Space hotel says it's on schedule to open in 2012

The cost of a three-night stay at ‘Galactic’ resort estimated at $4.4 million

BARCELONA, Spain - A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project.

The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost $4.4 million for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.

During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes. They would wear Velcro suits so they can crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.
Galactic Suite Ltd's CEO Xavier Claramunt, a former aerospace engineer, said the project will put his company at the forefront of an infant industry with a huge future ahead of it, and forecast space travel will become common in the future.

"It's very normal to think that your children, possibly within 15 years, could spend a weekend in space," he told Reuters Television.

A nascent space tourism industry is beginning to take shape with construction underway in New Mexico of Spaceport America, the world's first facility built specifically for space-bound commercial customers and fee-paying passengers.

British tycoon Richard Branson's space tours firm, Virgin Galactic, will use the facility to propel tourists into suborbital space at a cost of $200,000 a ride.

Galactic Suite Ltd, set up in 2007, hopes to start its project with a single pod in orbit 280 miles above the earth, with the capacity to hold four guests and two astronaut-pilots.

It will take a day and a half to reach the pod — which Claramunt compared to a mountain retreat, with no staff to greet the traveler.

"When the passengers arrive in the rocket, they will join it for three days, rocket and capsule. With this we create in the tourist a confidence that he hasn't been abandoned. After three days the passenger returns to the transport rocket and returns to earth," he said.

More than 200 people have expressed an interest in traveling to the space hotel and at least 43 people have already reserved.

The numbers are similar for Virgin Galactic with 300 people already paid or signed up for the trip but unlike Branson, Galactic Suite say they will use Russian rockets to transport their guests into space from a spaceport to be build on an island in the Caribbean.
But critics have questioned the project, saying the time frame is unreasonable and also where the money is coming from to finance the project.

Claramunt said an anonymous billionaire space enthusiast has granted $3 billion to finance the project.

Unmasking Jupiter's Europa -Does Its Hidden Ocean Harbor Life?

Europa. One of the most interesting non-Earth locations in the solar system. Never mind ice and occasional puddles, this moon has entire oceans - and where there's water, we can't help but hope there's life. Recent results show that there are heat sources to drive evolution of such as well, but there's still debate over what's actually going on in there.

The key point of contention is the satellites crunchy ice covering. We know that the Jovian moon is coated in kilometers of frozen material, but that sort of handwaving figure can get you in trouble - exactly how many kilometers there are can make all the difference. We believe that the European core is heated by the massive tidal forces applied by Jupiter - but how does that heat radiate into space?

Most scientists believe that the subEuropan seas are locked under tens of kilometers of ice. Heat is then conducted from the warm core by bulk convective motion of ice - huge chunks of frozen material literally carrying the heat away with them as they move up through the icy layer, shuffling and refreezing as they dump heat into space.

Professor Richard Greenberg believes that the crust is thin, only a kilometer or so, and heat is carried out by simple conduction - much slower, but providing a constant flow of energy through a relatively fixed underwater region bordering the immense cliffs of ice.

Greenberg does weaken his case by accusing a "Big Ice" cabal of scientists of suppressing his results, holding back his views to favor their own established model. The thing is, when you start talking about a conspiracy against you it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong: you sound a bit crazy. Especially when that "cabal" isn't a hidden core of ultra-billionaires, but probably about twenty guys with tenure who meet twice a year to talk about space moons.

On the upside, it seems the shadowy Europa lobby can't keep him silent and he's printing a book, "Unmasking Europa", putting forward his views and setting up the mother of all "I told you so"s if it turns out he's right. Again, he slightly weakens his case by fantasising an entire Europan ecosystem based on a few flybys of the Galileo probe, and it's not as if popular opinion will actually sway the scientists investigating the issue.

What is important is that such issues do now percolate to the public, one way or another. Science is no longer the preserve of those either rich enough to afford it or trying to build missiles out of it. Beside the cook books and crime novels you can find imaginings of the stars, controversies of the cosmos, and books about the entire universe. Which are slightly more interesting than "Five things you can do with leftovers" by Dolores Housewife.

New Signs That Ancient Mars Was Wet

Mars may have been wet for a billion years longer than previously thought, new water-related opal evidence from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests. The findings have implications for the possibility that Mars once supported life.


Scientists have known for some time that the 4.5 billion-year-old planet once harbored liquid water because of the many features on its surface that were likely created by flowing water.


Hydrated, or water-containing, mineral deposits also provide telltale signs of where and when water was present on ancient Mars.


Until now, only two major groups of hydrated minerals, phyllosilicates and hydrated sulfates, have been observed by spacecraft orbiting the red planet. (The clay-like phyllosilicates formed more than 3.5 billion years ago where igneous rock encountered water. Hydrated sulfates formed until about 3 billion years ago from the evaporation of salty and sometimes acidic water.)


But a new hydrate mineral has now entered the picture: hydrated silica, commonly known as opal.


These opaline silicates were detected by MRO's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) and are the youngest of the three types of hydrated minerals. They formed where liquid water altered materials created by volcanic activity or meteorite impacts on the Martian surface.


"This is an exciting discovery because it extends the time range for liquid water on Mars, and the places where it might have supported life," said CRISM principal investigator Scott Murchie of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "The identification of opaline silica tells us that water may have existed as recently as 2 billion years ago."


Some of the opaline deposits were also associated with iron sulfates, which study team member Ralph Milliken of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said is "the exact sort of minerals you would expect to see if you had really acidic water."


And not only do the deposits indicate the past presence of liquid water, but that the water "was there long enough to alter some of the rocks," Milliken told SPACE.com. "It wasn't an overnight process."


One particular location where the opaline silicates were found was the large canyon system Valles Marineris.


"We see numerous outcrops of opal-like minerals, commonly in thin layers extending for very long distances around the rim of Valles Marineris and sometimes within the canyon system itself," Milliken said.


The minerals were also recently found in Gusev Crater by NASA's Mars rover Spirit.


Another recent study, which Milliken co-authored, looked at images of the same deposits taken by MRO's HiRISE camera.


The new study, detailed in the November issue of the journal Geology, reveals that opaline silicates are widespread and occur in relatively young terrain.


"What's important is that the longer liquid water existed on Mars, the longer the window during which Mars may have supported life," Milliken said. "The opaline silica deposits would be good places to explore to assess the potential for habitability on Mars, especially in these younger terrains."

Planets Thought Dead Might Be Habitable

Astronomers have long talked about a "habitable zone" around a star as being a confined and predictable region where temperatures were not to cold, not to hot, so that a planet could retain liquid water and therefore support life as we know it.

The zone may not be so fixed, it turns out. Some extrasolar planets that one might assume are too cold to host life could in fact be made habitable by a squishing effect from their stars, a new study found.

A planet's midsection gets stretched out by its star's gravity so that its shape is slightly more like a cigar than a sphere. Some planets travel non-circular, or elongated paths around their stars. As such a world moves closer to the star, it stretches more, and when it moves farther away, the stretching decreases.

When a planet's orbit is particularly oblong, the stretching changes are so great that its interior warms up in a process called tidal heating.

"It's basically the same effect as when you bend a paper clip, and it gets hot inside," said researcher Brian Jackson of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Jackson and colleagues created a computer model to simulate this effect on exoplanets, and found that the process could shift the range and distance of the "habitable zone" around a star in which planets would have the right temperatures needed to harbor life.

"It could be that planets close to the edge of the habitable zone get way too much tidal heating, and they'd be too hot," Jackson told SPACE.com. It also could be that planets just beyond the outer edge, which according to previous models would be too cold, might undergo enough heating that their surfaces would be warm enough for life and water, Jackson said.

Tidal heating could in fact affect many planets in the galaxy, because the oblong orbits that cause the phenomenon are quite common.

"Most of the extrasolar planets we've found so far are in pretty elongated orbits, which is surprising because most of the planets in our solar system have orbits that are roughly circular," Jackson said.
Scientists aren't sure why our solar system is unique in this way, but the difference could significantly affect the hunt for life beyond Earth.

In some cases it would suggest that it's going to be little bit harder, Jackson said, because worlds that looked habitable may experience too much tidal heating. On the other hand, some planets that were thought to be too cold might in fact be warmed up enough for life, and that might improve our odds.

Tidal heating could further boost some planets' habitability by warming them enough to spur volcanism, which in turn drives plate tectonics, the process that recycles rock through a planet's surface layers.

Plate tectonics is a definite boon for life, because stirring up the surface layers helps to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since rock absorbs CO2 from the air. And having the perfect balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere helps a planet maintain that "just right" temperature range.

Airliner had near miss with UFO

A passenger jet bound for Heathrow Airport had a near miss with a UFO, Ministry of Defence files reveal.

The captain of the Alitalia airliner shouted "Look out" to his co-pilot at the sight of a brown missile-shaped object shooting past them overhead.

Civil Aviation Authority and military investigations could not explain the 1991 incident near Lydd in Kent.

The unsolved close encounter features in UFO-related military documents made available by the National Archives.

After ruling out the object flying past the Alitalia jet being a missile, weather balloon or space rocket, the MoD closed the inquiry.

Nineteen files covering sightings between 1986 and 1992 are being made available online.


Almost 200 such files will be made available by the MoD over the next four years.

The current batch also include a US Air Force pilot's account of being ordered to shoot down a UFO that appeared on his radar while he flew over East Anglia.

There is also an MoD request that army and navy helicopters not take photographs of crop circles, because of concerns about undermining the official line that the military did not investigate unexplained phenomena.

And the files also contain a letter from a woman claiming to be from the Sirius system who said her spacecraft - also containing two "Spectrans" with "Mr Spock ears" - crashed in Britain during World War II.

UFO expert and journalism lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr David Clarke, said the documents would shed new light on relatively little-known sightings.

He said some conspiracy theorists would already have decided that the release of the papers was a "whitewash".

He added: "Because the subject is bedevilled by charlatans and lunatics, it is career suicide to have your name associated with UFOs, which is a real pity.

"The National Archives are doing a fantastic job here. Everyone brings their own interpretation.

"Now you can look at the actual primary material - the stuff coming into the MoD every day - and make your own mind up."

Zuckerberg: Facebook is all about growth

Maybe it's advice he heard from a career counselor at Harvard and took to heart: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For now, what Mark Zuckerberg wants most for Facebook is to see it grow and grow and grow some more, without too much fretting over the bottom line.

In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Facebook's co-founder and CEO minced no words on the matter: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

Of course, it could be less a philosophical matter than a practical one for a site that's still sketching out its plans for making money to match its popularity. And bless his heart, even in a tanking global economy, Zuckerberg suggests there's plenty of time for that. He elaborates:


But what every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said essentially the same thing over the summer--the social network's focus is on growth.

How do the two executives divvy up their responsibilities? Zuckerberg said of Sandberg, who joined Facebook about six months ago:


She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

He also made it clear who's boss: "Me!"

On Friday, Zuckerberg will be taking part in a "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference in London

Methane-Ethane Lakes of Titan

This artist concept shows a mirror-smooth lake on the surface of the smoggy moon Titan.

Cassini scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified ethane. This result makes Titan the only place in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

The Size Of Our World

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THE ARTICLE

http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm

Japan hopes to turn sci-fi into reality with elevator to the stars

From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality.

Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.

For chemists, physicists, material scientists, astronauts and dreamers across the globe, the space elevator represents the most tantalising of concepts: cables stronger and lighter than any fibre yet woven, tethered to the ground and disappearing beyond the atmosphere to a satellite docking station in geosynchronous orbit above Earth.

Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables — or flat ribbons — will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.


In the carriages, the scientists behind the idea told The Times, could be any number of cargoes. A space elevator could carry people, huge solar-powered generators or even casks of radioactive waste. The point is that breaking free of Earth's gravity will no longer require so much energy — perhaps 100 times less than launching the space shuttle.

“Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space,” Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, said.

The vision has inspired scientists around the world and government organisations including Nasa. Several competing space elevator projects are gathering pace as various groups vie to build practical carriages, tethers and the hundreds of other parts required to carry out the plan. There are prizes offered by space elevator-related scientific organisations for breakthroughs and competitions for the best and fastest design of carriage.

First envisioned by the celebrated master of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1979 work The Fountains of Paradise, the concept has all the best qualities of great science fiction: it is bold, it is a leap of imagination and it would change life as we know it.

Unlike the warp drives in Star Trek, or H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, the idea of the space elevator does not mess with the laws of science; it just presents a series of very, very complex engineering problems.

Japan is increasingly confident that its sprawling academic and industrial base can solve those issues, and has even put the astonishingly low price tag of a trillion yen (£5 billion) on building the elevator. Japan is renowned as a global leader in the precision engineering and high-quality material production without which the idea could never be possible.

The biggest obstacle lies in the cables. To extend the elevator to a stationary satellite from the Earth's surface would require twice that length of cable to reach a counterweight, ensuring that the cable maintains its tension.

The cable must be exceptionally light, staggeringly strong and able to withstand all projectiles thrown at it inside and outside the atmosphere. The answer, according to the groups working on designs, will lie in carbon nanotubes - microscopic particles that can be formed into fibres and whose mass production is now a focus of Japan's big textile companies.

According to Yoshio Aoki, a professor of precision machinery engineering at Nihon University and a director of the Japan Space Elevator Association, the cable would need to be about four times stronger than what is currently the strongest carbon nanotube fibre, or about 180 times stronger than steel. Pioneering work on carbon nanotubes in Cambridge has produced a strength improvement of about 100 times over the last five years.

Equally, there is the issue of powering the carriages as they climb into space. “We are thinking of using the technology employed in our bullet trains,” Professor Aoki said. “Carbon nanotubes are good conductors of electricity, so we are thinking of having a second cable to provide power all along the route.”

Japan is hosting an international conference in November to draw up a timetable for the machine.

Stranger than fiction

“Riding silently into the sky, soon she was 100km high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X15s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, the point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight. Nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.”

THE NULL'S TOP TEN WEIRD THINGS SENT INTO SPACE

10. Golf Clubs

Two golf balls have been hit in space. It probably means that the first contact we have with aliens will be when they arrive a bit narked, asking, "Is this your ball that just smashed my greenhouse window?"

9. Salmonella

It seems as though anyone can get a lift into space these days, even death-causing microbes. However, they didn't seem to like it since Salmonella's little space jaunt made them more potent.

8. Luke Skywalker's Light Sabre

No, were not joking. It's absolutely true - the light sabre that Luke himself used to fight the Dark Side is on its own six million mile trip into space. Even Chewbacca was there to see it off.

7. Sweet Potato

A top piece of stellar research happened when the Chinese blasted veg into the heavens to see how it would taste once back down on Earth. They found that it was pretty much the same.

6. Bird Droppings

It's no wonder that you can never get bird crap off your windscreen despite all that scrubbing. Severe storms and space orbit couldn't shift the stuff, but can it survive the heat of re-entry?

5. Inflatable Space Station

If you thought that space travel might get a bit dull after a while then think again. One company's idea for the future sounds as though there's going to be bouncy astro-castles galore.

4. Scotty's Ashes

When James Doohan died in 2005 there was only one place fitting for the ashes of Star Trek's Scotty to be laid to rest. He'll be boldly going until his cask canna take it any longer.

3. Cosmic Dancer

A sculpture was sent into space to “investigate ... the advantages of integrating art into the living and working environment". Or, if you cut the bull, to investigate how to get famous.

2. Sea Urchins
Animals of all shapes and sizes have made the trip into space including a group of particularly adventurous sea urchins. They'll be so disappointed when the get to the Sea of Tranquility.

1. Anything you want
A Californian company is offering you the chance to send anything you want for a trip into space. Anything you want, that is, as long as it'll fit in a coke can and isn't too heavy. The wife'll have to stay.

LINK
http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk/article/1315