Russia’s Federal Space Agency is apparently training would-be astronauts from South Korea for a 2008 spaceflight, according to the country’s Interfax News Agency.

A field of some 36,000 candidates has been narrowed to 10 contenders, though only two South Koreans will be selected after a series of medical checks, Federal Space Agency spokesperson Igor Panarin told Interfax.

“It is a completely state-run project, and it is financed by the South Korean government,” Interfax quoted Panarin as saying.

Training for South Korea’s two astronaut candidates is expected to begin in Spring 2007 at Russia’s Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City. An agreement between the Federal Space Agency and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute is expected to be signed on Dec. 7.

Russia currently has a full list of non-Russian astronauts in training. U.S. entrepreneur Charles Simonyi is training for a March 2007 Soyuz flight to the International Space Station (ISS) for a 10-day space tourist mission.

Two Malaysian astronauts-to-be are also in training for a September 2007 mission, in which one will make national history as their country’s first spaceflyer.

Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, 34, and Faiz Khaleed, 26, are the two Malaysian astronaut finalists, with Shukor considered the prime candidate and Khaleed as back-up, according to the Associated Press. The wire service added that Malaysia’s first astronaut is expected to play the children’s game “Batu seremban” – or “Five stones” – and spin Malay tops to demonstrate the effects of microgravity during the planned ISS-bound spaceflight. 

For those of you who are counting, Russia launched the first female space tourist - U.S. businesswoman Anousheh Ansari - to the ISS in September. Earlier this year, the Federal Space Agency launched Brazil’s first spaceflyer - Marcos Pontes - on a 10-day spaceflight as well. That’s a whole lotta firsts.

Swarms of NASA shuttle managers, engineers and contractors are discussing the planned December launch of the space shuttle Discovery and its seven-astronaut crew during a two-day review at the agency’s Florida spaceport this week. 

Known as a Flight Readiness Review, the meeting began early Tuesday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida and is expected to set a hard Dec. 7 launch date for Discovery’s STS-116 mission to continue assembly of the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA’s STS-116 mission is slated to mark the agency’s first night launch in four years. It will be the third shuttle flight of 2006 and the second dedicated to space station construction.

Veteran shuttle flyer Mark Polansky is commanding Discovery’s STS-116 spaceflight. He and his crewmates plan to deliver a new piece of the ISS—a short spacer truss known as Port 5—to ISS, rewire its power grid and ferry NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who will replace Expedition 14 flight engineer Thomas Reiter, to the orbital laboratory.

NASA plans to hold a news conference to set to official launch date for STS-116 on Wednesday. The briefing will begin no earlier than 3:00 p.m. EST (2100 GMT) and be broadcast live on NASA TV.

 Click here for SPACE.com’s nifty–and free–feed of NASA TV.

A few months back, I wrote about the birth of yet another ‘miracle’ white buffalo born on the Heider farm in my hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.   Now word comes that the series of coincidences just keeps getting weirder and weirder.  Seems like the fate of this newborn white buffalo didn’t end up being as ‘miraculous’ as initially imagined.  ‘Miracle’s Second Chance’ was struck by lightning.

The white buffalo wasn’t the only buffalo killed, but boy oh boy, where’s one of those psychic readers when you need one?!?

Search teams looking for the silent Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) got more bad news last week. The Opportunity Mars rover sitting near Victoria Crater in Meridiani Planum didn’t hear a peep during two radio signal attempts as MGS flew overhead last Tuesday and Wednesday.

There’s possibly another bit of worrisome data too.

Engineers using a star tracker on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) swept the possible whereabouts of MGS. In analyzing the data, two points of light may have been detected that were not in a star catalog. Last week there was some speculation — just that, speculation — that pieces of MGS might have been observed. But there was also caution that the data was still being analyzed.

Other objects that were not in the star field were also picked up by the MRO star tracker - but these were well off the predicted orbit track of the missing-in-action MGS and are possibly cosmic ray hits in the equipment’s electronics.

Meanwhile, use of MRO’s super-powerful zoom lens camera system — HiRISE — didn’t spot MGS. HiRISE did see a few star streaks, but nothing that could be MGS, HiRISE principal investigator, Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona told me. MGS should have produced a very strong signal if it was in view, he said.

More news about the MGS search situation is likely forthcoming.

A while back a couple of astronomers used their years of meteor-forecasting experience and computer models to predict a flurry of shooting stars for this past weekend’s annual Leonid meteor shower. Their work was confirmed by a couple other meteor forecasters.

The prediction was highlighted by NASA. Our Skywatching Columnist Joe Rao and I both reported on the forecast, and then I blogged about how cool it is to freeze your tail off and ruin a good night’s sleep to go out in the pre-dawn to see this annual display. You can all go back to bed now.

The Leonids reminded us once again that they are fickle and that meteor forecasting is a tricky business. The shower was a bust.

“It would appear that the expected outburst either failed to materialize, or consisted of extremely faint meteors,” Rao said in his astronomy newsletter.

It was not the first inaccurate Leonids forecast. In 2001, four separate research groups all missed the mark to some degree (but at least the display that year was indeed fantastic).

This year the Leonids simply stunk. Even the regular, dependable non-peak Leonids, which typically number around 10 per hour with a few bright fireballs during the pre-dawn hours for a couple nights surrounding the peak, seemed absent. I saw more Leonids on Thursday morning, well before the expected peak, than on the mornings over the weekend.

Observer David Stine in Oklahoma called it “the worst meteor shower I have ever seen.”

So, at the risk of testing your patience, I might suggest we all turn our attention toward the “dependable Geminid meteor shower,” which peaks every year around Dec. 13-14. The Geminids reliably produce 1-2 meteors per minute during peak times. Really. The SPACE.com viewer’s guide for that event will post on Friday, Dec. 8. And we’ll see.

Last night I attended to the IMAX premiere of Happy Feet, the new socially conscious CGI feature from Warner Bros. with animation from the Australian company Animal Logic.  The animation is breathtaking– it is so good that it almost looks real– and since the story line borrows a lot from March of the Penguins, sometimes it actually looks real (although I just learned this morning that the color of the snow in March of the Penguins was actually doctored to look white because of the inevitable result of thousands of penguins standing around in the no-longer-pristine snow for weeks on end…).

The problem, as with so many CGI movies, is the story line.  The movie was about 30 minutes too long for my taste and the loose ends of the plot were tied together hurriedly in the last 5 minutes (my guess is that the Director wanted it to be 30 minutes longer!).  A little less CGI and a better crafted story line would have worked better.  It would have also better illustrated the plight of the penguins.

Oh yeah, more music too.  The music and dancing was very entertaining– I particularly liked the Barry White and Chaka Khan pieces (I’m showing my age…). It’s kind of like a laser show where the laser images gets old but the music keeps you engaged.

Bottom line:  go see the movie and bring your kids for sure– best idea, see it at an IMAX theater for the full CGI majesty.

The privately built booster of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) — Falcon 1 — is now targeted for a January 2007 return-to-fright liftoff.

In its maiden voyage, the rocket failed shortly after launch on March 24, 2006.

Elon Musk, SpaceX head, advised me that the rocket’s next flight is now slated for a mid-to-late January 2007 sendoff. 

The first stage of the booster is at the firm’s Kwajalein Atoll site, with the second stage to be delivered there in two weeks. However, the island range is closed for launches from mid-December to mid-January, Musk said.

“Rather than try to rush a launch before the range closes, we are going to take our time and triple check all systems,” Musk added.

For a recent story on the SpaceX program, go to:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060817_spacex_musk.html

On this very November weekend in 2001, I drove the family to some remote location in Maryland to get away from the city lights of Philadelphia, stumbled on a Vacancy sign at a hunting lodge called Vonnie’s, got the kids settled into their first bunk-bed experience, then woke everyone up in the wee hours and forced them out into the cold to huddle in sleeping bags on a big plastic tarp in the middle of a plowed field as the frost formed so we could watch one of the most incredible meteor showers ever.

Two of our kids fell asleep before the peak of that year’s Leonid meteor shower as my wife dozed off-and-on while keeping our infant son warm in her arms (he missed it all).

Fog formed in the field, creating a fuzzy halo around us and leaving, most of the morning, a hole to the heavens directly overhead where ancient comet debris danced across the sky, sometimes producing several streaks at once. Now and then, a particularly bright one would briefly cause shadows on the ground and light up our chilly faces. My wife (when she was awake) and I were dazzled.

The older kids, now teens, remember mostly the smelly bunk beds, the cheap TV, and how they laughed at me for it all. But they did see some shooting stars, and they’ve never stopped talking about the experience. One of them painted the scene in art class a few weeks after the shower, colorful brush strokes against a dark blue canvas. Impression made.

This year only the little guy, who is 5 now, will get up with me to watch the Leonids. He’s not sure what a shooting star will look like, and he doesn’t remember the cold. (And he’s lucky because we’ve since moved to Phoenix. Forecast: clear skies, no frost.)

The Leonids this year won’t compare to 2001. But anyone with dark, clear skies could see up to a dozen meteors per hour plus a handful of “sporadic” meteors not associated with the Leonids. [News story]

If you have kids, see if you can get them up a couple hours before dawn Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Stay out as long as you can — it could take 15-20 minutes before you see your first streak, and you never know when a fireball will appear. (Caution: If you live in a city, the light pollution will drown out all but the brightest meteors; expect to be disappointed.)

I got up at 4 a.m. today to see if the show was ramping up as expected. It is. In about 30 minutes of watching, I spotted 9 meteors, about half of which were Leonids (you can tell because they radiate out from the constellation Leo). Ironically, though the Leonids are known for producing bright fireballs, the brightest shooting star I saw this morning, one that pulsed brilliantly and left a nice vapor trail that lasted a couple seconds, was not a Leonid. It was all I needed to get psyched for the weekend. Hey, maybe I can even get the teens out of bed at 4 a.m. …

***

Words & Pictures: Accounts of the Leonids in 2001 and 2002.

Long-time residents of Crescent City, Calif. must feel today like their city is a tsunami magnet. Smacked by one in 1960 and another in 1964, the town was hit again today by the tsunami that originated near Japan. From a nearby local newspaper’s reporttoday:

*** Two docks were torn apart and numerous boats were broken loose when a tsunami surge hit the Crescent City Harbor around 3 p.m. Debbie McAndrews of the harbor said the surge wasn’t waves, but appeared to look like a “rolling river.” ***

On March 27, 1964, the Alaskan Good Friday earthquake spawned a tsunami that killed more than 120 people in all. Ten of the deaths occurred in Crescent City, which saw waves as high as 20 feet (6.3 meters). The water surged up to a half-mile inland in spots.

But a megatsunami, from a 9.0 earthquake off the California Coast, will be much worse. Scientists say it’s just a matter of time. Check out this map of the predicted run-up compared to that of ‘64, done by geologists at Humboldt State University.

Residents of Crescent City: Know your escape route!

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — As if launching people off their home planet to live and work aboard a fully functional space station wasn’t impressive enough, the folks at NASA are poised to broadcast the endeavor on high-definition television (HDTV) today.

At 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT), astronauts aboard the International Space Station will beam down an HDTV broadcast of NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria—the outpost’s Expedition 14 commander—to kick off the Space Video Gateway. The gateway is designed to relay high bandwidth digital television signals to Earth, NASA officials say.

Expedition 14 flight engineer Thomas Reiter—a European Space Agency astronaut—will play cameraman with a Sony HD 750A camera as ISS astronauts share a meal, talk space nutrition and discuss their long duration spaceflight. Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin rounds out the space station’s three-astronaut Expedition 14 crew.

The camera and other assorted hardware launched toward the ISS aboard NASA’s Atlantis shuttle in September. While not the first HDTV system shipped to the station, it is the first to be operated live to give a new glimpse into orbital living.

“HDTV provides up to six times the resolution of regular analog video,” NASA’s station HDTV principal investigator Rodney Grubbs said in a statement. “On previous missions, we’ve flown HDTV cameras but had to wait until after the mission to retrieve the tapes, watch the video and share it with the science and engineering community, the media and the public. For the first time ever, this test lets us stream live HDTV from space so the public can experience what it’s like to be there.”

Today’s broadcast results from a cooperative effort by NASA, Discovery HD Theater and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will be carried live at Discovery Channel stores and Japan’s NHK broadcast network.

So if you don’t live in Japan or subscribe to HDTV at home, head on over to a Discovery Channel store (psst, if you’re in New York there’s one at Grand Central Station) to watch the show.