Apparently the naming policy for objects in the night sky includes rechristening massive chunks of drifting space trash.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have renamed two hefty pieces of defunct hardware that were tossed out from the orbital laboratory during a July 23 spacewalk in honor of the man that cut them loose.

“Good news for us, two new satellites…Nebraska 1 and Nebraska 2,” ISS Expedition 15 commander Fyodor Yurchikhin christened the space junk last week.

He named them in honor of Nebraska-native Clayton Anderson, a NASA astronaut and Expedition 15 flight engineer who created the new orbital debris.

The Ashland, Nebraska astronaut pitched a 1,400-pound (635-kilogram) ammonia tank and a 212-pound (96-kilogram) video camera stand support over the side of the ISS from the tip of the outpost’s outstretched robotic arm, which was controlled by Expedition 15 flight engineer Oleg Kotov. The two items, which NASA expects will take around 300 days or so to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, were no longer needed aboard the ISS and had to be cleared to allow later space station assembly tasks.

“It was spectacular,” Anderson told Nebraska television reporters of the spacewalk, his career first, during a series of space-to-ground interviews.

But apparently Yurchikhin wasn’t satisfied with just discarding the ammonia tank and camera stand support.

“If you need anything else for us to jettison, ask us,” joked Yurchikhin with NASA’s Mission Control in Houston, adding that he’ll contact Russia’s Mission Control as well. “We’ll be ready.”

“If Oleg keeps eating all the food, we’ll jettison him!” Anderson replied.

The sad news from the Mojave spaceport has rippled across the entrepreneurial space community.

In a weekend update from Scaled Composites:

“The outpouring of support from around the world has been incredible, and we can’t thank you enough for all the support you have given us.

As of this morning (Saturday), three that were injured remain hospitalized. Keith Fritsinger (critical), Gene Gisin (critical), and Jason Kramb (serious).

Glen May’s family has advised us that his funeral is Friday, August 3, in Collierville, TN. They have requested that anyone at Scaled that has special memories of Glen that they would like to share with the family to please email aprildmay@aol.com. Other arrangements are pending, and will be posted when we have them. We’re trying to do what we can to support the families during this tragic time. We will plan to show our respects as a company at the appropriate time, as well.

Several Scaled folks have spent time with Eric Blackwell’s family over the last two days, and will continue to support them in these difficult days. Todd Ivens’ family is enroute to California.

A fund is being established to help the families. We will post the information on our website as soon as it’s available.

The accident investigation has begun. We spent several hours at the site on Friday morning. Late Friday afternoon, California OSHA arrived and has sealed the site for their own investigation. We are working closely with them.

This is an incredibly hard time for all of us. We continue to ask you to keep those people and families who were hurt or have died in your thoughts and prayers.

Sincerely,

The Scaled Composites Family

In addition, I thought I’d share with you some comments that I received in my own research into the tragedy.

“We at UP Aerospace are deeply saddened and our sympathies go out to the families for the loss of the three employees at Scaled Composites. It’s a small world in the space community and so when something like this happens it sends shockwaves throughout everyone,” said Jerry Larson, President of UP Aerospace.

Larson told me that the rocket launch industry has always been a difficult business to be in and does come with many forms of risk, especially during development.

“It’s a very sad and unfortunate that this anomaly resulted in the loss of human life and severe injuries. Anomalies are expected in the development of any new system which is the very reason for extensive testing prior to putting the system into service, but no one ever expects or is prepared for this kind of tragedy,” Larson said. “I firmly believe that this new era of space commercialization will, in fact, change the way we view space travel…it will take time, and will come with setbacks…but will ultimately press on to success.”

From Patrick Bahn, chief executive officer and founder of TGV Rockets, headquartered in Norman, Oklahoma:

“Our hearts are with the team at Scaled Composites and we know that this is the worst kind of day any leader can face…the loss of beloved teammates in the pursuit of the dream. We have the highest hopes that the team at Scaled will learn from this incident, wipe away the tears, and be back to operations soon.”

“It is our hope that the industry share the knowledge of this incident and any other issues, so that we can form an industry association to improve safety practices and that perhaps high-minded individuals can fund a foundation aimed at improving safety within this new industry,” Bahn told SPACE.com.

In a just issued release from the Space Frontier Foundation: “Burt Rutan and his team include some of America’s best aerospace test engineers. Whatever the cause of this tragic event was, they will get to the bottom of it, fix the problem, and then make their spaceship fly,” said James Muncy, co-founder of the Foundation and a space policy consultant in Washington, D.C. “It will be the best possible way to honor their sacrifice.”

Added Rick Tumlinson, fellow co-founder of the Foundation: “Some of us think of space heroes as only those who strap themselves into a rocketship. But people like these, who give their sweat and lives to build those ships, who take their families out to live in the desert and work incredible hours on tedious tasks to make those rockets fly, and who do so because they share the dream of an open frontier in space…they too are true heroes.”

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NASA is fostering work on a student-built satellite that would orbit the Moon.

The American Student Moon Orbiter (ASMO) project is being spearheaded at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

ASMO officials are calling upon American university students and their faculty advisors to design, build, register, launch and operate the ASMO small spacecraft and its scientific payload. The student-built spacecraft could be launched to orbit the Moon in 2011 in tandem with a spacecraft being developed by European students under a companion program.

Roundtable talk on ASMO is slated for next month’s conference on small satellites that’s being held at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

Anticipated appearances at the ASMO meeting includes special guest Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

A 50-year-old pastor in San Antonio was killed after being struck by lightning while hiking with his sons.

Lightning kills about 66 people in the United States every year. Many of those deaths involve obvious tempts of fate by people who ignore the rumble of thunder and remain outdoors.

But bolts can strike entirely out of the blue, too. Last month a Florida man was killed by lightning under clear skies.

Swarms of NASA space shuttle mission managers, engineers and contractors are meeting to pin down a firm August launch date for the Endeavour orbiter and its STS-118 crew.

Mission managers were expected to begin their two-day Flight Readiness Review at about 8:00 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT) today at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The meeting will review Endeavour’s readiness to launch its STS-118 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) no earlier than Aug. 7.

The STS-118 astronaut crew includes teacher-turned-spaceflyer Barbara Morgan - who served as backup for NASA’s first Teacher in Space Christa McAuliffe before the agency’s 1986 Challenger tragedy. The seven Endeavour astronauts will deliver a fresh load of cargo, spare parts and a new starboard piece of the station’s main truss that serves as the outpost’s metallic backbone.

Flight Readiness Reviews are standard meetings that precede every shuttle launch to allow shuttle officials to determine an orbiter’s status for flight and go over any outstanding issues. Among other things expected to be discussed during Endeavour’s review are the shuttle’s readiness after years of modifications and upgrades since its last flight in 2002, the presence of some unmixed rubber in the protective O-rings on the orbiter’s boosters and a firm target for the mission’s August launch.

NASA will hold a press conference at 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) on Thursday, July 26 to present the results of Endeavour’s review and announce an official launch date.

You can watch that press conference live via SPACE.com’s NASA TV feed, which is available here.

Northrop Grumman’s 100 percent equity plans for Scaled Composites in Mojave, California will not impact work underway in developing the commercial, passenger-carrying SpaceShipTwo.

Dan McClain, Director of Media Relations for Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles, California said that on July 5 Northrop Grumman agreed to increase their ownership of Scaled Composites. The large aerospace firm has had for several years approximately 40 percent of Scaled, now increasing its equity to 100 percent, he advised.

McClain said that the equity transaction was expected to close in August, pending the usual regulatory procedures, which includes Hart-Scott-Rodino approval - a federal antitrust law.

The financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

McClain emphasized that the equity change will have no impact on development of the SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle. There are to be no differences at all in the on-going work at Scaled with aerospace primes or jobs it does in its commercial programs.

Back in July 2005, Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group of companies and Rutan as president of Scaled Composites, jointly announced their signing of an agreement to form The Spaceship Company - a new aerospace production enterprise to build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft. That new company will own the designs of the new SpaceShipTwo and White Knight 2 launch systems that are now in development at Scaled Composites.

“The partnership between Scaled Composites and the Virgin Group on The Spaceship Company is unchanged by the transaction,” McClain added. “Certainly, Burt will remain at the helm and lead Scaled Composites…and the entire management team will remain. It will continue in its current operating model as a separate entity within Northrop Grumman,” he told SPACE.com.

Regarding the benefit to Northrop Grumman by the ownership of Scaled Composites, McClain added: “First of all, both Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites felt that Scaled would benefit from the broader resources that Northrop Grumman can bring. But, in particular, Northrop Grumman recognized the innovative and entrepreneurial qualities of Scaled Composites as a good fit with our company’s efforts to define the future of aeronautics and spaceflight.”

McClain said that Northrop Grumman values the mode of operation that Scaled Composites has currently.

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, is delaying its Kaguya lunar orbiter mission from its August 16th sendoff.

According to one report, JAXA engineers have found problems with an onboard electronic part used in the Kaguya mission, finding them to have been wrongly installed.

JAXA specialists had found a similar problem in preparing the Wideband Internetworking Engineering Test and Demonstration Satellite (WINDS) - a finding that caused the relook of Kaguya and its subsatellites to be deployed in Moon orbit.

Kaguya is a huge lunar orbiter and was formerly known as SELENE, for SELenological and ENgineering Explorer. The spacecraft consists of a main orbiter and two small subsatellites. Sure enough, the polarity of onboard condensors — one each within the subsatellites — were found to be installed in reverse position.

No immediate word as yet on how lengthy the delay will be.

According to a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries/JAXA statement: “The new launch date will be announced as soon as it is determined.”

Back on February 7th 1971 (Earth time), Ed Mitchell was speeding much faster than a rifle bullet, on a trajectory between the Moon and the Earth. That’s when the strangest thing happened…

Mitchell had piloted Apollo 14’s Lunar Module down to the Fra Mauro region of the Moon, become the sixth human to do science in the dust, and gotten himself and Cdr. Alan Shepard back off the regolith and onto their bus ride back home.

Now he was bored: “We were just systems engineers on a perfectly functioning spacecraft.” So he looked out the window. The Command Module was pointing “up” – which is to say perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System – and spinning slowly, about once every two minutes. “Barbecue Mode”, it’s called; to evenly heat the vehicle. Ed was floating, watching the Earth, Moon, Sun and starfield pan by.

And then, without warning: an overwhelming feeing of bliss, timelessness, connected-ness… He suddenly and deeply felt the understanding of his constituent atoms as having been born in the fires of ancient supernovas. He saw Earth and it’s people and all it’s other species and systems as a unified integrated synergistic whole. He felt good; ecstatic actually…

He was not the first – nor the last – to have this specific epiphany.

Rusty Schweikart had felt it back on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.”

20 years ago, author Frank White collected, sifted, polished and curated the observations of 30 astronauts and cosmonauts. But these weren’t science observations or notes about the spacecraft hardware. They were reports of this specific, marked psychological shift – common to all these space travelers – immediately and profoundly broadening these hard-boiled guys’ perspectives.

This morning, in a hotel across the street from the Pentagon in Washington, DC, Frank White addressed proponents of proselytizing this Overview Effect. Cognitive scientist David Beaver had called us here. A core group of about 40 authors, astronauts, special; effects designers, ex-magicians, musicians, scientists, technologists, producers, journalists, capitalists, space-tourist adventurers, humanists, assorted geeks, hippie-survivors (and, yes, this reporter) quickly decided upon a loose strategy of collaboration and mutual support. Intended mission: maximize opportunities for Earth-dwellers to have individual Overview experiences. Strategy: use art, science, mass media, music, environmental awareness, personal networking and, oh yeah: the Web to spread the opportunity for non-space travelers to understand and possibly experience the Effect.

After decades of studying this, Ed Mitchell is pretty certain that the feeling of interconnectedness / oneness with the Universe is a consequence of quantum physics. Now Mitchell and the others assembled here want, specifically to induce or produce the Overview Effect in as many of Earth’s citizens as possible.

If this feels a little religiously fervent to you, you’re not wrong. And that’s a danger: It tends to turn critical thinkers off before they start thinking truly critically about the possibilities.

But, to the good, the Overview Effect is - by definition - simultaneously ecumenical and agnostic. And it’s nothing if not a thrill ride:

40 years ago, Doug Trumbull instantiated Overview Effects in moviegoers as the special effects designer of Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001 a Space Odyssey. Since then Trumbull’s technical-artistic touched has graced many pivotal motions pictures. He, more than anyone, invented the motion-based movie-driven theme park ride. That little thing at Universal called Back to the Future, for instance; Trumbull made it fly.

Today, at the conference, Doug foresaw a time perhaps 5-6 years out when a video iPod-like device would deliver an Overview Effect-producing dose of media content directly to users’ retinas. Oh, and it looks like Trumbull will own or co-own the patent…

Andy Newberg, a neuroscientist/physician with a background in space medicine, is learning how to spot the markers: “You can often tell when you’re with someone who has flown in space,” he says, “It’s palpable.” Andy scans brains for a living: praying nuns, transcendental meditators, others in the act of focused states. He can pinpoint regions in subjects’ gray matter that correlate to these circumstances. Newberg is seriously looking at how to fly equipment that could study, in-situ, the brain functions of space travelers. If this Overview Effect is physiologically real, Andy could watch it happen.

Interestingly, Newberg’s first test subject will not be a paid astronaut, but rather a paying space tourist: Reda Andersen slated to fly with Rocketplane Kistler says “It would be criminal NOT to study the first of us (space adventure travelers).”

Barbara Marx Hubbard is convinced this is evolution in action: “The sleep of the womb is over,” she says, “We are growing up; becoming fully human.” Hubbard has worn many hats: disciple of Bucky Fuller, Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, international space advocate, and importantly a mother of five. As we’re born, Barbara says: “we pass from the Inner Space of our mothers into Outer Space”

So, keep the term “Overview Effect” in the top list of your search engine. In the next few years, you’ll see it connected to some awfully smart, entertaining, pithy, profound, soulful, and, yeah probably some way-too-silly and hopelessly doomed-to-fail stuff, as well.

But such is the messy, non-directed, unintended, viral-memetic way of evolution.

For you blogites out there, back on June 27th I noted that something was rumbling at Virgin Galactic — Sir Richard Branson’s public spaceliner enterprise — regarding a likely engine developer for the huge White Knight 2 carrier plane.

The curtain has now been lifted. Pratt & Whitney Canada has been picked to provide their PW308 turbofan engine to power the suborbital spaceship launcher. Pratt & Whitney Canada is a United Technologies company.

Those screaming PW308 engines will push the White Knight 2 (WK2) launch plane down the runway and skyward. The WK2 aircraft will haul SpaceShipTwo (SS2) — both are now being built by Scaled Composites in Mojave, California — to about 50,000 feet for release.

The first flight of White Knight 2 is planned for 2008.

Virgin Galactic is the launch customer for the SS2 system, having ordered five SS2 spacecraft with options for a further seven, plus WK2 carrier aircraft. The Pratt & Whitney Canada turbofan engine was selected by The Spaceship Company (TSC) - a jointly-owned Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites venture.

Additionally, TSC and Virgin Fuels will work with the Longueuil, Quebec-based jet engine supplier to evaluate use of advanced biofuels in White Knight 2 that could reduce engine emissions, thereby enhancing the carrier plane’s environmentally friendly status.

Virgin Galactic is offering suborbital space treks to the public for $200,000 a seat. So far, it has received over $25 million in deposits and interest from over 80,000 people from 120 countries around the world, according to a press statement released by the engine manufacturer.

A potential outward bound destination for astronauts: Phobos and Deimos - the two moons of Mars.

NASA is stirring up the exploration pot by co-sponsoring in early November the first international conference on sending robots and humans to Phobos and Deimos.

This global gathering of experts will meet at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. They’ll detail new ideas on probing Phobos and Deimos, as well as how to utilize the two moons as a gateway for exploring Mars itself.

In the human exploration department, scientists and engineers are to delve into what an expeditionary crew might do on Phobos and Deimos - and how to use those mini-worlds to help in investigating the red planet. Also, what precursor robotic missions that might be needed will be addressed.

By the way - Russia is already spearheading a multi-nation project to explore Phobos, dubbed the Phobos-Grunt mission, a sample return effort eyed for 2009.

Phobos is the larger of the two moons and is the closest to Mars…so close, in fact, that it stands to be ripped apart by gravitational forces way out in the future.

Phobos and Deimos are thought by many scientists to be captured asteroids, perhaps rocky travelers that originated in the outer solar system.