Top 100 Space & Astronomy Blogs

Check out this nicely annotated list of space blogs (including this one) on the find-schools-online.com website.

To this list I would add at least three more important links:

Space Transport News
Clark S. Lindsey provides one-stop shopping for breaking commercial spaceflight news and commentary, updated several times a day.

Space Today
Futron analyst Jeff Foust pulls together links to space news stories each day from around the Web.

Personal Spaceflight
Another site by Foust, this one devoted to his insights on commercial manned spaceflight news.

What else are we missing?

Inside: America's Secret Weapon Lab

I was a consultant on a National Geographic Channel special on DARPA called America's Secret Weapon Lab that premiers tonight. Show time is at 9:00 p.m. If you miss it, it's also on this Saturday, December 6 at 11:00 a.m., and Thursday, December 11 at 2:00 p.m.

I got the production team in the door at DARPA, and me at the same time, by pitching myself to DARPA director Tony Tether as one-stop shopping for good publicity for the agency. Tether gave me acccess to interviews and programs at the agency, and he got not just a book about DARPA, but a TV show as well.

Until the production team, Terra Nova Television, established its own relationships at DARPA, I acted as go-between. I also advised on good projects to shoot, suggested directions the show should go in and the tone it should take, provided some research help, and advised on the script.

It's a good show, and I think it represents the agency well. The focus, naturally for a television production, is on DARPA projects that are photogenic, including hypsersonic aircraft, exoskeletons, a novel swim flipper called Power Swim, and a rocket powered grenade stopper called Iron Curtain, among others.

In addition to some great footage of all that, the show includes interviews with DARPA director Tony Tether and many of the agency's program managers.

One piece of Tether's interview that did not make it into the final cut, though I pushed for it, was a wonderful moment when Tether asked anyone who had an idea for a DARPA project to email him directly at tony.tether@darpa.mil. He promised he would make sure any ideas sent to him would be considered. Great stuff, and a perfect summation of what the agency is all about.

XCOR Suborbital Tickets on Sale Now

I've just telecommuted in to a press conference in Los Angeles at which principals from XCOR Aerospace and Rocketship Tours announced that tickets for XCOR's rocketship-in-development are on sale now. Danish investment banker Per Wimmer also ceremoniously signed his consent form and was presented a giant first ticket, making him officially Passenger Number One.

Veteran travel entreprenour Jules Klar, credited with popularizing European travel for Americans in the 1960s, was introduced as the head of Rocketship Tours. "I did an enormous amount of due diligeance," said Klar of his decision to select XCOR as his rocketship provider of choice. He cited XCOR's 3,500 successful rocket firings since 2000 and the company's unmarred safety record as factors in his decision.

For their $95,000 ticket price, says Klar, passengers will get a "complete and total experience," not just the 1/2-hour run to space and back in XCOR's planned Lynx vehicle. After some basic physical and mental screening, said Klar, spaceflight participants will enjoy a 5-night stay at the Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort in Arizona, where they will start training that will at some point include acrobatic airplane flights.

Former Space Shuttle commander and XCOR chief test pilot Rick Searfoss will fly the two-seat Lynx to suborbital space with one passenger at a time. The passenger will sit right beside Searfoss in the cockpit to get the best possible view. That view from space, said Searfoss at the conference, is "virtually a spiritual experience." He called the view the best part of the experience, in fact, easily beating out the experience of going weightless.

Lynx passengers won't get much of a sensation of weightlessness anyway, since they'll be strapped into their seats the whole time, in contrast to the planned Virgin Galactic experience, which will include floating about the cabin of an 8-place spaceship. At $200,000 a ticket, the Virgin experience also costs twice as much.

XCOR chief Jeff Greason gave an update on his company's progress in building the Lynx. With design work completed earlier this year, the engineers and technicians at XCOR have started building the ship in their shop in Mojave, California, with first prototype engine "very shortly" to be put on the test stand. The company aims to fly the first test flight in 2010, with Wimmer to get his ride in 2011, if all goes well.

Want to ride? You can make a deposit and get on the passenger list for $20,000. Pay the full $95,000 up front to get priority seating. Call 888-778-6877 or visit the Rocketship Tours website for more info.

Direct from the Moon

I've just received a review copy of the upcoming National Geographic Channel program Direct from the Moon.

The piece kicks off the channel's Exploration Week on Monday, December 17, at 9:00 p.m.

Centered around stunning new imagery from the Japanese space agency's lunar satellite Kaguya (also known as Selene, and launched in September 2007), Direct from the Moon features new interviews from Apollo moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, as well as an intriguing set of interviews from the Japense researchers analyzing the data Kaguya is sending home.

The show is worth watching just for two sequences alone: an Earthrise, from which the shot above is a still, and a 3D terrain map of Tyco crater revealing the terraces, valleys, and central peak in never-before-seen detail.

Tyco seems to have been formed by an impact roughly around the same time as the Yucatan Peninsula impact therorized to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

But while the terrestrial impact crater is hidden underwater, Tyco is naked for Kaguya, and now us, to see, and to draw conclusions from about what happened here on earth so long ago.

Going back even further, one Japanese researcher interviewed for the program, has concluded that lunar and terrestrial strikes originated from the asteroid belt, and that leads to the intriguing idea that iron from asteroid impacts interacted with elements in Earth's early oceans to create amino acids, the building blocks of life.

Exciting as it is, Direct from the Moon feels like it's trying to do too many things at once in the mere 50 minutes alloted to it: is it an Apollo documentary? A back-to-the-moon call to action? Or a presentation of exciting new findings made possible by Kaguya?



I'll never get tired of Apollo eye candy, and I could watch those segments all day. Nor will I ever tire of hearing Aldrin et al describe what so very few humans have ever seen before.

But the new data streaming from Kaguya and the scientists interpreting it deserve a show of their own. These (to American audiences) new faces and hardware exploring the moon, the unprecidented detail of the 3D images taken from Kaguya's 60-mile orbit, the new theories about the Earth-moon system's origins and what they can tell us about how life started here on Earth, all should provide fresh inspiration for a new generation of explorers.

As Adrin says in the program, "That satellite has improved our understanding, our definition of just what the surface of the moon really looks like. And it ought to stir the imagingation in any human being."

DARPA book complete

I'm in a blissful lull now, awaiting my editor's feedback before starting revisions on my book about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The book runs just under 300 pages without notes and other back matter. Some other stats:

Working title: The Department of Mad Scientists: Inside DARPA and How It Shapes Our Technological Future

Tentative list of chapters:

1: An Arm and a Leg
DARPA and the military industrial complex, advanced prosthetics, and why DARPA may just represent the best use of our tax dollars.

2: The Sky Is Falling
President Eisenhower, Sputnik, and how ARPA became America's first space agency.

3: The Intergalactic Network
ARPA invents the Internet, GPS, and stealth airplane technology, and then wonders what the hell it's for after the fall of the Soviet Union.

4: Crazy-Ass Things
Tony Tether takes over DARPA with a mission to bring back the era of visionaries with their hair on fire, and after 9/11 becomes DARPA's longest-serving director.

5: Back Seat Drivers
Ten days in the desert with 35 driverless cars and their humans.

6. Bot on Bot Action
The robot cars go head-to-head in DARPA's first robotic street rally.

7. The Final Frontier
Back in space, DARPA launches satellites on the cheap and discovers the secret of hypersonic flight.

8. The Robot Will See You Now
Robotic surgery comes of age; up next: surgery as word processing.

9. Power to the People
Behind the scenes at perhaps DARPA's most important project yet: getting us energy security now.

Pub date: Fall 2009

Publisher: Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins Publishers

Jim Benson Has Died

I've just heard the sad news that Jim Benson, founder of SpaceShipOne rocket contractor SpaceDev has left this world. He was 63 years old. From a SpaceDev announcement released today:

"SpaceDev Founder and Board Member James Benson, 63, died peacefully in his home. Benson was diagnosed in 2007 with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, the cause of his death early this morning."

Jim was a passionate advocate for the commercialization of space and he started his company in Poway, California to help make it happen with affordable micro satellites built with off-the-shelf components and hybrid fueled rockets. SpaceDev won the competition to supply components for SpaceShipOne's rocket motor. Just how much of the rocket SpaceDev contributed was a source of contention between Benson and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan that led to a falling out between the two.

Popular Science editor Eric Adams and I were struggling to get a good view of the final SpaceShipOne launch on October 4, 2004 when Jim grabbed the two of us and snuck us through a hole in the fence to allow us to escape from the media viewing section into the VIP section. I felt like a kid sneaking over the schoolyard fence after hours. Jim's unquenchable boyish enthusiasm certainly contributed to that feeling.

A few months later, I drove out to Poway to meet Jim at his office and he gave me a tour of the shop where the fuel had been molded into SpaceShipOne's rocket motor and he took me around the offices and satellite mission control center at SpaceDev. Back in Jim's office, Jim proudly showed me his tattered Science Fiction Book Club membership card framed on his wall.

Jim had been inspired to get into space as a boy, and he never lost that sense of wonder and excitement for the final frontier, nor was he afraid to share that passion with anyone he met. He will be missed.

SpaceX in Orbit!

Yesterday Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, reached orbit with the first privately built liquid fueled satellite launcher.

It's a huge boost for commercial spaceflight and perhaps the biggest milestone since the 2004 launch of the suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipOne. Just as SpaceShipOne proved that a private company can send people into space, SpaceX has proven that orbital spaceflight need not be the exclusive domain of major government programs.

"Wow, this is a great day for SpaceX," said CEO Elon Musk in an email after the launch, "and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team. The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion — middle of the bullseye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake."

This was SpaceX's fourth launch attempt. The company attempted its first launch in March 2006, the second in March 2007, and the third this past August. All four launches were made from the company's launch pad in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii.

In addition to perfecting its Falcon 1 rockets since its first launch attempt in 2006, SpaceX has expanded into a former Boeing 747 assembly plant in the Los Angeles area, built out a launch facility at the home of the U.S. space program, Cape Canaveral, Florida, and made steady progress on a rocket capable of manned flight, the Falcon 9.

With this launch, of a 364-pound dummy test satellite, orbital space is now officially open for business. This is good news for any company that wants to do business affordably in orbit, including Bigelow Aerospace, which aims to launch the first commercial space station by 2010.

It's also good news for NASA, which is facing the grim prospect of losing its own access to space with the retiring of the Space Shuttle in 2010 and the possible loss of its Russian launch partner because of renewed tensions between the United States and the Russian Federation.

With the Merlin engines that will power Falcon 9 now proven spaceworthy, SpaceX seems poised to step into the American space-access gap.

"I will have a more complete post launch statement tomorrow," said Musk in his email, "as right now I'm in a bit of a daze and need to go celebrate :)"

By the way, SpaceX is hiring, big time. When you're done checking out launch footage at http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=30, Musk's tour of SpaceX's shop floor, including the production line cranking out Merlin engines at an astonishing rate of one engine per week--more than all the rest of U.S. rocket booster production combined.

The 76 positions open at SpaceX, according to the Careers page on the company website, include spots for engineers trained in:

Rocket engine combustion
Turbo-machinery
Advanced structural design & analysis (composite and metal structures)
Avionics, guidance & control
Embedded real-time programming
Digital and analog electronics including RF electronics


...as well as technicians skilled in:

Launch operations
Composites manufacturing
Electronics assembly (PCB and wire harness)
Machining
Structural assembly
Propulsion systems assembly
Quality Assurance

Surgery as word processing

I'm just finishing up a chapter in my DARPA book on the Trauma Pod project.

Last month I visited the project's headquarters at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, where I snapped this picture of the robot surgical system at the heart of the program.

Rick Satava, an Army surgeon, started what became Trauma Pod at DARPA in the 1990s. He left DARPA for the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command just before a successful Phase I demo at SRI last year.

What you see here is a modified da Vinci Surgical System (developed at SRI and commercialized by Intuitive Surgical) poised over a fake patient, with a robot scrub nurse awaiting instructions in the foreground. Phase I answered the question "can a robotic system treat wounded soldiers in the battlefield?" with an unqualified "Yes."

Next steps: take the remote human surgeon out of the loop by completely automating several of the most essential trauma operations, and then shrink this stuff down to a size that can roll on an armored personnel carrier or fly in a black hawk helicopter.

The goal is to enable soldiers on the battlefield to load wounded comrades into the trauma pod and have the system go to work immediately patching up hemorrhaging blood vessels and collapsed lungs, buying precious minutes in which to get to a field hospital.

Battlefield trauma surgery is just the beginning, Satava tells me. He envisions a day when surgeons compose operations on computer systems much the way writers like me use word processing software to write articles.

Here I am test-driving SRI's latest surgical robot, the M7, in a photo by SRI public relations consultant Deborah Lacy. Just like word processing? Let's just say it's a good thing there wasn't a real patient on the table. You can see the instruments I'm remotely manipulating on the monitor behind my head.

Satava's surgeon of the future (50 years from now, Satava figures) would work on a three-dimensional representation of a patient created from a head-to-toe CT scan. After perfecting the operation, he or she would hit a command to "print" the procedure on the actual patient. As Satava put it to me:

You...send the image to the surgeon. He spends a few minutes and gets...exactly what he wants without damaging the patient--being able to edit it and then just send it out--and bing, bing, bing, it’s all done by the robot immediately.

The advantage, says Satava, will be surgery done up to 12 times faster and 15 times more accurately than by an unassisted human surgeon. In other words, a procedure that takes an hour in today's operating rooms could be shaved down to just 5 minutes.

Virgin Galactic Rolls Out Mother Ship

I've just return from Mojave to Los Angeles via a specially chartered Virgin America flight for reporters to witness the rollout of Virgin Galactic's White Knight 2.

The ship isn't flying yet--it'll begin ground tests tomorrow and flight tests in the fall. Check out my full report on PopSci.com.

Rocketeers Paperback Shipping July 29

I have on my desk the paperback edition of my book Rocketeers, which goes on sale Tuesday, July 29.

This edition features a few corrections and updates, and also a bibliography, which the hardback version doesn't have.

Cover price is $14.95, and it'll be available in all the usual outlets, including Amazon, which I see has discounted it to $10.17.

I'll let you know when I have signed copies for sale on my website.

White Knight 2 in Mojave and Oshkosh

I'm packing up to head to California for the rollout of Virgin Galactic's White Knight 2, built by Scaled Composites.

White Knight 2 is a B-29-sized four-engine jet made of carbon fiber composites that was designed to carry an 8-seat spaceship called SpaceShipTwo to high altitude. Once there, the spaceship will drop from between White Knight 2's twin booms to fire its rocket engine for a Mach-3 run to space.

Virgin Galactic has already sold more than $20,000,000 worth of tickets to suborbital space at $200,000 each, and some of the future passengers will be on hand in Mojave for the unveiling, along with Virgin chief Richard Branson, White Knight and SpaceShip designer Burt Rutan, and a cadre of Virgin airline pilots training for the job of spaceline pilot.

The rollout is schedule for 7:30 a.m. Monday, July 28 in Mojave. Watch this space for my reporting on it.

Afterwards, Branson and Rutan are heading to the EAA AirVenture Convention at Oshkosh, where they'll give a couple of presentations on White Knight 2. Here's the schedule, as given to me by the Scaled media rep:

Presentation 1: Tuesday, July 29, Pavillion #7, 1:00 p.m.

Presentation 2: Tuesday, July 29 (same day), Theatre in the Woods, 9:00 p.m.

Unfortunately for Oshkosh attendees, the White Knight 2 will stay behind in Mojave.

XCOR and Rocket Racing League at Oshkosh

The media reps at XCOR Aerospace and the Rocket Racing League (RRL) have just filled me on on their plans for demo flights and presentations at the EAA AirVenture Convention at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

XCOR's engineers have been hard at work perfecting the Rocket Racing League's first X-Racer, a rocket-powered racing airplane, and now they're ready for demonstration flights at Oshkosh. Here's the schedule:

Flight 1: Tuesday, July 29, 2:30 p.m., following a 2:10 p.m. press conference

Fight 2: Friday, August 1, 2:30 p.m.

Flight 3: Saturday, August 2, 2:30 p.m.

All flights will be flown by Rick Searfoss, a former Space Shuttle commander now serving as XCOR and the RRL's chief test pilot. "And in addition," the RRL rep tells me, "the Rocket Racing League exhibit/booth on Aero Shell Square will feature the RRL simulators, games, and other great stuff for all ages."

XCOR chief engineer Dan DeLong and company president Jeff Greason will also give three separate presentations on the company's future as a commercial spaceship developer. I'm sure their spaceship-in-development, the Lynx, will feature prominently. Here's the schedule for those events:

Presentation 1: Monday, July 28, 2:30 p.m.

Presentation 2: Saturday, August 2, 1:00 p.m.

Presentation 3: Sunday, August 3, 11:30 a.m.

On the Fox Business Network

Look for me on the Fox Business Network this Monday morning, July 21, at 7:30 a.m. on a breakfast show hosted by Charles Payne.

I'll be on in the studio for a few minutes to talk about the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, including news from Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace and a new edition of my book Rocketeers.

Watch this space for a link to the segment after it airs....



---Update on July 21---
Not quite as much time as I had hoped for for the segment--they seem to have been running late and had to truncate the time alloted to it.

Still, they brought in Diane Murphy, veteran space business communications executive and SpaceX's new communications director via satellite. She was in excellent form, in spite of having to appear in a Los Angeles studio at 4:00 a.m. Nice job, Diane!

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to plug the new edition of my book Rocketeers. Watch for a post about that soon.

Space Adventures Charters Entire Soyuz

Check out my PopSci.com report of a Space Adventures press briefing in New York City this morning. CEO Eric Anderson announced new charter flights to the International Space Station.

Scientists Weigh in on Biofuels vs. Food Debate

I'm blogging for PopSci.com from the first annual BioMass conference in Minneapolis. Latest post here.

Biofuel Diversity at the University of North Dakota

Yesterday I visited a research facility in North Dakota creating jet fuel out of vegetable oil, and I've posted a report on popsci.com.

DARPA Turns 50

I've just posted my reporting on last night's 50th anniversary celebration for the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency on the Popular Science website at PopSci.com.

DARPA's bionic arm project

One of the fascinating projects I'm researching for my book about DARPA is the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. I recently spoke with DARPA's program manager for the project, Army Colonel and intensive care unit doctor Geoffrey Ling, who filled me in on how the program came to be and his goals for it.

Ling was on a tour of duty in Afghanistan when he treated a young boy who'd lost an arm and a leg to a Russian land mine. That's what planted the seeds in his mind for what became Revolutionizing Prosthetics. That, and an encounter with a young American soldier in Iraq who wept when Ling told him his million-dollar wound would get him sent home.

As Ling explained it to me, the goal of his program is a "brain-controlled arm that functions at the level of capacity of an arm, that looks like an arm, that weighs like an arm, and also gives you sensory feedback just like your arm would, and we want it within four years."

The clock started ticking in 2005 and now the arm is due in 2009. The work is going on at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. That's a prototype the group produced last year. I'll get a full update on current progress at a massive, convention-style meeting of all the participating researchers in Maryland later this month.

Meanwhile, just to hedge his bets and get something in the pipeline even faster, Ling created a two-year arm project, now finishing up work at Dean Kamen's DEKA Research (of Segway Human Transporter fame).

Ling calls this one the strap-and-go arm."You wake up in the morning, you put it on, and off you go. It doesn't require hooking up to your brain or anything like that, it's a strap-and-go arm. So we recognize that the strap-and-go arm will not be as dexterous and as functional as the brain controlled one but it needed to be a whole lot better than the hook that's available today--you know, the thing out of Peter Pan?"

I reported on DEKA's arm last year, and I'm due for an update. Ling says progress since then has been amazing. "It's a fantastic arm," says Ling. "Mike, you have to see it to believe it." I'm there.

My XCOR story on PopSci.com

Yep, it's a suborbital spaceship. Check out my story on the unveiling of XCOR's new Lynx spacecraft, along with embedded video, on popsci.com.

"Big announcement" coming from XCOR Aerospace

The folks at XCOR Aerospace tell me that the company is planning a press event on March 26 in Los Angeles. These guys are not prone to frivolous or gratuitous PR, so I'm most definitely intrigued.

Come to think of it, I don't think XCOR has ever held a press conference in the time I've been following them, since 2004. The engineers, technicians, and managers at XCOR prefer to keep their heads down, do their work, and let their deeds speak for themselves.

They've already built and flown a rocket powered airplane, a 7,500-pound-thrust methane rocket engine for NASA (through prime contractor ATK), novel piston fuel pumps designed to replace million-dollar turbo pumps in high-powered rocket engines at a tiny fraction of the cost, and built countless rocket engines to show again and again that liquid fueled rocket engines can be safe, reliable, and affordable enough to become part of our everyday lives.

But the company was founded to get people into space, and the founders have never lost sight of that prize, wrangling contracts from the Department of Defense, NASA, and private companies to build components of their planned suborbital spaceship as well as fund components of the ship for which they don't have customers.

A mysterious project has been underway on the XCOR shop floor behind a black curtain for some time now, and the company has been incredibly successful lately, with contracts and money rolling in faster than ever before. In fact, XCOR made Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest growing companies in America last year.

Are we about to witness a new private spaceship unveiled?

I'm going to blog the XCOR press event for the Popular Science website at www.popsci.com. Look for a link from here on March 26.

Orion Propulsion wins space habitat contract

I've just had a note from Tim Pickens, CEO of Orion Propulsion, pointing me to the latest news posed on his company's website announcing a contract from Bigelow Aerospace. Orion will build thrusters for Bigelow's planned first commercial space station.

Bigelow's booming along on an excellerated schedule to launch its Sundancer space station by 2010. Orion's focus is on "selling shovels to the miners," as Pickens puts it, i.e., providing the means for other companies to reach space quickly and affordably to find whatever profits they may find there--or not to profit at all; Orion is also building thrusters for NASA's next planned crew launcher, the Ares 1, through a contract with prime contractor Boeing.

To get the Bigelow contract, Orion built and tested a prototype thruster and sent it to Bigelow along with a written proposal. Given Robert Bigelow's impatience with paper designs created at the expense of actual working hardware, that seemed a prudent move on Orion's part, but it also reflects the way Orion prefers to do business too.

Next generation space journalists weigh in

I got a call this morning from a group of high school students led by my colleague Graeme Stemp-Morlock at the University of Waterloo's Waterloo Unlimited program.

The students interviewed me and wrote a pair of articles, one of which I've posted here. Check out the other piece on Graeme's blog at http://www.graemestempmorlock.wordpress.com/.

The Family Vacation of the Future

You’ve been to Disneyland, and you’ve visited France, but where to next? For some, the answer is space. Currently, there are several private companies around the globe that are working towards making space travel available to anyone with the money.

It’s not just NASA anymore.

Before you rule out the trip based on the current cost of a suborbital trip, $200,000, Michael Belfiore, author of “Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space,” predicts that the price will plunge to the more affordable price of $10,000 within a few decades.

During orbital holidays in space, passengers would inhabit space hotels, proposed by Robert Bigelow, former millionaire real estate agent turned space entrepreneur. Encompassing the common characteristics of resorts on earth, these hotels will provide all your necessities and more. The view from your room will be out of this world.

Passengers would complete minimal training and basic medical examinations before departing on their space voyage. In contrast to the years of training NASA astronauts undergo, suborbital space tourists only need two days of training. This raises questions regarding how to handle an emergency when there is limited staff aboard the spacecraft.

According to Belfiore, space travel in moderation would not be excessively stressful on the passengers’ anatomy. Trips lasting longer than a few weeks, however, would increase the risk of bone loss, heart troubles and weakened muscles. However, researchers, not families, would be looking at these extended voyages and associated hazards.

Plus, who has that kind of vacation time?

By Paula Makela, Cathy Chen, Alexandra Dozzi, and Colleen Gilhuly

On Woodstock TV

I'll be on Woodstock's own TV station tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time as a guest on Bill Pfleging's Tech Attack. Tune in live at www.woodstocktv.org, and call in to join the conversation at 845-679-7777.

This is as close to home as it gets for me. The studio is just down the road from my house, right next to the playground where I walked my daughter during yesterday's break in the cold weather, and it's practically in the ball field where the Dalai Lama spoke last summer.

Bill's a good friend of mine, Woodstock's resident computer tech guru, and a fellow writer. He and his wife Minda Zetlin recently published a highly entertaining book about technologists' and managers' failure to communicate called The Geek Gap.

This will be a fun show, very informal, and we'll have a full hour to engage in some lively dialogue about cheap access to space, why geeks and suits have trouble understanding each other, and whatever else our callers want to talk about.

My desk

This one's for my friend Ben Zackheim, who wanted to see the results of the office overhaul I did at the beginning of the year.

Here's a little tour for those of you who are also interested:

Mac: After five-plus years, it was time to upgrade my desktop computer. I'd had such a great experience with my iPhone that I upgraded to this iMac. I do believe I have purchased my last PC.

Laptop: I'd already upgraded my laptop to this HP. Nice machine, great for watching movies, okay for traveling on assignment. Too bad it runs Windows Vista, the worst operating system I've used since Windows 3.1. It's counter-intuitive, locks me out of essential settings by default, required uninstalling a raft of craplets, and until I could figure out how to stop it, interrupted my work constantly to install endless updates and automatically reboot. I've had my Mac for probably a quarter of the time (a month and a half), and already I'm using it with much greater facility. And I've been a dedicated PC user since the days of DOS.

Office phone: Two lines, one for home, the other for Skype--which I use as a portable office line--keep the middle-of-the-night calls from antigravity researchers in Taiwan from waking up my family. I'm not joking. Skype interfaces with the phone through a converter box behind the video phone.

Video phone: This Ojo video phone displays full motion video with sync sound and requires no computer. Currently my little girl's grandparents are the only people I know with the same unit, so they're the only ones we can call on it. Looks like from its website that the company that makes it is going down in flames, so even that limited usage is coming to an end, making this a $300 paperweight.

Inspiration: The Alex Ross print of mild-manned Clark Kent pulling off the impossible transformation into Superman keeps me going through difficult deadlines. A cover for one of my PopSci stories, blown up and framed, features the enticing headline above the magazine title, "How Cannibalistic Spider Sex Can Make You a Genius," reminding me to keep my sense of humor.

Current reading: Michael J. Neufeld bills his 2007 biography of rocket pioneer Werhner von Braun as the most comprehensive treatment of his topic ever. He may just be right. More on that in an upcoming post.

My PopSci story on a hypersonic airliner

Check out the February Popular Science for my cover story on a European concept for a hypersonic (that is, faster than five times the speed of sound) airliner.

If you're like me and live in a town that doesn't carry PopSci in any of its stores (gripe, grumble), you can also click over to the website and read the full story there.

Interestingly, even though the editors specifically wanted me to pitch the airline as the ultimate in environmentally friendly transport, the A2's designers don't see it that way at all.

Yes, the jet runs on hydrogen, giving it an environmentally benign water-vapor exhaust, but the A2's chief designer, Richard Varvill of UK-based Reaction Engines, is quick to point out that there is presently no economically viable means of producing that hydrogen without releasing greenhouse gases.

This tendency toward optimism is something I really like about Popular Science. To be sure, many of our problems here on Earth are of our own creation, but, says the magazine each month, we're also smart enough to develop the means of our own salvation.

On Canada AM

On Wednesday I discussed commercial spaceflight with Seamus O'Regan on Canada AM, CTV's national morning news show.

Check out the interview here. It runs four minutes.

At the Perimeter Institute

Whodathunkit. The little town of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada hosts a world-class research institute attracting physicists from around the world to probe the mysteries of the universe.

I've just returned from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where I got the royal treatment--my own private office, limo rides to a fro, continuous access to an open food bar, and an audience of hundreds for my talk on private space travel.

As John Matlock, public relations director and my host at the institute put it, the place is competing with similar facilities in such renown tourist destinations as Paris and New York for brain power so they pull out all the stops in making researchers and other guests welcome.

The building itself is a marvel of glass and steel, filled with light, somehow providing the quiet and privacy needed to think big thoughts while conveying a sense of openness that allows conversations in public areas to flow naturally into secluded alcoves complete with fireplaces and leather armchairs.

My favorite feature is the blackboards seemingly on every available wall, most, like this one in the Black Hole Bistro on the fourth floor, filled with equations jotted by wandering physicists. The effect is to transform abstract thought into exquisite works of art, well-lit and prominently displayed, as in an art gallery.

Next time your travels take you to Toronto, build in enough time for the hour-and-a-half drive to Waterloo for one of the Institute's public events. It'll be an experience you won't soon forget.

Meanwhile, I'll link to the video of my own talk when it's posted on the Institute's website.

SpaceShipTwo - my VIDEO coverage

I was busy last Wednesday. Not only did I live blog the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo on Wired.com, but I also reported on the event on camera. Wired posted the resulting video, produced by Randi Himelfarb, on YouTube.com last night. Click the image to link to the video.

SpaceShipTwo Unveiling - My Live Coverage at Wired.com

I'm attending the press conference at New York's Natural History Museum for the unveiling of SpaceShipTwo, Virgin's commercial spaceship. Check it out at http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/spaceshiptwo-un.html

Working It Out

When I first saw the title of this book, I read it as "The 4-Hour Work Day," and I still thought it was outrageous. But no, this entrepreneur-turned-author really does aim to show you how to work a 4-hour work week.

I'm a great believer in the power of books to change your life, and I just couldn't pass this one up. Turns out it's well-written, funny, and full of good ideas. And, yes, it has changed my life.

The book's central premise is that the 8-hour work day is an artificial construct, that there's no reason on Earth why you have to work the same schedule as everyone else.

Hell, I've known that my entire working life. I've never held a full-time job, preferring instead to pick up short-term engagements that will allow me to pursue my own goals. I started out as a temporary secretary while still in college, switched a few years later to contract writing because it allowed me to work at home, and never looked back.

Ferriss goes further than that, though. Slip away from the watchful eye of an employer, and there's no reason on Earth why you actually have to do the work yourself. Hire it out. Better still, hire it out to someone making pennies on your dollar. To someone, say, in India. In other words, outsource your work.

Well, I'm not about to outsource the writing of my magazine articles and books. But the idea intrigued me. Why not outsource whatever else I could? Case in point, I've been invited to deliver a PowerPoint presentation at the Perimeter Institute next month, complete with exciting photos and video clips.

Even as a temp, I never worked with PowerPoint much. In my previous life as an actor and playwright, I always avoided what theater folks call "tech" as much as possible. Tech goes wrong. Tech relies on techies to run those lights and sound cues. Tech costs money. So I distilled theater to its most basic elements: one man in a room in front of an audience. No props or costume changes, and only a single, straight back chair for a set.

I've taken a similar tack with my book-related talks. Until now. These guys want PowerPoint with video, and by God, they're going to get it. I gave an Indian outsourcing firm Ferriss recommends in his book a whirl. They did okay, about what you'd expect from a temp flying by the seat of his pants. I could relate.

But it still wasn't what I wanted. So I went local, hired my buddy Mark Greene at Pecos Pictures to work it out. He's a video guy. He knows this stuff. Sure, he costs more than the generalists in India, but he's worth it.

My friend and fellow writer Jeff Davis is a big believer in hiring local whenever possible. It's a way to give back to the community that supports you, he says, and it gets you better quality work. I think he's on to something there.

SpaceShipTwo coming out of the closet

Since SpaceShipOne spun through 29 rolls flying out of the atmosphere in 2004, the ship's designer, Burt Rutan, has been promising a new and improved design for his follow-on ship--one that won't shake, rattle, and roll paying passengers quite so much.

SpaceShipTwo, to be owned and operated Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, has been coming together behind closed doors, with its exact configuration a closely guarded secret.

That'll change next Wednesday when Rutan and Branson appear in a rare joint press conference at the Museum of Natural History in New York to show off some scale models.

Virgin's also debuting a new look for its branding and "livery," as they're calling it. Still based on Branson's eye, the logo, for one, will undergo a makeover.

Besides the new ship configuration, the big question on everyone's mind is how things are going for the project since last summer's fatal test stand accident that has forced a halt to development on the spaceship while an investigation grinds on.

Virgin remains upbeat, planning for test flights to begin this summer, with the first spaceflights next year, and revenue flights to begin in 2010, according to a MarketingWeek article (via RLV and Space Transport News).

It'll be interesting to see what Rutan says about that, since he has thus far steadfastly refused to hold himself and his company to any sort of schedule.

Check in here for links to my reporting on the unveiling after it takes place.

New Year, New Book

Since the release of Rocketeers last summer, I've been retooling for my next project, a book about DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm. And what a long arm it is, sponsoring technology research and development that effects our lives in ways most people can hardly imagine. The computer network you're connected to, for instance, started as a DARPA project.

Watch this space for updates on the shadowy world of military research, with an emphasis on tech that could help the rest of us. Clean, renewable energy, bionic arms, cars that drive themselves, hyperspeed jets, and more, are all part of DARPA projects. As in my last book, I'll introduce you to the engineers making it all happen and show you around their labs and workshops.

Among my resolutions: to blog several times a week. As I expand my focus to take in not just commercial space travel, but other science fiction coming true, I aim also to expand my audience beyond my core readership of space workers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts, but anyone else interested in how advanced technology can help solve our Earthly problems. Not to worry if want to keep tabs on the world of commercial spaceflight--I'll keep up my coverage there too.

Along the way, I'll give you a glimpse into my own R&D process, offering what I hope will be an entertaining and informative view of the working writer's life.

I hope you'll join me on this next fantastic voyage. Meantime, pick up the current Popular Science for my cover story on hpersonic aircraft. Yes, it's a DARPA-funded project that could just change the world. Around the world in four hours, anyone?