Virgin’s White Knight.

“‘It was very emotional for me,’ he said. ‘I thought, “Oh my God, we’re getting closer.”‘” I’ll say…Richard Branson and Burt Rutan unveil their space tourism mothership, the White Knight Two. “Virgin Galactic envisions a future where space voyages will become as common as airplane travel. It wants to fly 500 people into space in the first year for $200,000 a head…So far, more than 250 wannabe astronauts have paid the full amount.” Hmm…maybe it’s time to start putting ads on this site.

Wish You Were Here.

ESA’s Mars Express sends back some impressive postcards from Mars. “Over the last five years its stereo, high resolution camera has taken thousands of images of the surface, revealing the planet’s awe inspiring beauty in unprecedented detail.”

How Red Does Your Garden Grow?

“‘There’s nothing about it that would preclude life. In fact, it seems very friendly,’ said mission scientist Samuel P. Kounaves of Tufts University. ‘We were flabbergasted.‘” Hope y’all like asparagus: Early tests by the Mars Phoenix seem to indicate that the Martian soil is more nutrient-rich than anyone expected. “Carbon-based organic material, however, has not been found and may be impossible to detect with the equipment now on Mars.“

Red Rain Coming Down.

“It’s with great pride and a lot of joy I announce today we have found proof that this hard material really is water ice and not some other substance.” Signs have pointed in that direction for awhile now, and particularly since the Phoenix landed. But now, it seems we have really, truly, definitively found ice on Mars. “The next questions to answer are what chemicals, minerals and organic compounds might be mixed in with the water. ‘Just the fact that there’s ice there doesn’t tell you if it’s habitable,’ Smith said. ‘With ice and no food it’s not a habitable zone. We don’t eat rocks — we have to have carbon chain materials that we ingest into our bodies to create new cells and give us energy. That’s what we eat and that’s what has to be there if you’re going to have a habitable zone on Mars.‘”

Under a Red Moon.

“‘They’re taking an Apollo-like approach,’ Gilbreth said. ‘Our program is much more ambitious than Apollo. We’re going to put four people on the moon for seven days, eventually for six months. China is looking for a minimum capability. We’re looking to put an outpost on the moon.‘” NASA officials concede that China will beat the US back to the moon. “The goal of NASA’s Constellation program is to return astronauts to the moon by 2020…Gilbreth said the Chinese could accomplish that by 2017 or 2018.“

Moreover, that US date will likely slip five years when Pres. Obama takes office in January. In all honesty, this is one of the few areas where I emphatically disagree with our nominee. There are plenty of places to acquire $18 billion for education without raiding the space exploration budget…defense bloat, for example.

Ice, Ice, Baby?

“‘We were expecting to find ice within two to six inches of the surface,’ said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in a statement. ‘The thrusters have excavated two to six inches and, sure enough, we see something that looks like ice. It’s not impossible that it’s something else, but our leading interpretation is ice.’” Well, it sure looks like ice. The Phoenix Mars Lander seems to have found its quarry almost immediately after landing. And where there’s water…

Flight of the Phoenix.

“In my dreams it couldn’t go as perfectly as it went tonight, we went right down the middle.” Touchdown: NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, soon to look for water in the Martian Arctic, lands without incident in the Vastitas Borealis plains. Congrats!

Childhood’s End.

“Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy.” — Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

No ship that small has a cloaking device…

“‘It’s very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night,’ said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. ‘Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very dark.‘” Dick Cheney’s soul? Tonight’s lunar eclipse? No, a great leap forward in “transformational optics”…and invisibility cloaks. The “paper-thin material…absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black.”

Distant Mirrors.

“‘This is a landmark discovery because it implies that solar system analogs may be very common, at least scaled-down versions,’ said Sara Seager, an extra-solar planet expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘…We are on an inexorable path to finding other Earths.‘” Astronomers find a solar system not unlike our own 5,000 light years away. “We are seeing the emergence of a new planet-finding technique — one that opens up an entirely new capability for planet finding. It is more powerful than we ever thought possible.”