Blue Origin

This computational fluid dynamics simulation shows Blue Origin's orbital Space Vehicle with a body flap placed toward the spacecraft's aft end. More than 180 wind-tunnel tests were used to analyze design alternatives.

Executives at Blue Origin, the rocket venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, have traditionally been reticent about discussing where they're going — but now that they're focusing in on development work for NASA, they're speaking out about their progress and their ambitions. And it turns out that those ambitions are ... well, pretty ambitious.

Like Armadillo Aerospace, Blue is developing a vertical-takeoff suborbital space vehicle for tourists and researchers. Like Sierra Nevada Corp., it's working on an aerodynamic spacecraft to carry NASA astronauts and other spacefliers into orbit. And like SpaceX, it's working on its own launch vehicles as well. The company may not provide many specifics about its timeline, but that doesn't mean the pace is lackadaisical.

"It's not a question of, 'Are we on some timeline,'" Brett Alexander, Blue Origin's director of strategy and business development, told me last week. "We've always said 'later in this decade' is when we're going to do it. Working with NASA will just accelerate us."

Alexander, who has worked on aerospace issues for more than two decades in government and industry circles, discussed Blue Origin's blue-sky ambitions as a follow-up to last week's news about a successful round of wind-tunnel tests for its orbital Space Vehicle, or SV. He said more than 180 runs were conducted at Lockheed Martin's wind-tunnel facility in Dallas to work out the right placement of aerodynamic body flaps on the aft end of the spacecraft.

The idea is that the flaps will enhance SV's biconic shape to give the capsule an extra bit of cross-range maneuverability "without the weight penalty and the complexity of wheels and wings," Alexander said. That could allow for a quicker return to orbit in the event of an emergency, since the SV could more easily be guided to a parachute-slowed descent over a designated land range.

May is a big month for Blue
Alexander said the resulting spacecraft design "will be officially blessed" at a system requirements review in May. Also during May, Blue Origin expects to begin testing of the thrust chamber assembly for its BE-3 rocket engine at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, Alexander said.

The company, based in Kent, Wash., is receiving $22 million from NASA during the current phase of the space agency's program to help commercial ventures develop space taxis for the post-shuttle era. The SV isn't nearly as big as the space shuttle, of course, but it should be capable of transporting up to seven passengers to and from the International Space Station.

Alexander declined to say definitively whether Blue Origin would apply for further NASA funding during the next phase of the effort, known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability or CCiCap. But with or without the money from NASA, Bezos and his team intend to create its their very own space transportation system.

"We started this design before NASA had the commercial crew program," Alexander said. "It was always our intention — and still is — to develop this."

He said that the plan calls for the "first few flights" to be launched on United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 rocket, and that Blue Origin will eventually switch to its own launch vehicle with a reusable first stage.

Suborbital craft as 'pathfinder'
In parallel with its orbital development effort for NASA, Blue Origin is working on a separate crew capsule and propulsion vehicle that would blast off vertically for suborbital space trips. That part of the space program came into the spotlight last August, when Blue's unmanned test rocket went awry and crashed at the end of a supersonic test flight at Bezos' private spaceport in Texas. At the time, Bezos said that his team was "already working on our next development vehicle." Last week, Alexander said the development effort was "still under way."

In February, Alexander told Flightglobal that the suborbital crew capsule was undergoing testing, and that a pad-abort test would be conducted "in the summer sometime."

Although the funding arrangements for the privately backed suborbital program and the NASA-supported orbital program may be different, the two programs support each other technologically.

"Suborbital is definitely a pathfinder for our orbital system," Alexander said. The implication is that Blue Origin's rockets will be taking tourists and researchers to the edge of space significantly earlier than they'll be taking astronauts to orbit.

Bezos, whose net worth is currently estimated at more than $20 billion, doesn't strictly need NASA's money to pursue his long-held space ambitions. But Alexander said government backing will quicken Blue Origin's pace, and he argued against the sentiment in Congress that NASA should select just one company as the "leader" to go forward with spaceship development. Right now, NASA is supporting development efforts at four companies — the Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX as well as Blue Origin — and observers expect the field to shrink for the next round of funding. It's just a question of how much shrinkage there'll be.

"Competition is definitely better — better for the program, better for the country, better for the future of human spaceflight," Alexander told me. "If they down-select to one, it's no longer a commercial space program."

What do you think about Blue Origin's ambitions and the prospects for commercial spaceships? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos:

• Blue Origin spruces up its rocket report
• How tycoons will fuel future spaceflight
  
• Bezos aims to bring up Apollo 11's sunken engines
• Cosmic Log archive on the commercial space race

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

SpaceX conducted a successful test firing of a Falcon 9 rocket's engines on its Cape Canaveral launch pad, one week before its precedent-setting launch to the International Space Station. But it took more than one try.

The initial countdown was halted just 47 seconds before the nine engines were scheduled to start up. SpaceX fixed what it called a "limit that was improperly set" on the flight computer and quickly set up another countdown. The second countdown proceeded smoothly, and the rocket's nine engines fizzed to life for two seconds as expected, at 4:15 p.m. ET today.

"Woohoo, rocket hold-down firing completed and all looks good!!" SpaceX's millionaire founder, Elon Musk, reported in a Twitter update. Meanwhile, company spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham said "engineers will now review data as we continue preparations for the upcoming launch."

This was a full dress rehearsal for SpaceX's second official demonstration flight for NASA. The first demo flight, back in December 2010, sent a gumdrop-shaped Dragon space capsule into orbit for the first time. The second flight, scheduled to lift off as early as May 7, could see the Dragon go all the way to the space station.

The company has received more than $375 million so far from the space agency for the development of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon. SpaceX and another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., are getting the money to help NASA fill the gap in payload transportation capability left by last year's retirement of the space shuttle fleet.

In addition, SpaceX is receiving tens of millions of dollars from NASA under a separate program to make the Falcon/Dragon launch system suitable for carrying astronauts as well as cargo. Musk founded the California-based company in 2002 with the long-range aim of flying people to Mars.

The Falcon 9 didn't fly anywhere during today's test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 40 in Florida, but if SpaceX and NASA stick to the current timeline, the rocket will send the robotically controlled Dragon capsule into orbit on May 7. A couple of days later, the spacecraft will catch up with the space station and go through a sequence of rendezvous maneuvers.

If the Dragon performs those maneuvers correctly, NASA would give the go-ahead for the Dragon to approach a station docking port. The station's robotic arm would grab onto it and bring it in for berthing. There'll be some cargo riding aboard the Dragon — water, clothing, scientific gear and the like — and the astronauts would take a couple of weeks to take on those payloads and load up the Dragon with Earth-bound cargo. Then the Dragon would be unberthed and sent back down to a Pacific splashdown, marking the successful end of the first flight of a private-sector spaceship to the International Space Station..

There are a lot of "ifs" on that list of contingencies. This launch has been delayed repeatedly due to software glitches, and if a snag like the one that occurred today happened to crop up on May 7, liftoff would have to be postponed for three days. To reach the space station, the Falcon has to lift off right on the dot. The orbital mechanics will not allow for same-day do-overs. But that's OK. Last month, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said "we may have to have a couple of attempts, but we're certainly looking forward to getting that flight off."

If the Falcon 9 and the Dragon pass their tests, that would put SpaceX in a position to ship supplies to the space station in earnest, under the terms of a $1.6 billion NASA contract.

Will SpaceX get 'er done? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about SpaceX and the commercial space race:

• Private spaceship launch set for May 7 
• SpaceX has a lofty goal: Help save humanity
• Next steps in the new space race

Last updated 4:27 p.m. ET.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

More than a month after his record-setting solo dive to the bottom of the ocean, filmmaker James Cameron is fleshing out his adventure tale with personal details as well as comparisons to another one of his passions — space exploration. The story hit TV screens tonight on "James Cameron: Voyage to the Bottom of the Earth," a half-hour documentary premiering on the National Geographic Channel.

The main thrust of the story unfolded back on March 26: Cameron climbed into a custom-built submersible called the Deepsea Challenger and plunged nearly 36,000 feet (10,898 meters) to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It's the deepest part of the ocean— reached only once before, by a two-man team in 1960.

Cameron recounted his adventure in a teleconference with reporters just after the trip, but during tonight's show, documentary footage added more color to the account. For example:

• The sea was unsettled in the days leading up to the dive, and at one point Cameron thought he would have to choose between making the attempt and attending the blockbuster premiere of "Titanic 3-D." If he missed the premiere, he said, the top movie executives behind the film release might never speak with him again. Fortunately, the weather cleared just in time to satisfy Cameron's tight schedule.
• Cameron's wife, Suzy Amis, gave him a good-luck smooch before the dive. "Is this going to be a PDA?" Cameron asked, using the acronym for a public display of affection. "Yup," Amis said. Cameron said that when he was at the very bottom, he took a phone call from Amis, "which of course was very sweet ... but let that be a lesson to all men: You think you can get away, but you cannot."
• The last guy to speak to Cameron before the dive, and the first guy Cameron spoke to after surfacing and climbing out of the Deepsea Challenger, was Don Walsh, who made the 1960 trip down to the bottom along with Jacques Piccard on the Trieste. "I'm glad it's you that's taking back the record," Walsh told Cameron beforehand. Afterward, Cameron told Walsh, "Hasn't changed a bit since you were down there."
• Cameron described the bottom of the seafloor as looking like "white Latex paint on a sheet of masonite." He extended the Deepsea Challenger's robot arm to collect a soil sample, but the hydraulic system sprung a leak just as he was extracting it. All he was left with was seawater with a bit of sediment at the bottom. He also lost his ability to move around the bottom, due to a thruster malfunction. "I was done," he said. "It was time to come back." Fortunately, the system for dropping two 600-pound blocks of ballast and sending the submersible back up to the surface worked as planned. "If this doesn't work, it's going to be a bad day," he recalled thinking at the time.

Cameron has been in the news lately not only for his deep-sea adventure, but also for his role as an adviser to Planetary Resources, the venture that is building spacecraft to identify and mine near-Earth asteroids. Cameron made the connection between the deep sea and outer space when he described how the Deepsea Challenger kicks up sediment when it reaches the seafloor. "It was just like landing a spaceship — it was the coolest thing."

National Geographic

A video shot through a porthole of the Deepsea Challenger shows the submersible's robotic sampling arm sticking out over the "white Latex paint" of the seafloor. Click on the image to watch a video clip.

Mark Theissen / National Geographic

James Cameron emerges from the Deepsea Challenger submersible after his successful solo dive to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, on March 26.

The outer-space angle came out in a statement about the show issued before tonight's premiere: "More money gets put into space exploration, but the ocean is our life support here on spaceship Earth.  And we’re destroying it faster than we're exploring it," Cameron said. "I think it draws attention to the ocean and the lack of funding for ocean exploration."

Cameron also touched on that concern last week in a Q&A with The Hollywood Reporter, in which he said the lesson from the Deepsea Challenger's dives was that "a small group of privately funded, passionate young engineers can come up with something that governments can't do." The Hollywood Reporter's Patrick Brzeski went on to ask what that meant for the bigger picture, and here's part of Cameron's reply:

"Well, first it means, as governments, whether it's the U.S. or any other government, we've lost our edge when it comes to exploration — whether it's space or unexplored corners of the oceans. And secondly, there are a lot of new technologies and advancements being made in material sciences that allow us to do things at a fraction of the price that it would have been previously. That allows private individuals to come into the game. Those two factors combined are making exciting things happen. You see the same thing in space, with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. You know, Elon Musk's SpaceX is going to be regularly orbiting vehicles to service the International Space Station. They basically stepped into the shoes of NASA — for a fraction of the price. That’s a better business model than doing deep ocean exploration. I hate to even use the term entrepreneurial for what we’re doing, because entrepreneurial implies that there’s going to be some big profit at the end if you’re successful. But really for me the end result is the science and exploration and the imagery we’re getting. It's not a profitable thing — we aren't doing it because we expect to find oil and gold down there. But see, the thing is, you never really know where pure research is going to take you. The New Britain Trench — at 27,000 feet — no one had ever been down there to look at it. In one dive, in the first five minutes, I discovered two new species. In the first five minutes of being on the bottom!"

In the interview, Cameron also referred to his well-known efforts to take a trip into space himself and make a movie, either on Russia's Mir space station (before it was deorbited in 2001) or the International Space Station (before the Columbia tragedy in 2003). If last year's rumors turn out to be true, Cameron just might finally get his chance to film the final frontier, perhaps during a round-the-moon odyssey.

He might have to hold off on his next real-life adventure until he gets "Avatar 2" and "Avatar 3" into the theaters. But whether that next adventure involves outer space or the sea, I have a feeling it's going to be a doozy.

More about James Cameron and exploration:

• James Cameron's deep-sea team goes back for more
• Cameron's dive stirs call for more deep-sea exploration
• Filmmaker/explorer unfurls Explorer's Club flag
• Asteroid mining crazy? So is deep-sea drilling

 "James Cameron: Voyage to the Bottom of the Earth," airs again on the National Geographic Channel on May 3, 6 and 10. Check listings for times in your area.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Scott Thompson / Maryhill Museum file

Maryhill Museum's concrete replica of Stonehenge was designed to duplicate the ancient English monument.

British researchers conducted experiments at a Stonehenge stand-in as well as the actual 5,000-year-old monument to determine how sounds echoed within the ancient circle of stones — and they found that the sounds would have taken on an eerie reverberation.

"We can expect such a space to have a striking effect on someone of that time, identical to what we feel nowadays when we go into a church," the University of Salford's Bruno Fazenda, who orchestrated the research project, told me in an email.

The study is described on the university's website in a technical analysis as well as a news release issued last week, but the upshot is that the Neolithic people who gathered inside the circle could well have had a religious aural experience. That meshes with the view of most archaeologists that the monument on England's Salisbury Plain took on the trappings of a place of healing — a "Neolithic Lourdes," if you will.

It's not easy to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Stonehenge: For one thing, many of the standing stones are missing from what was thought to be their original places, ruining the acoustic arrangement. For another thing, researchers are not allowed to run electrical power out to the site, or bring in a generator. That limits the types of sound equipment and scientific instruments that can be used on site.

Replicating the reverb
Fazenda and his colleagues from the University of Huddersfield and the University of Bristol found a couple of clever solutions to those challenges. They brought air-filled balloons to the Stonehenge site in 2009, then popped the balloons with a needle and recorded the reverb with a microphone and a digital field recorder. The reflected sounds of the pops were hard to make out, but they appeared to follow a pattern of 1-second reverberation time at midfrequencies, for locations that were within the ruins of the stone circle.

To study the reverberation patterns in detail, the team headed off to the Maryhill Museum in Goldendale, Wash., which has a full-scale concrete replica of Stonehenge on its grounds. The monument was built by millionaire industrialist Samuel Hill as a tribute to fallen World War I servicemen. The museum let the researchers make their measurements with more sensitive instruments, powered by on-site generators. The same balloon-popping technique was used, and the readings confirmed the reverberation pattern that the team found at the real Stonehenge.

"For an outdoor space, the stone circle exhibits quite a 'live' acoustic environment," Fazenda said. "In the Neolithic, such an environment was not very common at all. The only spaces that might sustain reverberation were caves and perhaps some natural features such as opposing cliff faces."

Fazenda said the echo effect would be much more like what you hear in a cathedral than in a concert hall.

"The center of the space has potential for some focusing effects," he said. "That's the point where all reflections arrive at the same time, and with the largest gap relative to direct sound. On paper we would expect that to sound striking. However, there are quite a lot of scattering effects from the stones, so the clear echoes are somewhat destroyed by it."

He stressed that it's not at all clear whether Stonehenge was designed with the acoustics in mind, but he and his colleagues do think that the setting would have added a special something to drumbeats, chants or music inside the stone circle.   

'Research hobby'
Fazenda, who teaches audio production at Salford, has been working on this project for the past four years on an unfunded basis. "It has been a kind of 'research hobby' that I have managed to do after hours (don't really call it spare time)," he wrote. He believes the project could break new ground in the field of archaeoacoustics — the study of the sound characteristics of ancient spaces.

"The original focus was on studying the acoustic response of the space," he said. "The recent output has been that we replicated it using wavefield synthesis, which immerses you in a sound field, thus giving you the most approximate aural experience that you could get of being in the space. That was shown at a few recent events, and we have a permanent demo in our labs here at Salford. A wavefield synthesis system uses +64 channels and speakers, so it is not really portable."

Such a system can be tuned to provide a virtual-reality sense of the sounds of Stonehenge, as well as the sounds of other ancient settings that are no longer configured the way they were in their heyday. Want to hear the roar of the crowd in the Roman Colosseum? There's a wavefield synthesis app for that.

Fazenda is preparing a paper on his "research hobby" for Acta Acustica, the journal of the European Acoustics Association. He's also writing a chapter for a book on the acoustics and music of British prehistory. (For more on that subject, check out the website of the Acoustics and Music of British Prehistory Research Network.)

You can expect to hear more about the sounds of Stonehenge in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, give a listen to these sound files, and follow the Web links for more about archaeoacoustics.

Stonehenge sound files:

• Hand-clapping outside and inside the Maryhill stone circle (via Sonic Wonders)
• Univ. of Salford's rendering of a song with Stonehenge-style reverb (WAV file)
• Sounds of Stonehenge ... including a podcast on sound heritage

More about archaeoacoustics:

• Scientists revive sacred sounds
• Was Stonehenge inspired by a sound illusion?
• It turns out that cavemen loved to sing
• Stonehenge: Totally awesome place for raves
• Researchers re-create scary pre-Columbian sounds
• Acoustic archaeology yields mind-tripping tricks
• Listen to the sounds of science

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Mining asteroids for water and precious metals may sound like a sci-fi boondoggle, especially the way Jon Stewart described it Wednesday night on "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central. When Planetary Resources co-founder Eric Anderson says water would be worth $20,000 to $50,000 a pound in space, Stewart quips, "Who amongst us wouldn't pay $50,000 for a pound of space water ... at the space convenience store?" To cut through the orbital debris, Stewart brought astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on stage to weigh in during a segment called "Bulls#*t or No Bulls#*t." In just one minute, Tyson rendered his decision — while solving a Rubik's Cube puzzle and ribbing Stewart about the reverse-rotating Earth in his show's opening credits. Watch how it went down in the video clip above, and get the straight story from MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan in the clip below.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto,"my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Skywatchers as far south as Colorado and Kansas witnessed a quick flare-up of the northern lights this week, which called to mind the brilliant, beautiful displays that northerners saw earlier this year. The skies have settled down — for now — but developments on the sun suggest we could be in for another wave of auroral glories.

The greenish glow over Lake Superior, recorded from Michigan's Upper Peninsula at 2 o'clock in the morning by Shawn Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto.com, was impressive enough to make NBC's "Nightly News" on Tuesday night. In an email, Malone told me that the "intensity caught me off guard."

"Check out the passing freighter for scale," Malone said in his comments on the Vimeo version of the video. "What a view those sailors must have had!"

Mark Riutta had a similar view from Copper Harbor Cabins on the Upper Peninsula, as the time-lapse video below illustrates. Riutta told me over the phone that he and his girlfriend were getting the cabins ready for the summer season and were surprised by how bright Tuesday's display turned out to be. "We were just about to go to sleep, when we looked out and wondered, 'Why is it so light out there?' he said.

SpaceWeather.com provides a roundup of auroral images from a dozen U.S. states, mostly in the Midwest but also including the top state for the northern lights, Alaska. And speaking of Alaska, here's an unconventional view of the aurora that was recorded from a height of 90,000 feet during "Project Aether: Aurora," a scientific experiment that took place this month:

Project Aether, led by University of Houston physicist Ben Longmier, sent up almost two dozen weather balloons laden with high-definition cameras and scientific instruments to monitor auroral activity near Fairbanks. Most of the payloads have been recovered, but the student researchers are still on the lookout for a few that haven't yet been located. If you happen to be in the Fairbanks area and find one of them, you could win a prize.

More prizes could be in store for aurora-watchers: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reports that we're currently in the midst of a minor geomagnetic storm, which could spark another wave of northern lights. What's more, an active region of the sun known as AR1465 has developed the type of magnetic field that's associated with stronger X-class outbursts.

To keep tabs on the solar weather report, check in with SpaceWeather.com as well as the Space Weather Prediction Center's website and Facebook page. And to watch some classic auroral videos, check out the gallery offered by NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.

More auroral glories:

• Awesome auroras on Uranus ... and Earth
• Farewell to the northern lights
• Northern lights make for must-see TV
• Southern exposure for auroral lights
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto,"my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Space entrepreneurs laid out a lot of the details for their billionaire-backed plan to extract resources from near-Earth asteroids today, but other details — such as how much they've received in investments, or exactly how they'll get their hands on precious water and precious metals — are still being held close to the vest.

If Planetary Resources is as successful as its founders hope, it could be bringing a fortune in platinum and gold back to Earth within the next decade or two, and supplying outer-space filling stations with water, fuel and air for interplanetary travelers. The company could tap into trillions of dollars' worth of space resources. But the venture could also go bust, just as some of the first European trading companies did when they came to the Americas centuries ago.

"There's a significant probability that we may fail," company co-chairman Eric Anderson acknowledged during today's big reveal at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

At least two things are certain: Planetary Resources is already bringing in income, and it's intending to launch real hardware within two years. "This company is not about paper studies. .... We're not just talking about it. We've done enough of that," Anderson said.

The company was founded in 2009 by Anderson and Peter Diamandis, but flew under the radar until last week. Both men have had long experience with space and technology ventures: Anderson heads Space Adventures, the company that has brokered eight private-passenger trips to the International Space Station. He also serves as president of Intentional Software, the company founded by billionaire space traveler Charles Simonyi. Diamandis is co-founder of the X Prize Foundation (which awarded a $10 million spaceflight prize in 2004), Zero G Corp. (which puts passengers on zero-gravity airplane flights) and the Rocket Racing League (which is currently in neutral).

Stephen Brashear / Getty Images

Planetary Resources' president and chief engineer, Chris Lewicki, shows off a full-scale mockup of the Arkyd Series 100 space telescope during a news conference at Seattle's Museum of Flight. "Good morning, everyone. I'm Chris Lewicki, and I'm an asteroid miner," he told the crowd.

This latest venture has the backing of Simonyi as well as other billionaires, ranging from Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt to Silicon Valley's Ram Shriram and Texas' Ross Perot Jr. (son of the former third-party presidential candidate). The company's advisers include filmmaker/adventurer James Cameron and astronaut/scientist Tom Jones.

Planetary Resources

An informational graphic explains Planetary Resources' perspective on a future "gold rush." Click on the image for a larger version.

Planetary Resources' executives declined to say how much the backers were putting into the business, but Diamandis touted them as "risk-tolerant investors" who were prepared to support the venture for decades. He also said "the company is cash-flow positive at this point," with about 20 engineers working at the company's headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. And there are still more openings to fill, which is a big reason why the company's executives decided to go public now.

Former Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki, who serves as the company's president and chief engineer, said the company had a contract with NASA to share data about the development a laser-equipped spacecraft system that combined imaging, optical communications and navigation. He hinted that there were other contracts as well, but wouldn't provide details.

Step 1: Launch space telescopes
The system will be used on Planetary Resources' first-generation spacecraft, the Arkyd Series 100 space telescope, also known as Leo. As Lewicki told me in a previous interview, the Arkyd Series 100 will serve as the company's Earth-orbiting survey telescope for identifying asteroids. It will also be sold to other parties for use as a "personal space telescope" or Earth-imaging satellite. He said the price tag for the telescope would be on the order of tens of millions of dollars, and eventually mere millions of dollars.

The Leo telescope would be built to have "multi-tool or Swiss Army knife capability," Lewicki said. Its imager would be capable of doing spectral analysis of near-Earth asteroids, to determine their chemical composition. There'd also be a camera mounted on a boom so it could take pictures of itself. The Museum of Flight's president, Doug King, said he and his institutional colleagues might someday consider becoming customers.

With a mass of 66 to 110 pounds (30 to 50 kilograms), the spacecraft would be small enough to launch as a secondary "rideshare" payload on any of a variety of launch vehicles, including the SpaceX Falcon, the Russian Dnepr or the European Ariane. The first launch is expected within two years, Anderson said.

Planetary Resources' prime targets would be among the estimated 1,500 asteroids that are energetically easier to get to than the moon. The team would be looking for water-rich or metal-rich asteroids that come close enough to Earth for a more detailed survey to be made. 

Step 2: Go beyond Earth orbit
The asteroid survey effort would continue with the Arkyd Series 200 "Interceptor," which would be equipped with a propulsion system and scientific instruments as well as an imager. Such craft could be placed into geosynchronous Earth orbit as a secondary payload — then identify, track and fly past asteroids that happen to come between Earth and the moon. Lewicki told me that the interceptor craft could get "up-close and personal" with a near-Earth asteroid within five years.

Planetary Resources

An artist's conception shows the Arkyd Series 200 spacecraft tracking an asteroid.

Planetary Resources

A swarm of Arkyd Series 300 spacecraft conducts reconnaissance on an asteroid.

Step 3: Swarm around an asteroid
The Arkyd Series 300 "Rendezvous Prospector" spacecraft would incorporate the laser-based communication system, enabling a swarm of probes to surround a distant asteroid for coordinated reconnaissance. "Within a decade, we hope to have identified our first target that we'll start extracting resources from," Diamandis told me. The Series 300 would demonstrate technologies that could be used for interplanetary missions by NASA or other entities.

Lewicki said the mission plan called for sending multiple low-cost spacecraft so that the failure of one probe wouldn't doom the mission. "When failure is not an option, success gets really expensive," he quipped.

Step 4: Get the goods
Later generations of spacecraft would have the capability to extract water from carbonaceous asteroids. If there's power available for a space processing system, the water could be broken down into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathable air. Such materials could be stockpiled in orbital or deep-space fuel depots, to be fed to spacecraft in need of a fill-up. Diamandis said a 165-foot-wide (50-meter-wide) asteroid with 20 percent water ice content could provide enough hydrogen and oxygen to power every space shuttle that ever blasted off.

The first goal for resource extraction would probably be a water-bearing asteroid, Diamandis told me, but eventually techniques would be developed for extracting gold and platinum-group metals from promising asteroids and returning the shipments to Earth. Platinum-group metals are particularly valued because they're used in a wide variety of high-tech devices, ranging from consumer electronics to fuel cells for electric vehicles. Platinum currently goes for more than $1,500 an ounce, which makes it almost as costly as gold.

If those valuable metals could be brought back from space at an affordable price, that could create a multitrillion-dollar shift in high-tech markets.

Hurdles to overcome
That's a big "if." In order for Step 4 to succeed, there'd have to be sufficient demand for deep-space refueling. Right now, there's zero demand, but that could change if NASA actually goes through with its current plan to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by the mid-2020s and to Mars and its moons by the mid-2030s.

Planetary Resources' long-term business plan assumes that in the next few decades, there'll be enough spaceship traffic to recover its investment in asteroid-mining infrastructure. The precise shape of that infrastructure is yet to be determined: One illustration provided by Planetary Resources shows swarms of spacecraft doing strip mining, while another shows a water-bearing asteroid being enveloped by a huge inflatable shell.

One option might be to capture a small asteroid and bring it closer to Earth for processing. This month, a study prepared for the Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech determined it would be feasible to capture a 500-ton, 23-foot-wide (7-meter-wide) asteroid and transport it to a lunar-scale orbit. Mission cost was estimated at $2.6 billion, which is about the same cost as NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. The members of the study group included Lewicki and Jones as well as John Lewis, who has been studying the prospects for asteroid mining for decades and is serving as an adviser to Planetary Resources.

Mining a 23-foot-wide asteroid won't produce as much of a payoff as the 165-foot-wide asteroid that Diamandis had in mind, but the bigger the asteroid, the more difficult it would be to bring it closer to Earth. There might also be risks associated with moving space rocks or even platinum shipments around our planet's celestial neighborhood.

"The energy equivalent of a medium-sized 'ore wagon' in space, if it fell to Earth, would be on the order of a hydrogen bomb," NBC space analyst James Oberg said in an email. (That might be an exaggeration. The fireball that blazed over California and Nevada early Sunday is thought to have been caused by a meteor about the size of a minivan, with the energy equivalent of 3.8 kilotons of TNT. That's roughly a quarter of the explosive power of the Hiroshima atom bomb.)

"Carl Sagan long ago warned that building asteroid-deflecting technologies had a dark side — the same technology could be used to steer asteroids directly at Earth for military threats," Oberg wrote. "Fortunately, Sagan's fears were science-based and not spaceflight operationally based. It turns out to take far too long — years in flight — to actually drop a space rock on Earth. And the ability to deflect space objects safely away from Earth, or into commercial mining zones, is nowhere near accurate enough to do the opposite — aim for Earth itself.

"But the issue is a perfect rallying cry for environmental activists who can be counted on to rally against this looting of heaven's virginal treasures."

If Planetary Resources' long-term plan is successful, that could force nations to face the long-dormant issue of property rights in outer space. Oberg said widescale commercial exploitation of space resources could spark a diplomatic outcry, "at least until the United Nations gets some acknowledged 'tax' on any space-based profits." That issue is at least a decade away, however.

Even if Planetary Resources doesn't hit its long-term goal, the earlier phases of its business plan — the data deals and the spacecraft sales — would still give the billionaires an opportunity to recoup their investment. And it's virtually certain that other companies will eventually join the fray. For example, a venture called Moon Express is chasing after a share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize and making plans for mining operations on the moon. Just today, Moon Express announced the expansion of its scientific advisory board.

"We don't believe you have to wait around for a date with a near-Earth object," Bob Richards, the venture's co-founder and CEO, told me in an email. "If you want to mine asteroids, go to the moon  —  they have been bombarding the moon for billions of years."

How would you rate the chances for Planetary Resources, Moon Express and other would-be extraterrestrial miners? Feel free to cast your vote and/or leave a comment.

More about space resources:

• Asteroid mining venture starts with space telescopes
• Google billionaires back space resource venture
• Could legal loophole lead to extraterrestrial land claims?
• Private property in outer space? It's debatable
• To infinity and beyond: Investing in space travel
• How to make the moon pay

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The venture known as Planetary Resources eventually plans to go asteroid mining — but the first step in the billionaire-backed business plan is to launch an orbital fleet of "personal space telescopes" capable of looking out into the heavens or back down on Earth.

Right now, the idea of sending robotic drilling operations to near-Earth asteroids, extracting water for powering interplanetary spaceships — and, by the way, turning that into a profitable business — sounds like pure science fiction. But to quote Planetary Resources' president and chief engineer, Chris Lewicki: "Everything is science fiction right up to the point that it's science fact."

Lewicki knows his way around an outer-space challenge. He's been involved in managing NASA's twin Mars rover missions as well as the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which made the first on-the-spot observations of Red Planet water ice. Even by that scale, however, his new mission at Planetary Resources is special. It's not just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. "Maybe once in a species, that kind of opportunity comes along," he told me.

The venture, which was hinted at last week and formally unveiled Tuesday at Seattle's Museum of Flight, is sufficiently down to Earth to attract funding from such A-list investors as Google CEO Larry Page, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Texas billionaire Ross Perot Jr. and spacefaring software executive Charles Simonyi. Filmmaker James Cameron has signed on as a senior adviser.

Planetary Resources is the latest brainchild of Eric Anderson, whose company Space Adventures has helped millionaires and billionaires go on 10-day trips to the International Space Station; and Peter Diamandis, the motive force behind the multimillion-dollar X Prize program, the Rocket Racing League and the Zero G Corp.'s weightless-airplane tourist venture. Anderson and Diamandis serve as co-chairmen of the venture they co-founded.

Diamandis said Planetary Resources follows up on discussions that he and Anderson had starting about three years ago — and also follows up on a nearly lifelong ambition he's had.

"As a teenager, when I was asked what I wanted to be, I'd say, 'An asteroid miner,'" Diamandis told me.

Why mine asteroids?
Planetary Resources' ultimate goal is to set up a commercial infrastructure for fueling trips far beyond Earth orbit, with Planetary Resources controlling the equivalent of oil wells, refineries and filling stations in outer space. That's the long-term promise of near-Earth asteroids.

NASA file

An artist's conception shows a robotic mining operation on a near-Earth asteroid.

"A water-rich asteroid would greatly enhance the large-scale exploration of the solar system," Anderson said in a news release. "Water has many uses in space. For instance, it would not only be used for hydration, but also would be broken down into oxygen and hydrogen, for breathable air and rocket propellant."

But why go to all the trouble, when there's so much water on Earth? "It costs on the order of $20,000 per kilogram to get a liter of water into orbit," Diamandis explained. "If you're able to buy it on orbit for one-hundredth of the cost, that would be transformative."

Asteroids also could yield precious metals such as platinum, gold and rare-earth materials — treasures that are worth bringing back to Earth. Diamandis said a single asteroid in the range of 200 to 500 meters in diameter could contain more platinum-group metals than has ever been mined in the whole of human history.

"When the availability of these materials increases, the cost will reduce on everything, including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer monitors, catalysts; and with the abundance of these metals we'll be able to use them in mass production, like in automotive fuel cells," Diamandis said in the news release.

Humbler materials could be used for construction of deep-space facilities. "Even dirt is valuable as a radiation-shielding material," said former NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who got his Ph.D. in planetary sciences by researching remote-sensing techniques for asteroids. Jones is now serving as an adviser to the Planetary Resources team.

First launch in two years?
Building a commercial empire in outer space may be the long-range plan, but the short-term plan is closer to home. The first step to mining an asteroid is figuring out what's out there. To that end, Planetary Resources' first hardware project is what's known as the Arkyd-101 personal space telescope.

Planetary Resources

Planetary Resources has developed the Arkyd-101 space telescope with remote sensing capability, as shown in this artist's conception. Data gathered from near-Earth asteroids will assist in analyzing the composition of the body to determine a commercial value.

Lewicki hopes the personal space telescope will do for astronomy what the personal computer did for information technology. Planetary Resources plans to put the instrument into Earth orbit to survey the sky for potential targets — asteroids that come close enough to Earth often enough to make them reachable, and have a spectral signal that would make them good candidates for mining. The main target is C-type or carbonaceous asteroids, which are dark and not so easy to detect with existing instruments.

The Arkyd-101 telescope is designed to be launched on any of a variety of rockets, including the Russian Dnepr, the European Ariane, the Indian PSLV or the SpaceX Falcon, Lewicki said. It would have arcsecond resolution for astronomical observations, and if the camera were turned earthward, Lewicki said the resolution would be a "couple of meters per pixel," which comes close to the standard for commercial Earth imaging.

The key factor is the cost: Lewicki noted that an imaging instrument like NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer would typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars. "We're looking to go one to two orders of magnitude below that," he said.

Diamandis said that price reduction would significantly widen the market for orbiting telescopes. "We're in discussions with groups that might want to buy personal telescopes," he told me.

Another part of the Planetary Resources' early-phase business plan would be to strike a deal with NASA, under which the space agency would buy data about the spacecraft and astronomical observations. NASA may find such data useful for planning its own missions to near-Earth asteroids, culminating in manned flights in the 2020s. Similar data purchase deals were made a couple of years ago with several of the companies that are planning to put landers on the moon to win a share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize.

Thanks in part to technology development contracts with NASA and other partners, "the company is cash-flow positive at this point," Diamandis said.

He said about 20 engineers have already been hired to work for Planetary Resources, with operations based in Bellevue, Wash., east of Seattle. The need to advertise for more employees was one of the reasons why the company's principals decided it was time to go public with their plans, Diamandis said.

He and Lewicki are projecting the first launch of hardware in the 18- to 24-month time frame. Once the telescopes are up and running, the team will identify likely candidates for future missions. The top targets would be near-Earth asteroids that are energetically easier to reach than landing on the moon. Getting to those asteroids would require the development of additional spacecraft for the Arkyd product line, such as an in-space propulsion vehicle and an experimental resource-extraction package. 

"Three, four, five years out, depending on trajectory, is when we envision getting up close and personal with an asteroid," Lewicki said.

Time for a reality check
Planetary Resources says space mining could "add trillions of dollars to the global GDP," but such an estimate assumes that there'll be a significant demand for the water, fuel and air produced in outer space. If NASA doesn't send out deep-space transports, or goes with a space propulsion system that doesn't require a periodic fill-up, that could reduce the projected demand for the materials that Planetary Resources aims to produce.

That doesn't faze Lewicki, however. Even if NASA doesn't turn into a buyer, "we've got a private interest in developing those resources," he said.

There's also a question about the part of the operation that would involve shipping platinum and other materials back to Earth. Platinum now costs more than $1,500 an ounce, but with current technology, the cost of launching a mining probe, extracting ore, processing the metal and returning it to Earth would almost certainly be more than that on a per-ounce basis.

"The question is, how does the economics come into this?" said Adam Bruckner, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington. "Can it ultimately be less expensive to find it on an asteroid than to find it on Earth? At some point in the future — and it's debatable how far in the future — the two lines will cross."

Anderson acknowledged in a video statement that Planetary Resources would be an unconventional, long-term venture: "On a scale of 20 to 30 years, I envision the resources from space contributing a significant amount to the GDP of the planet — truly creating a world where one plus one equals three."

Bruckner noted that the idea of mining asteroids for water and other resources has been around for decades. Fourteen years ago, for example, a company called SpaceDev planned to take on a commercial deep-space mission to an asteroid. SpaceDev eventually abandoned the idea and turned its attention instead to the development of small satellites and hybrid rocket engines. In 2008, the company was acquired by Sierra Nevada Corp., which is currently receiving millions of dollars from NASA for spaceship development.

Bob Richards, co-founder and CEO of Moon Express Inc., one of the ventures competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, said he welcomed Planetary Resources' efforts but insisted that the moon was a better target for resource extraction than any near-Earth asteroid. Just today, Moon Express announced that it sent NASA a mission plan that eventually could lead to mining missions on the moon.

"I looked at this myself," Richards told me. "The energy argument doesn't trump the fact that we've sampled the moon and we know what's there. ... But it's a big universe. There are trillions of trillions of dollars in space resources, so there's enough room for a lot of players."

More about extraterrestrial investments:

• Google billionaires back space resource venture
• Could legal loophole lead to extraterrestrial land claims?
• Private property in outer space? It's debatable
• To infinity and beyond: Investing in space travel
• How to make the moon pay

This report was last updated at 3:40 p.m. ET.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

The prototype space shuttle Enterprise is seen mated on top of NASA's modified Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Friday. Enterprise was the first orbiter built for the space shuttle program, but never went into orbit. It was used primarily for ground and flight tests within the atmosphere. Enterprise had been on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, but is now being prepared for its new home at the Intrepid Sea Air and Space Museum in New York.

A day after the space shuttle Discovery took its place at the Smithsonian, the prototype shuttle Enterprise is perched on a modified 747 jet for its journey to New York. Now the timing of the trip depends on East Coast weather.

Overnight, Enterprise was towed out to Dulles International Airport and hoisted up into the air with two giant cranes. The jet, known as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft or SCA, was brought underneath the 75-ton artifact. Then Enterprise was lowered down and "soft-mated" onto the plane at three attach points. The bolts will be tightened down for hard-mating on Saturday, in preparation for the big flight to New York.

This is the same process that Discovery went through in Florida leading up to Tuesday's flight to Dulles for its installation at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, next to the airport. On Thursday, Enterprise was moved out of the space it held since the center's opening in 2003, and Discovery was moved in.

NASA had been planning for Enterprise and the SCA to take off from Dulles as early as Monday morning, but this afternoon the space agency said the flight would be delayed due to a forecast of inclement weather in Washington as well as New York. "Managers will continue to review weather forecasts and announce a new flight date as soon as practical," NASA said in its advisory.

When forecasters give the go-ahead, the shuttle-jet combo will head up the East Coast and do a series of New York flyovers. You can expect to see the double-decker behemoth sailing over the Statue of Liberty as well as the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, the retooled ship where Enterprise will be put on display. After the flyovers, the Enterprise will be set down at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The shuttle-jet flight is old hat for Enterprise: The craft was the first vehicle built for the space shuttle program, and got its name in part thanks to a write-in campaign by "Star Trek" fans. Unlike the fictional starship, NASA's Enterprise never flew in space. Instead, it was used for ground tests as well as aerodynamic test flights atop the 747 carrier plane. Once the shuttle launches ramped up, Enterprise was deemed no longer needed for testing. It was handed over to the Smithsonian in 1985. The Udvar-Hazy Center's James S. McDonnell Space Hangar was specifically designed to show off the Enterprise.

After the 2003 Columbia tragedy, some sections of the Enterprise's wing panels were removed for impact tests, and those tests made a huge contribution to the accident investigation. That demonstrated that the shuttles can continue to benefit the space program long after their retirement.

It will take a few weeks for Enterprise to settle into its retirement home: The cranes will have to be set up for the shuttle's "demating" at JFK. Then Enterprise will have to be lifted onto a barge and brought up the Hudson River by a tugboat. The schedule calls for Enterprise to be hoisted aboard the Intrepid's flight deck sometime in June. It'll be put on display in a temporary climate-controlled pavilion this summer, and eventually housed in a permanent exhibit facility.

After Enterprise, there's one more shuttle-jet flight on tap: the transfer of Endeavour from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. That cross-country trip, due to take place in the latter part of this year, is likely to spark a nationwide frenzy of "Spot the Shuttle" sightings.

The last shuttle that flew in space, Atlantis, is going just down the road to Kennedy Space Center's visitor center, so there'll be no need to bring out the plane for that trip.

For more pictures of the Enterprise-747 mating, check out NASA Headquarters' Flickr gallery. And to get updates on the timing of Enterprise's flight and the flyovers, keep tabs on NASA's website as well as msnbc.com's space news section.

More about the shuttle shuffle:

• Astronauts revisit the shuttle's pros and cons
• How NASA selected the shuttles' future homes
• Seattle gets first pieces of shuttle trainer

Updated 5:20 p.m. ET.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.