Alan Boyle writes:Halloween is the traditional time for ghost stories, whether they're true or ... well, let's just say embellished. Here at the Log, our tradition is to share spooky tales of the unexplained as well as the explainable. In past years, we've had the saga of the haunted garbage disposal, the tale of the phantom horse, the out-of-body birthing experience, the hole in the attic and the case of the unseen door. Now it's your turn ...

OK, I admit that I'm a little late to the Halloween party. Blame it on Baltimore: I've been covering the New Horizons in Science symposium, sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing - and I've been so busy that I almost had to put off my plan to visit the grave of Edgar Allen Poe, Baltimore's local boy made mournful (see below).

So I'm leaving it to you to set the proper mood for the spooky season. To get into the spirit, you can check out Archaeology magazine's exploration of Halloween's Celtic roots, a documentary on the "British UFO Files" and this saga of a serious ghost-hunter. If you're on the skeptical side, you'll enjoy these scientific disproofs of the supernatural, this survey of ghost-hunting history amd a professor's Halloween reality check.

Do you have a tale of the unexplained? Or a spooky experience that turned out to have a perfectly natural explanation? Feel free to share them in the comments section below.

Update for 10:50 p.m. ET (7:50 p.m. PT) Oct. 31: While I pondered, weak and weary, over the map to Poe's monument in the Westminster Graveyard ... I finally decided to take a walk and see what I could see of the landmark.

Fortunately, I didn't get to the cemetery upon a midnight dreary, but upon a 9 o'clock cheery. A Halloween graveyard party was winding up, and I was able to slip through the wrought-iron gate to take in the festivities.

In one corner, a masked, red-caped woman was reading from Poe's "Masque of the Red Death." More than a dozen listeners, some in costume, spread out in the grass, amid the gravestones. Some lounged cross-legged on the tops of the burial vaults, as if they were taking in a summer concert rather than a fall spookfest.

In another corner, an actor playing the part of a Revolutionary War officer perched gargoylishly on a monument in the darkness, explained the ins and outs of the Continental Army to bystanders.

In the middle, tourgoers trooped through the catacombs of Westminster Hall, stopping by real-life crypts and graves. One epitaph, written by a husband for his late wife in 1813, exclaimed: "Her death was as calm and resigned as her life was pure and virtuous!"

And in the northwest corner, the Poe family's marble monument was illuminated by spotlights. Someone placed a fresh bouquet of roses on the stone ledge as a tribute, but somehow the withered flowers left behind from past visits seemed more fitting for the occasion.

Strangely enough, the atmosphere at the Halloween tour wasn't gloomy or macabre at all, but surprisingly lighthearted. But then again, who can feel gloomy when you're in the presence of teenage trick-or-treaters dressed like winged sprites, Japanese schoolgirls and good-looking Goths? It was the most pleasant cemetery I've ever been in.

Halloween at the Poe gravesite comes just once a year, but you can visit the monument any day until dusk. Guided tours of Westminster Hall and Burying Ground are occasionally organized by the Mysterious Maryland Tour Co.

Alan Boyle writes:• The Guardian: Is robo-war ethical?
• 'The Egypt Code' and more from Sub Rosa magazine
• Improbable Research: The biology of B-movie monsters
• The Onion: Science disproves vampires

Alan Boyle writes:Will the Democrats win control of the House? Will the Republicans will hang onto the Senate? Who's going to win the presidency in 2008? No matter which side you come down on, there are virtual stock markets where you can put your money where your political views are. And an economist says the markets seem to do at least as well as the pollsters on predicting the election's outcome.

"Price is a beautiful thing," Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said Sunday. He laid out the latest line on political markets and other types of predictive schemes during the annual New Horizons in Science symposium, presented in Baltimore by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

These sorts of markets aren't all that new - the Iowa Electronic Markets, for example, have been letting online users put down real money on their election projections for the past decade. Currently, there's a rising sentiment that the Democrats will indeed take over the House, with the Republicans in charge of the Senate.

To be sure, the outlook could change as quickly as the stock market does - but Wolfers' point is that online prediction markets can come closer to the mark than the political polls. "These markets are quite accurate on average," he said.

You don't even need to limit the trading pool to hard-core political junkies, Wolfers noted. In fact, it's better to have "as much uninformed, idiotic money in the market as you can," he said.

"It's their money that draws in the intelligent money," he explained.

Wolfers took a closer look at some of the past and present predictions - and laid out some interesting implications:

• Based on a market analysis of the prices for Democratic primary contenders in 2004, as well as the trading on the party's presidential prospects back then, vice-presidential candidate John Edwards just might have won the election if he had run at the top of the ticket. Edwards had a market projection of 55.4 percent of the vote - while the actual Democratic candidate, John Kerry, came in at 50.1 percent.
• For the 2008 election, a similar analysis projects Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., as garnering 48.7 percent of the virtual vote, while "Anybody But Clinton" tests out at 48.1. "The implication is that Hillary is at least as electable as the competing Democratic candidates," Wolfers said.
• On the other side of the political fence, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., draws a virtual vote of 54.0 percent, with "Anybody But McCain" getting 43.8 percent. Wolfers said that should give pause to anyone in the Republicans' ABM camp.
• On other fronts, the markets indicate a 28 percent chance that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden will be captured by 2007; a 28 percent chance that Iran will be attacked by the end of 2007; a 20 percent chance that military action will be taken against North Korea by the end of 2007; and a 22 percent chance that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will resign in 2006.

"As of now, you're a certified political expert," Wolfers joked.

Under questioning, the economist acknowledged that markets weren't the perfect way to arrive at rational results, whether you're talking about predicting elections or making investments.

"The markets do it terribly," he admitted. "But 'terribly' turns out to be better than anyone else can do."

For more from Wolfers about prediction markets, check out this PDF file of a draft paper he and a co-author put together in 2003. You can also monitor the Iowa Electronic Markets, as well as the NewsFutures prediction market, the Foresight Exchange and TradeSports. There's even a box-office futures market at the Hollywood Stock Exchange and a hurricane futures market at HedgeStreet.

If you're interested in a newfangled approach to grand old political coverage, be sure to check in with our recently redesigned politics section. And let me know whether you think all these prediction markets are the wave of the future or just a gimmicky gamble.

Alan Boyle writes:NASA says it wants to take a closer look at proposals for robotic space missions that would bring a piece of an asteroid back to Earth, sniff the air of Venus, map the moon's gravity field, and give the Deep Impact probe and/or the Stardust probe a new lease on life. Check out this news release for more about the concept studies being approved as part of the space agency's Discovery program - and stay tuned for the final selection next year.

Alan Boyle writes:• Planetary Society: Add your name to NASA's next Mars lander
• NASA: Don't forget to send a message to the asteroid belt
• Spitzer Science Center: Snake on a galactic plane!
• New Scientist: Elephant in a black hole!

Alan Boyle writes:• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Monster of the Milky Way' 
• Planetary Society: Last call for Pluto digital time capsule
• NASA: A growing intelligence around Earth
• Lifeboat Foundation: Shouting at the cosmos

Alan Boyle writes:Rocket science has become a common way to refer to anything that's difficult to do - but turning rocket science into a marketable entertainment event is almost as difficult as the science itself. Many have tried, including Mark Burnett, the mastermind behind such reality-TV blockbusters as "Survivor" and "The Apprentice." Now the folks behind the Rocket Racing League are piecing together their own entertainment puzzle, in hopes of producing a watchable, profitable package by next summer.

Rocket Racing League

The Rocket Racing League would use a virtual "racetrack in the sky" like the one shown here to indicate where the racing planes are going. Click on the image to watch a video demonstration from the Wirefly X Prize Cup, using a conventional private jet.

It may be taking longer than they thought. When the league's creation was announced last year, chief executive officer Granger Whitelaw hoped to have four flame-throwing rocket planes ready to race against each other in a demonstration fly-off by now. Instead, the first X-Racer is still under development at California-based XCOR Aerospace.

But the pieces are still fitting together: At this year's Wirefly X Prize Cup, Whitelaw announced that a third team, Santa Fe Racing, had signed up for a $1.4 million sponsorship package. Still more teams are being organized under the league's support - and Whitelaw, a venture capitalist who's also a veteran of the Indy car circuit, told me the first race could take place next August.

Among the venues being considered are New York and Las Vegas, with the X Prize Cup in New Mexico serving as the racing season's capper.

Whitelaw's goal is to turn the rocket plane races into the flying equivalent of NASCAR auto racing - something that can be sold to the masses, not the classes.

"This is not rocket science," Whitelaw told me. "You've got to take the rocket science out of it."

By that, he simply means that the races should be more like the America's Cup, the Indy 500 or the Olympics - and less like a space shuttle launch or a Mars rover mission. "It's got to be in the entertainment and the sports pages," he explained. "It can't stay on the technology pages."

To that end, the league has made several moves:

• Arthur Smith, the producer behind reality-TV shows ranging from "Hell's Kitchen" to "The Swan" to "Celebrity Duets," has signed on to head up TV production for the Rocket Racing League. "I feel like 'The Jetsons' has arrived," Smith told Variety last week. Whitelaw said A. Smith & Co. was gearing up to make its pitch to a variety of TV networks. "He was our No. 1 choice, and we got him," Whitelaw said of Smith.
• During the X Prize Cup, Whitelaw arranged for a Jumbotron demonstration of the league's virtual "racetrack in the sky" - a technology analogous to the trickery that paints a yellow first-down line on the TV screen while you're watching a football game. In this case, a series of yellow boxes are superimposed on cockpit views, or even from-the-ground views of planes in the air, to show the aerial course that the racers have to follow. The software can even create a synthetic view to track the planes through a virtual-reality version of the course (Watch a video of the X Prize Cup demonstration.)
• Billionaire Bill Koch, a veteran of America's Cup sailing competition, has joined the league's board - and former U.S. Rep. Robert Walker, an expert on space and science policy, has become an adviser to the league.

So although the Rocket Racing League's rockets haven't yet begun the competition, there seems to be plenty of action in the pits. Even Peter Diamandis - who is the co-founder of the racing league as well as other ventures including the X Prize Foundation, Zero Gravity Corp., Space Adventures and the International Space University - marveled at the fast pace.

"Of all the dozen startups I've done, this is the fastest," he told me.

Alan Boyle writes:• BBC: 'Tower of Babel' translator made
• Wired: Battle of the new atheism
• National Geographic: Mysteries, riches in ancient Syrian tombs
• USNews.com: Is there room for the soul? (via Daily Grail)

NASA / JPL / Cornell

A true-color version of NASA's "McMurdo Panorama" shows the terrain surrounding the Spirit Rover at its Martian winter haven in the Columbia Hills.

The milestone, and the picture, come on the heels of a hilarious parody in The Onion that's based on the assumption that Spirit is getting bored and depressed up there. The truth is that the Mars rover team is overjoyed with the performance put in by Spirit as well as Opportunity, its robotic sibling on the other side of the planet.

If there's any anthropomorphizing going on, Spirit tends to be seen as the tough, blue-collar robot, plugging away despite adversity, while Opportunity is the "Little Miss Perfect" of Mars exploration. At least that's the way top rover scientist Steve Squyres described them almost two years ago, when he voiced amazement that the darn things were still going after one Earth year.

Even though one of Spirit's six wheels is gimpy, things are looking up: The depths of winter have passed, and in two weeks Spirit is due to come out of a troublesome period for radio communications caused by the sun's position directly between Earth and Mars. Even during the current downtime, Spirit is sending an average of 15 megabits of data daily, via a relay on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Those bits include pictures as well as information about the Martian atmosphere, dust properties and surface composition.

Scientists are already using the McMurdo Panorama - which was assembled from almost 500 megabytes' worth of data, captured in 1,449 separate images - to plot Spirit's course once the sunshine gets strong enough to restart the robot's perambulations.

In today's advisory about the 1,000th Martian day of operations (which actually comes on Thursday), the rover team says Spirit's next destination will be a "nearby spot on Low Ridge to access different rock and soil samples while maintaining a good solar panel tilt toward the sun for the rest of the Martian winter."

Meanwhile, Opportunity is going strong on the rim of Victoria Crater in Meridiani Planum, and sending back its own selection of jaw-dropping images. It's particularly intriguing to see the raw images from the rovers, which have yet to be assembled into finished color views. Of course, some of those raw images merely show the sun or the rovers' color-calibration targets, so you have to be selective.

To keep up with all of NASA's Red Planet missions - including the latest arrival, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter - check out the space agency's Web portal as well as our own "Return to the Red Planet" section. 

Update for 5:30 a.m. PT  Oct. 26: In response to my query about the 1,000th Martian day of operation, also known as Sol 1000, top rover scientist Steve Squyres sent in this e-mail from Europe, where he's currently traveling:

"Yeah, Sol 1000 is a milestone for us... although personally I'm going to hold off on celebrating until we know for sure that we've actually made it to Sol 1000! There's no reason to think otherwise, of course. But right now both rovers are in superior conjunction - the period of time when Mars is out of sight behind the sun. As expected, we haven't heard from either vehicle for about a week and a half, and we don't expect to until early next week. Considering how far Spirit is past warranty, I think that'll be the time to celebrate! For now, we're just enjoying this brief forced vacation from daily flight operations.

"Regarding what's next for Spirit ... for the past several months the rover has been sunning itself on a north-facing slope, waiting for winter to end. Spring is now on its way, and the amount of solar power we have is creeping upward. Once we're ready to move again - which should be fairly soon - the plan is to head back to Home Plate, a place that we explored briefly before the start of winter. Home Plate was so interesting, and our time there was so short, that we've still got some unfinished business to take care of."

Alan Boyle writes:• Space.com: NASA wants you to name a piece of the space station
• Nature: Older embryos can survive stem-cell extraction
• Discover Magazine: Database digs up new meds
• Discovery.com: Amazon River once flowed in reverse

Alan Boyle writes:If there's a spaceflight in your future - whether it's a quick suborbital spin, a hypersonic rocket jaunt across the Pacific or a visit to a private-sector space station - chances are the Federal Aviation Administration is going to play a role in how that happens. The FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is in charge of regulating as well as promoting commercial launches - and in that spirit, FAA Administrator Marion Blakey announced last week that it's "all systems go" for commercial space.

Blakey's comments to the Wirefly X Prize Cup Executive Summit in New Mexico last Thursday were part pep talk, part safety reminder. On one side, she encouraged space entrepreneurs to jump in and keep opening up the final frontier:

"Commercial space is all systems go at this point.  And, might I add, liftoff has already occurred.  This is an industry that has the people who got in on the ground floor right in this room.  If you look around, you can see them.  If you're here, you're a likely candidate to join them.

"Now from the government's perspective, our official policy is this … to embrace the private sector's daring spirit and clever ingenuity. And yes, you better believe that includes space tourism.

"We are in the business of encouraging and enabling the private sector.  We develop regulations to make this high-risk business as safe as possible…And we make sure potential passengers are properly informed and are willing to accept the risks that remain. And then? Well, then we'll step aside … get out of your way … and let you do what you do best: innovate."

On the other side, she reiterated the FAA's commitment to safety as its top priority:

"This is an industry not without challenges.  It carries liability in some uncharted waters.  Carrying passengers is a huge responsibility.  The Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee that we convene regularly back in Washington … in fact, they're meeting next Wednesday … they discuss this issue at length.  I think they're right to do so.  It's always topic No. 1 on the agenda. Their goal is to develop a level of safety for the public and for passengers and to develop consensus about it.

"Truth be told, I wouldn't have it any other way. And believe me, Congress, the taxpayer and the passenger aren't in disagreement. Safety first. I've said this a number of times in a variety of settings, and it's always on point: If it's not safe, it's not going to fly.  Period."

Blakey clearly expects there'll be an assortment of safe space vehicles out there. "There's more than one way to go 62 miles up," she told the crowd. "I'd be surprised if, in our lifetime, there weren't showrooms for space vehicles."

In a quick follow-up interview, Blakey and the agency's associate administrator for commercial space transportation, Patricia Grace Smith, discussed the road ahead for private-sector space travel:

Blakey: The FAA is fully behind the commercial space endeavor, with full enthusiasm as well as the weight of resources that we can bring to bear on this. ...

Talking about the issues of liability and risk, a lot of the way we are addressing those is with the approach to safety risk management, and safety management systems. So there's a lot of carryover [from commercial aviation]. There's really not a reason to reinvent, particularly when it comes to those types of processes and approaches that tend to drive the risk factors down to a very low level. It's all data-driven, and it's all about getting in front of these issues.

Me: With the current legislation, informed-consent arrangements govern how the industry is regulated right now. When you're talking about risk management, do you see those sorts of risk studies affecting how the informed-consent process is managed? Or is there some other procedure that might be added to address the insurability of flights and to make sure the industry is on a solid foundation?

Blakey: Right now, we need to exercise the authority that we've been given. In the rule that we're putting forward on this, we'll be able to be fairly clear about what the limitations are as well as the specific information that will be provided. But this is a very new industry, with vehicles with little air track record. You provide all the information, all the modeling, all the simulation data, etc., but at some point there is a risk that a passenger has to accept. And that is what the informed-consent approach is all about.

Smith: Our permit process as well as our licensing process has two very key parts to it: a safety review, and a hazard analysis. That gets right at the risks. What are the particular hazards that could result?

Me: For the uninvolved public?

Smith: For the uninvolved public. What's the mitigation to overcome those risks? The legislators were very smart in looking at going forward in this industry, in that our job is to protect the uninvolved public on the ground. The passengers go at their risk. The instrument for that is safety records from us, and from the licensee or permittee, in exchange for the informed-consent safety form. It's with a lot of review and analysis nevertheless, particularly looking at the specific hazards posed by the operational characteristics of the vehicle.

Me: One of the big questions that's coming up is this issue of point-to-point suborbital travel - the talk that a suborbital vehicle might launch from one location, go through space and come down in another location. Are there any additional implications for regulating that routine? It could be that someone would have to enter through air traffic control space ... it's not as if you can cordon off a portion of airspace and say that the flight is limited to that airspace.

Blakey: That's the case with the space shuttle right now. One of the things that I'm proudest of our commercial space office and our air traffic control organization for doing is pulling together to do a hazard analysis - what kind of effect the debris field will have, what kinds of liabilities does it pose. So we've done a lot of preparation in this area.

Smith: It's very conceivable that point-to-point would be a way that an operator would want to go. Remember, our authority allows us to oversee launch and re-entry. So if that vehicle launches from an FAA-licensed launch site ... it'll come down at a re-entry site, and that site would have to be licensed as well.

In the future, not necessarily so far out in the future, you'll have the case of a vehicle launching from Washington - an orbital vehicle at some point - and landing in China someplace. Those are the big international ticket kinds of issues we're going to have to work, through the community, by way of the treaties, in order to accommodate that. The same is true for a foreign vehicle launching on U.S. soil: We would have to license it if it's coming into the U.S.

Me: Is there a sense that the division between the commercial space transportation side of the FAA and the commercial aviation side is still well-delineated, so that you won't have to have air traffic control clearance from the other side of the FAA?

Smith: The point there is that we already have a working relationship with air traffic. We are another user in the National Airspace System. There may be other users - unmanned aerial vehicles. What the profile is for our entry and exit from the NAS, when we have more regular flights, we'll have to work those configurations so that the transit is safe.

Blakey: That's one of the great things about the fact that there's clear delineation. Space is different. But at the same time, as this becomes a more robust industry, with a lot of launches - absolutely, there's going to be a need for very good protocols and very tight working relationships. We do not intend to hold back the industry. After all, I don't think anyone sees commercial space as being limited to a few uninhabited areas. In the long run, it will have a bigger field to play in.

Me: I guess another frontier would be manned orbital commercial flight - for example, the scenario of someone going to a Bigelow space module on a SpaceX Falcon rocket with a Dragon capsule. Will you have to start from square one for that, or do you see suborbital as a proving ground?

Smith: I think suborbital is definitely a proving ground. The big question in the scenario you just mentioned is, who licenses the habitat?

Me: That may come up sooner than you think, if Bob Bigelow has his way.

Smith: Ha!

Blakey: I'll tell you, it begins to feel like something that's only a sci-fi world.

Me: It seems like a sci-fi world, but it's becoming reality more quickly than you think.

Blakey: Exactly.

Alan Boyle writes:• The Onion: Mars rover beginning to hate Mars
• YouTube: 'White & Nerdy' | Slate: Weird Al, troubadork 
• Improbable Research: Hot bird-in-bird action
• Enterprise Mission: Data's Head on the moon

Alan Boyle writes:For most political junkies, the recently announced national space policy is hardly a blip compared with the congressional page scandal and the war in Iraq. But at least one political heavyweight, former Vice President Al Gore, sees the White House's new perspective on space as a case of Iraq all over again. Gore lambasted the policy during an off-the-record luncheon address in New Mexico - and like most off-the-record talks to a large group, this one has spilled onto the blogosphere, complete with a video clip.

The snippet from the Wirefly X Prize Cup Executive Summit - which took place in Las Cruces, N.M., last Thursday - features Gore's reaction to the idea that the United States should have maximum "freedom of action" in space.

The idea isn't new: For years, the Pentagon has worried about a future "Pearl Harbor" in space, in light of the fact that satellite reconnaissance and communications have become essential for the modern military. Just in the past couple of weeks, such concerns were heightened by reports that the Chinese had tried to use high-powered lasers to blind U.S. satellites.

In response, the United States has resisted international initiatives to place limitations on military space activities, and that has raised worries abroad - justified or not - that the Pentagon might be planning to deploy advanced space weapons, touching off an orbital arms race. There have also been reports that the U.S. military is looking into ways to disable or even shut down the vital Global Positioning System in a crisis.

In Gore's view, a policy of space unilateralism would repeat the mistakes made in Iraq. Here's his explanation, as reported in the Popular Science Blog:

"Very few people have analyzed the insides of this new space policy. I urge all of you who are interested in space to analyze it very carefully. It has the potential, down the road, to create the [same] kind of fuzzy thinking and chaos in our efforts to exploit the space resource as the fuzzy thinking and chaos the Iraq policy has created in Iraq. It is a very serious mistake, in my opinion.

"We in the United States of America may claim that we alone can determine who goes into space and who doesn't, what it's used for and what it's not used for, and we may claim it effectively as our own dominion to the exclusion, when we wish to exclude others, of all others. That's hubristic."

Gore's comments on the space policy represent just one section of his X Prize Cup talk - which also touched upon what he has called the "climate crisis" and the importance of using the "space resource."

I was a fly on the wall during the summit, and his comments sure sounded like on-the-record observations to me. But when I asked him to confirm that the speech was on the record (which is the usual courtesy at an off-the-record event), he basically said no. Later, when I asked him again whether there was any on-the-record statement he'd be willing to make about the space policy, he told me, "Not at this time."

Maybe the X Prize Cup talk was just a test drive for a future public pronouncement. Be that as it may, Gore's views on the space issue are now out in the open - and they're already starting to draw fire ("just one more reason why Democrats can't be trusted with national security'). The White House policy pronouncement has also come in for some flak (for its "jingoistic and downright belligerent tone").

How the Bush administration views the final military frontier may seem like no big deal to most Americans. But commentators in other countries have been more vocal about their concerns, saying the new space policy meshes with their other worries about unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy.

For a sampling, check out a Canadian view from The Globe and Mail, a British view from The Times of London and a Chinese view from People's Daily. If you can read Russian (or use Babelfish), you can get Radio Mayak's perspective on America as the world's "space cop."

Is the new space policy a case of unilateral déjà vu all over again? A sensible step toward defending the high frontier? Or no big deal? Almost half the readers who have registered their opinion in our unscientific Live Vote support putting weapons in space. But as a reader has pointed out below, almost half are against it. What do you think - and why do you feel the way you do? Feel free to leave your comments below.

Update for 1:20 p.m. PT Oct. 24: Charles Miller, chief executive officer of Constellation Services International, noted the Popular Science report as well as a reference to Gore's remarks by Space.com's Leonard David at LiveScience:

"Unfortunately, neither one of them published the part that I was most interested in ... which is Gore's statement that space right now is in the exact same position that the Internet was in the 1970s ... and that space needs to be commercialized in order to achieve its full potential ... just like the Internet only achieved its full potential by being commercialized.

"This is a critically important statement by Gore on the commercial space industry that needs to get out ... particularly to the Dems who are likely to take over the House and possibly the Senate."

Although I'm not off the hook as far as the off-the-record rule is concerned, it's intriguing to think of space as a resource to be exploited as well as a destination to be explored - and, by the way, a potential military frontier as well.

Alan Boyle writes:• Univ. of Wash.: How oxygen decline choked early life on land
• Cosmos: Subterranean bacteria hint at Martian life (via Daily Grail)
• New Scientist: Viking landers may have missed Martian life
• Science News: The 'expanding universe' of spidrons

Alan Boyle writes:What do you get when you cross a circus with a space shot? That breed of alien hybrid would probably look very much like the Wirefly X Prize Cup, gearing up at the Las Cruces International Airport in New Mexico. Rockets are going up ... and sometimes crashing down. And then there's the big event in the center ring, the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

We've covered Armadillo's ups and downs in today's main wrap-up. But there were plenty of other shows going on at today's three-ring circus. In fact, at the very moment that Armadillo was preparing to start its attempt, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was taking the wraps off the prototype for Rocket Racing League's Thunderhawk rocket-powered plane - and millionaire space passenger Anousheh Ansari was recapping her recent visit to the international space station on the Jumbotron screen.

I may not have heard every word Ansari was saying, because my ears were still ringing from the Rocketman's jet-pack flight - a quick round-the-runway spin with lots of sound and fury, using a 165-pound rocket engine that's strapped to the back.

Dan Schlund, the man wearing the rocket, rose perhaps 30 feet (9 meters) in the air. Afterward, he described the ride as "squirrely" at times.

"It's like standing on a basketball with two firehoses and trying to keep your balance," he said.

Schlund had a far better time than the Tripoli Rocketry Association did with the first launch of the day here in Las Cruces. The liftoff looked perfect, but the rocket's parachute failed to open, and it plunged back down into the New Mexico desert.

The chute failure might have been caused by "a lot of moisture on the rocket out on the pad," a member of the Tripoli team said.

Tripoli's second launch went much better: A chorus of kids shouted out the final seconds of the countdown, and the big red Phoenix XL rocket rose amid the thunder of launch to an altitude of about 22,000 feet. This time, three parachutes opened up, and the stages floated harmlessly back down to earth.

If you come to the X Prize Cup, be sure to bring your binoculars: Most of the action happens hundreds or even thousands of feet away from the crowd. (OK, Rocketman was an exception.) But there are plenty of booths along the midway, with rocketeers showing off their gleaming wares and concessionaires selling souvenirs and snacks.

One of the rocketeers was Tim Pickens, head of Alabama-based Orion Propulsion, who was preparing Orion's rocket-powered truck for a demonstration. The rocket engine mounted in the bed of the truck can achieve as much as 2,750 pounds of thrust. For the X Prize Cup demonstrations, the truck is tied down in place, but Pickens said the engine can provide a pretty good jolt of acceleration.

The truck tours around the country for demonstrations, but it's definitely not Pickens' main business.

"The truck was done purely as a hobby," he explained. "The point of it is just to have fun. ... It may be years before I can ride a rocket, but I can build a rocket truck and offer that feeling to other people."

Toward the end of the day, Pickens finally got his chance to light the rocket on that truck - with all the flame and noise you'd expect.

Sure, there have been some misfires at the Wirefly X Prize Cup - rocket engines that didn't go off the way they were intended, or robot climbers that didn't quite work at the Space Elevator Games. But there have been no bad blow-ups so far, and Pickens' rule seems to apply: The point of it is just to have fun.

Alan Boyle writes:Armadillo Aerospace's Pixel prototype for a lunar lander completed the first leg of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge today, with $350,000 at stake. But one of Pixel's legs was damaged during the hard landing, and a small fire burned circuitry on the craft. Those mishaps ruled out the required return trip, which means Armadillo's first bid to win the prize was a noble failure.

"Good luck next time," NASA spokesman Phil West told Armadillo team leader John Carmack.

Today's contest was part of a $2 million competition being conducted at the Las Cruces International Airport during the Wirefly X Prize Cup rocket fest, with NASA providing the prize money. Armadillo's task was to have the remote-controlled Pixel blast off, rise to an altitude of 50 meters (164 feet), hang in the air for 90 seconds while moving over 100 meters (328 feet) and come down on a landing pad.

Pixel did all that - but the problem was that the craft had to retrace its steps back to the landing point. The damage done during Pixel's landing on the target pad made the second half of the trip impossible, Carmack said.

Even though Carmack didn't succeed at first, he plans to fly, fly again. For the full details, check out today's X Prize Cup wrap-up and my report on the cup's circus atmosphere..

Alan Boyle writes:NASA is a potential customer for trips aboard privately developed suborbital spaceships, the agency's chief told entrepreneurs building those spaceships today during the Wirefly X Prize Cup Executive Summit in Las Cruces, N.M.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said his agency would be in the market for quick trips to the edge of space, if the entrepreneurs deliver on their promises to create new passenger services. He drew a parallel between the current prospects for suborbital space travel and the government-supported airmail service that blossomed in the wake of World War I.

"Using the airmail paradigm, NASA will purchase seats on these suborbital flights for experiments and possibly astronaut candidates for mission proficiency, if and when they become available," Griffin said.

He noted that such suborbital flights, which could provide as much as four minutes of weightlessness at a time, would be superior to the zero-gravity parabolic flights now used for microgravity experiments and astronaut training.

At the same time, he indicated that NASA was interested in further privatization of its parabolic-flight operation. The space agency already has contracted for such flights through Zero Gravity Corp.

During his summit speech, Griffin also talked up NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS, which is currently providing almost $500 million to SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler to aid in the development of new orbital launch vehicles for resupplying the international space station.

New orbital as well as suborbital spaceships are expected to appear on the scene in the 2008-2010 time frame. For now, Griffin said the agency's COTS commitment was as far as he could go in terms of supporting space entrepreneurs. 

"I've probably right now gambled about as much on commercial space as I'm going to be allowed to do until somebody makes it look like it was a good idea," he said.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk and George French, Rocketplane Kistler's chief executive officer, were among the executives attending the summit. Their remarks, unlike Griffin's, were considered off the record under the summit's ground rules - but suffice it to say that the leaders of the "New Space" industry were not displeased by Griffin's remarks.

Here are other points from Griffin's talk:

• Griffin said the space agency expected its commercial partners to have "skin in the game" - that is, to show they're bringing additional private investment to NASA-related ventures. "Partnership with NASA is not an synonym for helping NASA spend its money."
• NASA is considering a revision of its human rating requirements - the standards that must be met for space vehicles that carry humans. "The definition of human rating is not simply how much paper and process you can buy," Griffin said.
• Griffin acknowledged that the current schedule leaves a gap between the scheduled retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2010 and the first manned flight of the Orion crew exploration vehicle in 2014. He said he'd like to shrink that gap but was constrained by congressional funding limits. "We're not technically paced; we're funding-paced," he said.

Alan Boyle writes:Will they or won't they? Armadillo Aerospace's bid to win a piece of the $2 million Lunar Lander Challenge could go boom or bust, depending on the outcome of an 11th-hour rocket test scheduled in advance of the Wirefly X Prize Cup in New Mexico.

Rocket fans are following every twist and turn in Armadillo's tangled tale.

Armadillo Aerospace

Armadillo's entrant in the Lunar Lander Challenge, a design called the "Quad" because of its four spherical tanks, fires its engine during a recent test.

Under the leadership of millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack, the Texas-based Armadillo team is considered the best bet to bring home some of the money put up by NASA under its Centennial Challenges prize program. The Lunar Lander Challenge requires contestants to send up a rocket ship to an altitude of at least 50 meters (164 feet), have it hover over to a landing site about 100 meters (328 feet) away, touch down, then retrace its route back to the starting pad.

The challenge actually has two tracks: One calls for a 90-second hang time and a relatively flat landing site, and the other calls for 180 seconds in the air and a rocky, uneven, moonlike landing site. Most observers think Armadillo has a good chance to win the "easy" competition (with a $350,000 top prize), if not the "hard" competition (with a $1 million top prize).

That's assuming Carmack's team gets to compete at all. After months of deliberation, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an experimental launch permit to Armadillo on Tuesday. But the FAA said it still needed more flight data before the show could go on, in front of what could be 10,000 spectators or more at Las Cruces' airport. So the agency made the permit contingent on Armadillo conducting a hover test for FAA inspectors on Thursday, the day before the Lunar Lander Challenge gets under way.

Armadillo's rocketeers brought their Quad lander to Las Cruces overnight, and had hoped to do a tethered practice run today at Las Cruces' fairgrounds, near the airport. However, the area was doused by a steady rain this afternoon - putting a damper on the pre-test.

"They called it on account of rain," reported Ken Davidian, who is working on behalf of NASA's Centennial Challenges program.

That leaves Thursday as the final day for Armadillo to conduct an untethered test and prove to the FAA that it has the right stuff for safe and sane rocketry. Stay tuned for updates - from here as well as from Robin Snelson's Lunar Lander Challenge blog.

Update for 10:15 p.m. PT Oct. 19: Armadillo's Quad rocket has gained full FAA clearance to compete in the Lunar Lander Challenge. Here's the full story.

Alan Boyle writes:• Space Elevator Blog: Teams qualify for $400,000 contest
• dBusinessNews: Lunar Lander Challenge judges listed
• RLV/Space Transport News: Rocket Racing League pushes ahead 
• LiveScience Blog: Experience the best in space

Alan Boyle writes:If you're going on a long space trip, remember to keep your drink straws clipped shut. Do exercise, but don't fling your sweat in someone else's direction. Practice going to the bathroom before you have to go in orbit. And for heaven's sake, don't forget the duct tape.

Those are some words of advice from those who have been there - almost a shuttle crew's worth of astronauts and medical experts who discussed hygiene and health in space today at the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight in Las Cruces, N.M. The astronauts were brought together at the symposium under the auspices of the Association of Space Explorers.

Tom Jones, a four-time NASA space flier who wrote "Sky Walking: An Astronaut's Memoir," said common sense covers most of the rules for space hygiene. "Control your technology, and clean up after yourself," he told the audience.

But orbital freefall - which makes everything seem weightless on the space shuttle or international space station - by necessity adds some extra twists. Most things have to be secured one way or another, including dental floss and fingernail clippings. And that's where the duct tape comes in handy.

Jones said his usual routine would be to stick the floss, the slivers of fingernails and other detritus onto a snippet of sticky tape - then crumple up the tape, put it in a waste bag and seal the bag.

"You can't fly without duct tape or Velcro," said Mario Runco, a veteran of three shuttle flights.

Among the other tips:

• Drinks are generally contained in the kinds of foil pouches familiar to most third-graders on Earth - and the drink straws have to be clamped closed with clips when they're not being sipped from. Otherwise globules of sticky grape juice or orange juice can blurp out of the straw and float around. Jones admitted that he was guilty of this breach during one of his spaceflights, and was embarrassed to find that "our grape spots were still on the walls" of the shuttle interior months later.
• When you brush your teeth, you have to close your lips carefully around the brush, then spit the foam into a towel.
• The shuttle's zero-gravity toilet works by sucking down urine, or using ducted air to blow away solid waste. But because the air currents have to flow in just the right way, you have to make sure to "sit precisely on that seat" to get the proper seal, Jones said. In fact, NASA has a "rendezvous and docking trainer" on Earth so that astronauts can practice their toilet technique before their spaceflight, he said. "After some practice, you begin to get the feel for it, if you know what I mean," Jones said.
• Daily exercise is part of the routine - especially for a long-duration space station flight, because astronauts have to guard against losing bone or muscle mass in zero-G. But because there's no natural convection in freefall, air warmed by the heat of a workout tends to float like a cloud around exercising astronauts. And that leads to increased perspiration. You have to aim an air duct toward yourself to blow away the hot air, or wipe yourself down repeatedly with a towel. Whatever you do, don't let the sweat build up too much. "One false snap of the head, and you'll send a quart of salty water off in someone's direction," Jones said.
• Although the Skylab space station had an actual shower, today's shuttle and station crews bathe by rubbing themselves down with wet, hot towels, then applying some rinseless soap. Hair is washed by applying water to the head (surface tension keeps the water from floating away), then using rinseless hospital-style shampoo. Then you towel yourself off, perhaps putting your head under an air duct to help dry your hair. "If you use that on a daily basis, you'll never offend anyone," Jones said.

Most of the tips applied to orbital fliers rather than future space tourists on quick suborbital trips - but Jonathan Clark, space medicine liaison for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, said even short-term fliers should be aware of the dos and don'ts. For example, he said, one space tourist suffered retinal burns while taking pictures of the sun with a high-magnification camera.

"That's something that any space tourist should be concerned about," Clark said.

Alan Boyle writes:• BBC: Human species 'may split in two'
• Slate: Maybe TV does cause autism
• Scientific American: The dark ages of the universe
• New Scientist: Swarmbots team up to shift heavy objects

Alan Boyle writes:It'll be at least a decade before humans revisit the moon, but if you can't wait that long, you can revisit a virtual moon in 3-D and see sights that just don't come across in the 35-year-old imagery from the Apollo missions - including the stars shining in lunar skies. The fresh perspectives come courtesy of Lunar Explorer, a software package making its official debut Monday.

Lunar Explorer / Starry Night

Apollo 17's rover and lunar module are visible in Lunar Explorer's view of the Taurus-Littrow valley. The dial at lower left serves as a navigational interface.

Lunar Explorer is a labor of love for Manny Pimenta, an electrical engineer, computer scientist and Space Frontier Foundation advocate who has been working for years to bring his idea to life: "What we're aiming for is to re-create the moon - with a simulation as accurate and realistic as we can make it," he told me.

He said the idea came to him around the year 2000 - when he realized that his childhood dream of visiting the moon by the turn of the millennium wasn't going to come true. He realized further that "I hadn't really done anything to try to bring about the future." Lunar Explorer is his attempt to rectify that situation.

"I'm basically betting my financial future on this," he said.

The programming was done by VirtuePlay, which has also worked with NASA on a lunar-racing simulation program for educational and mission planning purposes. Like the racing simulator, Lunar Explorer takes advantage of imagery from the Clementine mapping satellite as well as VirtuePlay/VirtueArts' RADE software architecture.

Clementine's stereographic views of the moon were enhanced and turned into a 3-D computer model that can reflect zoomable overhead perspectives as well as on-the-ground views. And it all works on your average home computer with a graphics card.

I watched a demonstration of the program at this summer's Space Frontier Foundation conference. One of the cooler features is that the simulation includes objects from past lunar missions, ranging from robotic Luna and Surveyor landers to Apollo's lunar modules and surface instrument packages.

You can go on virtual expeditions to lunar destinations never seen from the surface. You can also see the stars - which don't show up in imagery from the Apollo missions because of the way photographic exposures were made on the moon. (Some have cited the absence of stars as evidence that the moon missions were actually elaborate hoaxes, but those claims have been pretty thoroughly debunked.)

And that's not all: In future releases, Pimenta and his partners are planning to include the ability to create and manipulate objects or even whole settlements on a virtual moon - which could turn Lunar Explorer into something like "The Sims" in outer space.

Animations based on actual space missions also could be added, Pimenta said: "You could watch the spacecraft land right beside you," he said.

The program already can provide a 3-D, virtual-reality experience, provided you have the right kind of hardware. Right now, it works with military-grade head-mounted displays - but that kind of equipment costs tens of thousands of dollars, Pimenta said.

"We are ready to integrate the first consumer-level headset that comes along and provides adequate display capabilities," Pimenta wrote in an e-mail. "People will be able to enjoy a fully immersive lunar environment right in their own homes!"

The 3DVisor virtual-reality headset developed by eMagin just might fill the bill, Pimenta said.

Pimenta is also negotiating to have the industrial-strength, 3-D version of Lunar Explorer placed in museums and science centers - and after demonstrating the virtual moon at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he's starting to think about a virtual Mars, based on imagery from Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Lunar Explorer 1.0 is available for $39.95 through the venture's Web site, as well as through the Starry Night Store, the Space Frontier Foundation and other outlets.

For other virtual lunar explorations, you can give NASA's World Wind software a spin, pay a visit to Google Moon, or take a giant leap by looking up the Imax 3-D film "Magnificent Desolation."  And stay tuned for NASA's next real-life moon mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

While we're on the subject, I might as well remind you that I'll be covering the Lunar Lander Challenge and other X Prize Cup activities in New Mexico this week. I'll file my first reports from the scene on Tuesday.

Alan Boyle writes:• 'Nova' on PBS: 'The Deadliest Plane Crash'
• The Economist: Your television is ringing
• ANSA: Was Atlantis actually Sardinia? Debate rages (via Daily Grail)
• Times of London: Humanity's traces would vanish in 200,000 years

Alan Boyle writes:While I'm on vacation, here are a few Web links to spark your curiosity - or a smile:

• NASASpaceflight.com: NASA sets Orion 13 for moon return
• 'Fly Me to the Moon: The Movie' (via HobbySpace)
• Wired News: 'Second Life' figures get a life
• The Onion: Bush urges expanded drilling of Alaskan wildlife