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The idea of space tourism has been around for quite a while now with several millionaires expressing a serious interest in paying for a trip into outer space. First touted by science fiction writers, in the last few years the idea seems to have gained some pace and looks like it may become a reality fairly soon.

Branson’s Virgin Group founded a company called Virgin Galactic in 2004 with the stated aim of flying non trained tourists on sub-orbital and eventually orbital flights. The first flights will go to an altitude of 62 miles and allow the passengers to experience weightlessness for a cost of $200,000 each. Apparently the price tag hasn’t proved a barrier and they claim to have sold over 200 tickets already but the date the flight will take place remains a mystery.

Virgin Galactic have spent the last few years developing an aircraft called White Knight Two which is a bizarre two hulled aircraft which will carry the Space Ship Two to it’s blast off height. The new crafts were developed after customers complained that the first craft was only going to take them to the edge of space and they expected more for their money. The new crafts will allow them to experience weightlessness and this seems to have satisfied them. The carrier aircraft has already made a successful test flight in Mojave, California but the Space Ship Two that it will carry is still in development. Virgin Galactic have ordered five of the Space Ship Two rockets which carry two pilots and six passengers each and two of White Knight Two carrier crafts.

The tests are continuing and since the average age of the first group of passengers is over fifty they are going to pains to ensure that the entire process is safe. The worry is that the elderly passengers won’t cope with the G-forces that they will experience when the rocket fires.

Over the Christmas period it was announced that Virgin Galactic had signed a deal with the State of New Mexico. A 20 year lease agreement which cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars has been signed and New Mexico will be the location of Spaceport America.

The Spaceport will be the hub for all flights and the interest stirred up by space travel is expected to create many jobs and spark tourism in the area. The design is now complete and construction is due to start early this year with the next round of funding already in place. Virgin Galactic may be the first to sign the lease agreement and agree to base their headquarters in New Mexico but several other aerospace companies are also in talks with the Spaceport Authority.

The tests continue and obviously the safety of the passengers will be the chief concern before any flights are liable to go ahead. However the fact that there are now several companies pursuing the idea and a growing queue of rich would-be astronauts desperate to hop onboard may make this a reality sooner rather than later. The first flights are currently scheduled for 2009.

Wired News reports that scientists and astronomers have formed the Dark Skies Awareness group, which as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy is going to lobby for people to turn out the lights. The group reports that a fifth of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way because of light pollution.

Light pollution is a serious problem for astronomers. At the Palomar observatory in California, city lights are now directly observable through a gap in the mountains. According to Dave Kornriech with Cornell University, “Many observers have given up looking at objects in the southwestern sky, because the light pollution is so bad in that direction.” He adds that if the current trend of growth with the neighboring city of San Diego continues, “in the next ten years or so, Palomar will be useless for deep-sky astronomy.” The Mount Wilson observatory outside Pasadena has already been decommissioned due to the encroachment of urban light pollution. Although many other observatories in remote locations are unaffected at this point, one wonders, how long will it be before they too are rendered useless?

Whenever I talk about this to someone, inevitably the first thing they say is, “Turn out the streetlights? That’s stupid! People will die in traffic accidents!” Fortunately, no one is asking cities to turn their streetlights off. However, properly shading streetlights so that the light points down instead of up would both improve streetlight efficiency, and reduce the amount of ambient glow in the sky. Most street lights pour as much light uselessly into the sky as they point down onto the street.

Buildings – both residential and office – are also culprits. Leaving the lights on at night inside an office is not just a waste of money, it is contributing to light pollution. At home, many people install bright lights which shine all night, from dusk until dawn. Does the front of your house really need to be lit up with daylight intensity, 24 hours per day? Homeowners concerned about safety and prowlers can remedy this problem simply by installing lights on a motion detector.

Last year, over 400 cities across the world celebrated Earth Hour by turning out the lights for one hour. Google’s page went to a black background and the lights which illuminate the San Francisco Bay Bridge were turned off.

Turning off unnecessary lighting, and using more efficient lighting that puts the light where it needs to go, is a perfect example of a win-win-win solution. The first “win” is the money saved by using electricity more judiciously. The second “win” is in the overall impact on climate change, by using fewer resources to achieve the same results. The third “win” is for astronomers, migrating birds, and anyone who has ever looked up at the sky.

A darker sky is a better sky, for everyone.

40 years ago tonight, on Christmas Eve, 1968, Lunar Module Pilot William Anders, in a live television broadcast, announced that they were approaching lunar sunrise, and that he had a message for “all the people back on Earth.” He then began to read from Genesis 1:1–10:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” . . .

Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell took up the reading, and read through the creation story in Genesis, until he was relieved by Commander Frank Borman, who finished the creation story, and wished the entire world a merry Christmas. You can see a video of the live telecast here. Lovell, Anders and Borman were the first humans to leave Earth orbit, entering lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. It was Apollo 8 that took the famous “Earth rise” image linked above, showing Earth as it looks from space, something none of us had ever seen before— in a photograph that was an unplanned act of serendipity.

Forty years ago, we were racing to beat the Russians to the moon; now we jointly operate the International Space Station. All three astronauts reminisce about the experience here, and in this official NASA video. Although historically, we were, very much, in a rush to space to “beat” the Russians, when the time came, the successful lunar orbit was treated as a triumph for all of humanity, everywhere, in the true spirit of Christmas, and science.

Merry Christmas, to everyone, everywhere.

Bad news for all who have put stock in the tales and theories revolving around Alien abduction: Steven Hawking, while commenting upon the 50th anniversary of NASA, called such stories the product of “weirdos.” Even I will admit to feeling a tad heartbroken at such a remark coming from the revered physicist, thinking at first that he was dismissing the very thought of alien life itself. Not that I have piled all of my chips in said claims, but there have been times in my life when I desperately wanted them to be true.

I grew up in space, not literally of course but in grand works of fiction, both literary and cinematic, that regaled the swashbuckling tales of futuristic heroes and heroines. Now, I also had enough legitimate astronomy texts and an elementary grasp on the physics of space travel to know that tales such as those would likely never happen within my life-time, if ever at all. But I had always hoped that at some point, I’d be able to witness some sort of ‘First Contact,’ no matter how small it was. Hell, I’d probably have settled for a belligerent attack on our planet if I had gotten too old and desperate.

Then in recent months, all sorts of reports of water on Mars and CO2 on Distant Planets got me excited: Maybe the breakthrough I had always dreamed of is right around the corner. However, if Stephen Hawking is not a subscriber, I do not know if I can be. Bummer.

But wait!

While he did say such disparaging things regarding supposed alien abductions, when asked if he thought we were alone in this massive universe, he responded with a resounding “probably not,” and proceeded to give us three scenarios in which he saw the greatest possibilities. One was boring, one was exciting and one was middle of the road. And which one did he prefer? Why, the last one of course, though that is not the most riveting scenario for my sci-fi riddled mind. And yes, I realize he is just one man and he offered up nothing more than an opinion but it is nice to have an endorsement of such possibilities from someone so respectable for it is the belief in such possibilities that will propel us into the great unknown.

In 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon, Titan. It snapped pictures for an hour before its power ran out. Wired News is reporting that one of the images has been announced as proof that methane exists in liquid form on the moon.

Astronomers have cause to believe that there might be a full environmental cycle of liquids on Titan, similar to what we have on Earth. Except where Earth’s cycle involves water, Titan’s cycle would involve methane. Methane would evaporate from the surface, form into methane clouds, fall back to land as methane rain, and gather in methane lakes. Titan has observable clouds and lakes, so the question is whether methane mingles between the two.

If so, Titan may be supporting life at the microscopic level. On earth, microbes that live off methane do quite well for themselves. Titan’s atmosphere is similar to that of the early Earth’s, and if microbes lived here, they could easily have a foothold on Titan as well.

The evidence for liquid methane on Titan is… let’s just say “shaky.” Spots and splotches appeared on many of the Huygens probe’s pictures, and most of them were ruled out as “electronic imprints created by cosmic rays.” However, one of the spots were deemed too large to have been caused by cosmic rays. The spots appeared out of nowhere, and vanished shortly thereafter.

Titan’s average surface temperature is 94 K, so the theory is that the heat from the Huygens probe may have vaporized some methane, which then gathered on its lens as dew. This is an interesting first, but it’s hardly evidence that methane usually falls from the sky.

Astronomers pored over the Huygens probe’s pictures with interest, but found no evidence for methane rain. The photos show “high, wispy clouds” and a lot of dust in the air. Presumably if rain was common, dust would be cleaned from the air. However, the Huygens probe only took pictures for an hour, and only in one location on Titan. One can’t discount the evidence of Arizona, where it’s often dusty and rains infrequently.

New Scientist has published a report which deems the concept of a space elevator unsound. This adds another salvo to the eternal “Would It Work?” debate which has been raging through the science community for years.

Many people have proposed a space elevator as a permanent, cost-effective alternative to using various forms of flight to reach space. In the typical scenario, a tether is attached to the planet at one end, and to a counterweight at the other end. The counterweight is a big object in geosynchronous orbit, which keeps it in a fixed position above the anchor pad.

A variety of different vehicles could then traverse the tether, ferrying passengers and materiel into space at a fraction of the cost of, say, a shuttle launch. Ideally, a space elevator would also be quite a bit safer than either manned or unmanned flight, since there are fewer points of failure, and more opportunities for safety points.

The New Scientist article cites the Coriolis force as the most likely cause for failure of a space elevator. The Coriolis “force” makes a moving object appear to be deflected, when it is viewed from a rotating point of reference. For example, imagine that you are standing at the center of a moving, and you have a friend standing directly above the carousel in the bucket of a crane. If you throw a ball directly towards the edge of the carousel, your friend in the crane will see the ball travel in a straight line from the center of the carousel to the edge. However, from your perspective, the ball’s trajectory will appear to be deflected to the side into a curve.

The planet Earth, of course, is a rotating point of reference. If you step off it and start climbing a bit of rope into the sky, the Coriolis force will start to pull you off to the side, even though the rope itself is holding still. This movement could cause the elevator to begin swinging back and forth, and you don’t want it to do that.

One measure to prevent this oscillation from getting out of control is to slow down the rate of travel. The slower you travel, the less effect the Coriolis force will have, and the more time the counterweight will have to shift and counteract the oscillation. Unfortunately, scientists in the New Scientist article have crunched the numbers and decided that this puts the optimal transit time at about twenty four days. This would put a damper on one of the prime benefits of a space elevator, which is the potential for a relatively rapid turnaround time.

It’s hard to deny that the feasibility of constructing a space elevator on Earth is poor. Between the hazards posed to the tether by air traffic, space junk, and the Van Allen radiation belt, and the risks posed to nearby populations by a falling tether, a space elevator is better suited to uninhabited planets like Mars.

Of course, the New Scientist has pooh-poohed the concept of a space elevator in the past. Not everyone is deterred by the challenges – the First Annual Japan Space Elevator Conference was held in Tokyo last November, and the LiftPort Group has a countdown timer posted on their website.

Scientists have long theorized that the “magic spark” that created life on Earth may have come from meteors plunking into our primordial soup. Wired News reports that a team of Japanese scientists has set up a teeny tiny scale model which offers proof of concept that meteors could in fact have done the deed.

The origin of life on Earth has been the subject of popular myth, scientific theory, and religious debate for as long as myth, science, and religion have existed. The modern era for this line of scientific inquiry began early in the 19th century, when Italian scientist Francisco Redi disproved the prevailing theory of “spontaneous generation.” The theory of spontaneous generation held that living animals arose from decaying organic material. Redi prevented flies from accessing a pile of rotting meat, thus proving that maggots did not spontaneously arise from the meat itself.

Spontaneous generation sounds kooky to us today, but there’s no getting around the fact that at one point, the Earth was just one big, empty lump of rock. It has long been speculated that some or all of the chemicals necessary for life were carried to Earth by meteors. In the Late Heavy Bombardment or “lunar cataclysm” between 3,800 and 4,100 million years ago, the Earth suffered an extensive period of meteor strikes. The specific cause for this increase in meteor activity is unknown, but it would have both deposited large amounts of interstellar material on our planet, and made it a very tough place for wee little organisms to take hold.

There is no single agreed-upon theory as to how life arose from early conditions on the planet. Before a living organism can arise, the basic building blocks of its biology have to form. But which came first, the cell membrane, or the DNA which it contains? In other words, proteins first, or nucleic acids? Scientists have argued all sides of this debate for many years. Recently, a team of Japanese scientists decided to throw their hat into the ring.

The scientists constructed a microscopic scale model of the conditions they speculated were present on Earth, then used a propellant gun to shoot mock meteors into the “soup.” The impact of the pellets generated temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and caused fatty acids, amines, and amino acids to form.

Although they have not yet repeated their experiment, and a number of scientists have criticized their methods and findings, the Japanese team’s results are intriguing. If the recipe for basic organic molecules is ” + meteors” these conditions are not rare. Closest to home, NASA recently announced solid proof that Mars has water now, and was wet in the distant past.

Farther from home, who can say? It appears that the Late Heavy Bombardment affected our solar system at just the right time. We still don’t know the causes or origin of the LHB, but meteors hit planets all the time. Based on this most recent experiment, maybe the origination of life isn’t as unusual an event as one might think.

Photo courtesy Wired News/Yoshihiro Furukawa

Sapporo, the Japanese beer-maker, has brewed “Space Beer” entirely from barley grown on the Space Station. The beer has a 5.5% alcohol content. There are only 100 liters of the special Space brew, so don’t look for it in the U.S. anytime soon. There’s something enormously fun about the fact that one of the first things humans do upon reaching space is figure out how to make beer.

Establishing a space station has preoccupied the minds of people looking up into the stars since at least the mid 1800s. The famous rocket scientist, Dr. Werner von Braun, published a proposed design in Collier magazine, in 1952. The design used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in 1968, closely resembled von Braun’s concept.

In 1971, Russia launched Salyut 1, Earth’s first space station.
Russia boosted two more space labs into orbit before America launched Skylab, in 1973—but both Salyut 2 and Cosmos 557 crashed before the cosmonaut crew arrived. America abandoned Skylab in 1974, because of the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of getting crew there and back. Mir was the first cooperative international space station effort before finally falling out of orbit in 2001.

The pioneers of those earlier Space Stations paved the way for International Space Station Alpha where scientists and astronauts from participating countries combine efforts to establish an outpost in space ISS construction began in 1998, and is scheduled to be complete in 2011. The station has been continuously crewed since November of 2000, establishing a continuous, internationally-supported, human presence in space.

The next time you’re outside, late at night and far from city lights, look up. ISS is visible to the naked eye from earth. There’s even an ISS tracking site online, to let you know when and where to watch.

Finally, I leave you with a clip from “Delivering Destiny”— footage of Space Station history.

In the field of cosmology, some chunks of gas and dust are fascinating enough to be named. One in particular has been of interest to scientists since its discovery in 1986. It is an unusual comet called Machholz 1.

Unusual is Relative

Our solar system has its fair share of comets. Until recently, all of them have been classified into two categories. The majority of the comets observed in our solar system have a chemical composition that favors water ice. The estimated average H2O content of the first class of comets is 10^13 of ice. The second class of comets are distinguished by the notable presence of carbon molecule depletions, giving them the title “Carbon-Chain Depletion Comets”. Why the difference? The current consensus is that comets develop different chemical composition based on where they typically reside. Class 1 comets are believed to have formed in the vicinity of our system’s gas giants and subsequently traveled to the Oort Cloud where many of them remain. Class 2 comets have often been traced to the icy Kuiper Belt, specifically the much colder, farther out regions where their lack of exposure to the sun alters the rate of chemical depletion.

But Machholz 1 is a chemical oddity. While it bears many of the same carbon compounds as Class 2 comets, such as C2, C3 and cyanogen, they appear in much lower levels than those found in Carbon-Chain Depletion Comets. Recent observation has indicated that Machholz 1 isn’t alone in this. A rare few identified comets share this unusual characteristic.

The Big Deal About Depletion

Scientists are interested in comets primarily for their age. It is believed that most comets formed in a primordial stage of the universe when systems like our own were just coming into existence. Their exposure to extremes in temperature and radiation make comets into valuable time capsules, hinting at conditions in our galaxy long before Earth was even a protoplanetary disk. In fact, it’s highly likely that a significant portion of the water on our planet came from early comet collisions.

The low levels of carbon compounds in this new class of comet suggest a number of possibilities. Objects like Machholz 1 may be extremely old, from extremely far away, or both. In the first case, an older Class 2 comet would see a greater amount of depletion, indicating that Machholz 1 is one of the earliest objects in our solar system. Studying it would open up new avenues of thought concerning what our solar system was like in its nebular period. The other possibility is that the pending “Class 3” comets come from an alien solar system where the overall chemical content is different from ours.

Continued Opportunity for Study

Machholz 1 may be an interloper from another system or a long-lost cousin of closer comets, but these days it makes its home in an orbit around our sun. It is projected to come into view again in 2012. While this and other comets like it haven’t been extensively studied over the past two decades, new data from its last appearance in 2007 has piqued the scientific community’s interest in these objects of unknown origin. In three years’ time, Machholz 1 is likely to get a lot more attention than it’s used to.

After traveling more than six and a half million miles in sixteen days, the space shuttle Endeavor landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California, on Sunday the 30th of November. Originally scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center, the weather didn’t cooperate so NASA had to change the original re-entry and landing plans. Endeavor will be ferried home on a Boeing 747, probably later this week. You can find mission pictures here.
I always breathe a sigh of relief when a shuttle takes off or touches down safely. Since the Challenger exploded just after launch in 1986, and the Columbia re-entry disaster in 2003, there’s been that awareness of tension about the danger our explorers face, and that poignant sense of waiting and hoping for their safe return. It’s always been part of the experience of those who stay behind, I suppose.
Remember the voice-over from the opening credits on the original Star Trek? “Space, the final frontier . . . ” In 1977, the first space shuttle was fittingly named Enterprise, in response to a write-in campaign organized and waged by Star Trek fans. How long do you suppose we’ve looked out at the stars and wondered what we’d find there? Space truly is a frontier, still. Anyone drawn to tales of exploration and adventure can’t help, I suspect, but feel the tug of wonder when they look up at the stars. Whether it’s the first time we marvel at the Northern Lights, make a wish on a shooting star, or drive miles out of town to sit out on a cold and windy hillside in the middle of the night to watch a meteor shower—sooner or later the question comes up, “What’s out there?” Then sooner or later, some wise-guy says, “Well, let’s go find out.”
We can’t all go to space. Thanks to the ‘net, though, we can all watch the brave and lucky few who do get to go. And millions of us watched the Twitter feed for MarsPhoenix, in the days before the lander finally succumbed and went silent —and I know for a fact that I wasn’t the only one choked up, upon seeing that last tweet, in binary. The Mars team has tweeted that they need a name for the next rover, by the way, so they’re running a contest for kids to name MarsScienceLab And there’s the NASA TV site, if you just can’t get enough, or you’d rather have pictures than text.
Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, then Endeavor continued the program that Enterprise began. Columbia and Challenger, of course, both met with disaster. The last planned flights of the three remaining shuttles in service—the last planned flights of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program—are scheduled for 2010. I really, really hope they’re figuring out where to go next, and even better ways for us to get there.