reno and had been taught to communicate through American Sign Language. 

But Terrace wasn’t satisfied with the way Washoe’s feats had been documented. Terrace wanted to raise young Nim among people, just as Washoe had been brought up, but scrupulously log his progress and learning abilities. If chimpanzees could in fact master elements of human language, he wanted to be sure how they did it, and how well they picked it up. "I wanted to have a total record of how Nim signed," Terrace told me.

Courtesy of "Project Nim"

It wasn't speech that Terrace was after: The vocal cords of chimpanzees weren't designed to replicate human speech. But if the behaviorists were correct, chimps, our nearest genetic relatives, should be able to learn and communicate using the grammatical rules and expressive elements that American Sign Language and spoken languages shared if they were brought up among people. 

So, at the age of 2 weeks, Nim Chimpsky was put in the foster care of Terrace's student, Stephanie LaFarge, who lived with her family in Manhattan. LaFarge, who even breast-fed Nim, would be the first of a string of chimp-sitters who tried to teach him American Sign Language. Laura-Ann Petitto, then an undergraduate at Columbia, would be next. She raised Nim from the time he was 3 months old until he was 4 years old. 

At first, the results were astonishing. Nim learned quickly, and his caretakers — Terrace's small army of students — carefully recorded reams of video and pages of notes describing Nim's signs and behavior. In all, Nim learned 120 words, and used them to communicate with thousands and thousands of phrases.

"[Other researchers used to say], this is like getting an SOS from out of space. And I felt the same way," Terrace told me. "How amazing would it be to ask a chimp how he felt about something?

Herb Terrace, Columbia University

The experimental data made it look as if Nim the "A" student had settled the matter: Human brains weren't that special when it came to language abilities. For a time, it seemed as though the behaviorists had a resounding victory on their hands.

Terrace was writing up his findings for the journal Science when one day, as he watched a well-worn tape of Nim signing with his teacher, he began to notice that something was off. “Then I realized the teachers were prompting him,” Terrace told me. “They weren’t even aware of this. But Nim was.” 

In a “quarter of a second,” years of observations came crashing down, Terrace told me. "My understanding of Nim signing the grammatical rule was wrong," he said. "Eventually I concluded that our minds are fundamentally different from a chimp's."

It had to do with our understanding of ourselves as individuals. "We’re aware of our mind," Terrace said. "With a chimpanzee, I don’t think there’s any awareness of one’s own mind and another mind out there. That means you can’t have any concept in a chimpanzee of a self and other." 

Nim used the concepts of “I” and “Nim” interchangeably. When he wanted cookies, Nim's second caretaker Petitto told me, the chimp would take Petitto’s hand and lead her to the kitchen, to the locked cabinet in which the cookies were stored. While his message was clear, Petitto said, Nim could never take himself out of the picture. “He took me through the motions. It was physical. He couldn’t say, 'On Monday could you buy the cookies,'" she explained. 

Susan Kuklin

Nim signing with Laura-Ann Petitto.

And the ability to take ourselves out of the situations we describe through language is one of the things that make humans unique as communicators. “Language frees us up from the here and now, [to] let you and I talk about Mars without leaving Earth,” Petitto says. 

Terrace eventually concluded that chimpanzees lacked the "social intelligence" that made humans able to talk to each other, and Project Nim was closed. Nim, now a full-grown hulk of a chimp, was shipped off to a center in Norman, Okla., to rub shoulders with other chimpanzees his own size. 

With that, Nim’s participation in science ended — unless you count his stint as a medical test subject. His Oklahoma caretakers covertly sold him to a cancer research facility, but the sale was exposed by the media. A legal challenge resulted in Nim's return to the sanctuary in Norman, an adventure that "Project Nim" describes in detail. 

Though scientists concluded that Nim did not use language to communicate independently, they also saw that this was no dumb animal. "[The Nim project] opened people up to the possibility of incredible intelligence that they hadn't suspected before," said Frans de Waal, a primate researcher at Emory University who studies the emotional bonds that chimpanzees have with each other. 

Bringing a chimpanzee home to teach it human language was all the rage once upon a time, but that’s old hat now, he said. Communication studies on chimp behavior now look at the many and varied ways in which chimps and other primates interact naturally. The Nim project was pivotal in giving scientists an early glimpse of those rich possibilities. “We feel like the language studies have opened up an enormous amount of knowledge about cognition, but not about linguistics,” de Waal said. 

De Waal is particularly interested in chimp communication through body language and gestures. It’s complex, involved and surprisingly similar to human gestural communication. “If you put young human children with chimpanzees, they make wonderful playmates,” de Waal told me. “They understand each other perfectly because their body language is the same — there’s an enormous similarity.” 

Chimps have also shown a deep capacity for empathy. When one family of chimps experiences a death, "other chimpanzees come over and comfort them," de Waal said. 

Laura-Ann Petitto, who was Nim's longest caregiver, still speaks gushingly about her emotional bond with Nim. “It’s unlike anything you’ve experienced," she told me. "It’s not like being with a child, it's not like being with a dog — [Nim] was his own category. So he pulled out of me emotions and thoughts that were unique to me, and very powerful, because he was unlike any category that we have." 

Harry Benson

"Project Nim," the documentary, opened in U.S. theaters on Friday.

Petitto said her experience with Nim deeply motivated and influenced her work on the human brain. "I know how the brain tissue changes over time. I can look inside a baby's brain at a couple of days old and I can understand if that baby is at risk for language disorders later in its life," she told me. "All of these gifts that I can give to our species have been fundamentally informed by my work through Nim. So there’s been a wonderful closed circle."

More recent research reveals that chimps may be more attuned to understand human speech than previously thought, even if they can’t communicate themselves. A study published last month in Current Biology reported that a chimp raised by humans, as Nim was, could understand distorted human speech sounds. Such findings highlight "the importance of early experience in shaping speech perception," the study’s lead author told BBC News. 

Though he does not work on language studies any more, Terrace continues to explore the intelligence and memory capacity of monkeys, studying how quickly and extensively they remember combinations and sequences of images and numbers. “I’ve been studying how good their memory is, and I found it’s fantastic,” Terrace says. “And, I can sort of relate that to the work I did with the chimp in that. These monkeys are much smarter than anybody thought. But that kind of smarts does not give you language.” 

More about animal communication:

• How to speak 'Avatar'
• Grow a new language in your head
• Humans wired for language at birth

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter and join our conversation on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

To learn more about 'Project Nim,' check out the film's website. The film was based on the book, 'Project Nim: The Chimp Who Would Be Human,' by Elizabeth Hess. 

Google

Winners of the Google Science Fair's top prizes include, from left, Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 age category; Shree Bose in the 17-18 age category and Grand Prize competition; and Naomi Shah in the 15-16 age category.

Shree Bose, an aspiring young scientist from Fort Worth, Texas, won the top prize in the Google Science Fair for her project on ovarian cancer's resistance to cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug.

Bose's stash of geeky goodies includes $50,000 in scholarship money, a ticket for a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands, a chance to visit one of four big science institutions ... and a custom-made set of blocks from Lego, one of the sponsors of the contest.

Shree Bose with Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist.

Lauren Hodge and Naomi Shah were also winners in the judges' eyes. Hodge won in the 13- to 14-year-old category for her project on the effects of marinades on carcinogens in grilled chicken. Shah looked into the effect of air pollution on asthma — research that won her the top prize in the 15- to 16-year-old category. Shree Bose was the winner in the 17- to 18-year-old category as well as the winner of the Google Grand Prize. 

All three winners were given trophies made of Lego blocks. 

Google announced the science-fair competition in January and was flooded with 7,500 project entries from more than 10,000 participants in 90 countries. Judges whittled this list down to 15 finalists in the three age groups. 

The winners were selected by a cast of research bigwigs, including the director general of CERN, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American, National Geographic explorers, science filmmakers, and Google's own director of research, Peter Norvig. 

The teens who made the list of finalists investigated problems we already have, and some even built solutions. Who wouldn't want a safer sailboat or a safer herbicide? 

The finalists in the 13- to 14-year-old age group are: 

• Michelle Guo - Alzheimer's disease
• Anand Srinivasan - prosthetics technology
• Lauren Hodge - carcinogens in marinades 
• Daniel Arnold - railroad switch designs to prevent derailments 
• Luke Taylor - "Programming in Pure English" 

The 15- to 16-year-olds stepped it up a notch:

• Dora Chen - facial recognition for dementia patients 
• Naomi Shah - air pollution and asthma
• Harine Ravichandran - power lines and efficient electricity transmission 
• Gavin Ovsak - submersible water turbines
• Skanda Koppula - mapping the ocean floor

The 17- to 18-year-olds that made the finals were: 

• Shree Bose - ovarian cancer and drug resistance
• Christopher Neilson - a better GPS using stereoscopic cameras
• Vighnesh Leonard Shiv - music algorithms 
• Shaun Lim Hsein Yang - UV light as a natural herbicide
• Matthew Morris - improved keel design for safer sailboats 

After a weekend of visiting and touring the Google HQ in Mountain View, Calif., the 15 finalists presented their projects to the judging panel before the awards ceremony.

The prize winners were announced at a gala event at Google's headquarters, presided over by Mariette DiChristina, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American. There were other speakers, too: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joked that he wanted to hire all 15 finalists; and inventor Dean Kamen, whose advice to the young scientists included the Google motto: "Don't be evil." 

More on science contests:

• The science fair goes online
• 'Trek' tricorders could win $10 million 
• Google funds $30 million moon prize  

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter, and join our conversation on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

Lockheed Martin

A next-generation space surveillance system will rely on high-resolution radar and high-performance computing.

The space-junk alerts that have been sounded on the International Space Station over the past couple of weeks highlight the need for the “Space Fence,” a next-generation system for tracking orbital debris that’s due to begin operation in 2015.

One of the alerts, on June 28, came so late that the station didn't have time to get out of the way. The six astronauts living aboard the orbital outpost had to take shelter in Russian Soyuz lifeboats while debris of unknown origin zoomed past at a distance of just 850 feet (260 meters).

The other alert came Sunday, just as the space shuttle Atlantis was beginning its last visit to the space station. Initially, mission managers worried that the station-shuttle complex would have to be moved out of the way of some Soviet-era satellite debris, but today they said the junk would pass by harmlessly at a distance of 11 miles (18 kilometers).

The first case in particular demonstrates why debris-trackers need to know more about what's out there, said Doug Burgess, manager for space situational awareness programs at Raytheon.

"They only had 15 hours to make a decision about whether to maneuver or not, and clearly human life was at stake," Burgess told me today. "If the capability that Space Fence brings to bear were available, they would have had a much longer lead time."

Today, orbital-debris trackers at NASA and the U.S. Strategic Command can keep track of only the tip of the iceberg: About 20,000 pieces of space junk have been cataloged, but experts estimate that somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 objects larger than a centimeter (half an inch) are in Earth orbit. At orbital speeds of up to 17,500 mph, even an inch-wide piece of debris could destroy a satellite or damage the space station if it struck in the wrong place.

"This issue has always been on the minds of people who are trying to use space for all the things that it's used for today. ... We really are heavily reliant on space," John Morse, director of Lockheed Martin's Space Fence Program, told Discovery News.

More satellites in orbit tend to breed more space junk, as illustrated by the 2009 collision of a defunct Russian weather satellite and an Iridium telecom satellite, which left thousands of additional pieces of debris in orbit. "The situation is only going to get worse in time," Burgess said.

That's where the $3.5 billion Space Fence comes in. The existing radar tracking system, known as the Air Force Space Surveillance System, uses VHF and UHF frequency bands to track orbital debris, but those wavelengths are too wide to catch the small stuff. The new system will be far more sensitive because it'll operate in finer-resolution S-band wavelengths.

"It's an order-of-magnitude improvement," Burgess said.

But that's just the start: The next-generation Space Fence will also rely on high-performance computing to identify and keep track of orbital paths for what's likely to be hundreds of thousands of bits of orbiting junk. That should provide better "predict-ahead ability," Burgess said. Right now, NASA's rules call for the space station's crew to take evasive action — or prepare to abandon ship — if a piece of debris is projected to fly within an imaginary "pizza box" that's about 15 miles (25 kilometers) on each side and a half-mile (0.75 kilometers) above and below the station. The Space Fence would reduce the margin of error.

"Things like the pizza box get smaller, your uncertainty gets smaller, your ability to predict orbital tracks in advance becomes greater," Burgess said.

Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are in competition for the Space Fence contract, and in February, the U.S. Air Force provided each company with a $107 milllion, 18-month design contract. The designs are to get a preliminary review next February, with the contract awarded a year from now. The first of three planned globe-girdling radar installations is to be in operation in 2015, and the Space Fence should be fully operational in 2020. The favored sites for the installations are in Australia, the Marshall Islands and Ascension Island.

$3.5 billion may sound like a lot to pay for an invisible fence. But when you consider that the space station alone is a $100 billion-plus investment that needs to last until at least 2020 ... well, it just seems to me that they can't build that fence fast enough.

More about the space junk threat:

• Japan to go fishing ... for space debris
• Laser eyed to remove space junk from orbit
• NASA says it's stretched too thin to fight debris
• Europe creating a space-debris tracker of its own

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.