SpaceX propulsion chief explains Merlin

Tom Mueller Describes Merlin Engine
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This month's issue of Popular Mechanics has a feature by me about Space Exploration Technologies, the startup that might just end up building America's next orbital spaceship--and provide charter flights to NASA.

I told the SpaceX story in my book Rocketeers, but I've been angling for years to land a magazine story to cover it. In particular, I wanted to go deeper into the meeting of minds between company financier Elon Musk and propulsion chief Tom Mueller. The two met in a workshop where Mueller was building the world's biggest amateur liquid fueled rocket engine, and Musk asked Mueller, "Can you build something bigger?"

Read the story online at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4328638.html.

The online version of the story includes an innovative feature that I pushed hard for: a pencast of Mueller explaining the inner workings of the workhorse engine he and his team designed and built for SpaceX.

If you don't know what a pencast is, you're in for a treat. Livescribe, a Silicon Valley startup, has created what I call the Super Pen (actually known as the Pulse), which allows handwritten notes, doodles, sketches, or anything else you can make with a pen, to be linked with audio being recorded by the pen at the same time.

This has quickly become an indispensable tool in my work as a journalist. When someone I'm interviewing says something I know I'll want to play back later, I just jot a quick reference note, and then later, whenever I tap the pen to that place in my notebook, the recording of that particular place in the interview plays back.

You can also upload pencasts to the Web, which allows you to hear an interview playing back in a Web browser and watch the sketches and notes being drawn and written out in real time. This gives you a you-are-there immediacy I don't believe can be captured any other way. Check out the Mueller pencast here and tell me if you agree.

If you want to see more of these pencasts included with Popular Mechanics stories, let the editors know by adding a comment to my story at http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4328638.html.

Kepler Space Telescope on Nat Geo Channel

NASA's Kepler space telescope, launched in March and returning data since June, gets star billing on "Alien Earths" premiering on the National Geographic Channel tomorrow night at 9 PM Eastern and Pacific time.

Launch footage, animation of the probe in operation as it trails the Earth in a solar orbit, and speculation from researchers about what it will discover bracket an engaging program on the search for extrasolar planets similar enough to Earth to perhaps support life.

The search centers on planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone around stars where conditions are neither too cold nor too hot to sustain life--perhaps not life as we know it, but life nevertheless. To date, gas giants, like Jupiter, have been the focus of the search for extrasolar planets because their large size renders them detectable by ground-based telescopes, mainly via the wobbling they produce in their parent stars.

But the new, space-based telescope should be able to find rocky planets the size of Earth by monitoring the changes in luminosity in stars within its 100,000-star field of view as planets transit in front of them. This is a chore akin to detecting the flickering of a searchlight caused by a moth flying past, according to one of the researchers interviewed in the program.

Another researcher speculates that every star in the galaxy may well host at least one Earth-like planet, which would yield 400 billion such planets all together. Researchers expect Kepler to find at least 50 of them.

It would be an astonishing achievement bringing us one step closer to discovering that we are not alone in the universe, which is why I'm nominating Kepler for this year's Best of What's New issue of Popular Science.