It was quite the event - a magic Mojave Monday where heat and wind waft through the airspace that future public space travelers will fly through on their way to space.

While the July 28 unveiling of the Scaled Composites WhiteKnightTwo — the super-carrier plane that will haul SpaceShipTwo skyward for its high-altitude release — was cause for celebration by both Scaled and Virgin Galactic, there were quite a few notices of intent also being floated.

For one, Burt Rutan and his Scaled team clearly see the WhiteKnightTwo — and beefed up follow-on vehicles — as lofting not only satellites into orbit, but also as a staging craft for flyback boosters, as well as hurling people into orbit, right there from the Mojave Air and Space Port.

When WhiteKnightTwo takes to the air it will be evaluating a number of SpaceShipTwo items - from avionics to passenger cabin features and actuators, Rutan told me.

“We will, in many ways, be testing the systems for SpaceShipTwo when we fly WhiteKnightTwo. It’s a systems testbed,” Rutan emphasized.

Meanwhile, the still shrouded in secrecy SpaceShipTwo is roomy enough to carry 11, Rutan explained - but nobody would want a center seat on the early, and expensive, “pay per view” suborbital treks.

After all, there’s got to be elbow room for passengers to get those bags of gourmet and specially sauteed peanuts open!

Anyone suffering sweltering heat this summer will be interested to know what’s going on in Alaska.

The state is on pace to have the fewest days on record reaching 65 degrees. The current record for fewest 65-plus-degree days was 16 in 1970. So far, with summer half over, there have been only seven. The forecast is for continued cool weather through July.

The cool weather is being blamed at least partly on La Nina, which has been in place most of the past year and involves cooler-than-average temperatures off the coast of South America and, in turn, tends to generate cool temperatures in Alaska (among other large-scale effects).

We certainly live on a planet of extremes. Some trivia to pursue …

• Continental Records Quiz
• 101 Amazing Earth Facts
• Gallery: Living in Antarctica

Text messaging and walking at the same time, it turns out, can be hazardous to both the Blackberry-wielding pedestrians and passersby.

An article in The Wall Street Journal today describes several mobile mishaps. For instance, Mike Munoz, a 44-year-old car-dealership manager in suburban Portland, Ore., describes walking smack into the bride at a wedding while he’s texting.

“Who would miss someone wearing a white dress and an 8-foot train?” Munoz tells the newspaper. “She didn’t get hurt or tear her dress, and I didn’t get kicked out of the wedding for almost killing the bride.”

Then, there’s Bryan Fuhr, who was walking his dog in Manhattan last summer (while tapping away on a mobile device) when he stepped into a road in the path of a biker, who ran over Fuhr’s foot, knocking him to the ground and leaving him with scrapes, bruises and two broken toes, the newspaper reports.

The texting injuries have landed several in the emergency room, according to James Adams, Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s chairman of emergency medicine.

Portable this-and-that’s have helped businesspeople and teens alike to not only ditch excess baggage, but also to carry a technological tether wherever they go. The wireless connection can be a positive (the ability to call for help in an emergency and keep in touch with friends) to a negative, as bosses expect employees to be reachable 24-7, come hell or high water, vacation or staycation. Plus, work productivity can decrease as we all stay oh-so-connected, and technological addictions abound.

To counter the injuries, however, Blackberry enthusiasts have come up with some prevention tips. For instance, the WSJ article notes an Internet forum called crackberry.com, in which Blackberry users trade tips on how to safely navigate busy streets while texting.

“U gotta walk with ur chin @ about 45 degree angle, n u won’t bump into nothing,” reads one post from a user named JBEL. “Trust me it works.”

And in London, a directory-services company called 118 118, operated by The Number UK Ltd., started placing padded bumpers on lampposts in the East End to cut down on injuries to texters. (The padding was also a publicity campaign.)

With cell phones and PDA’s becoming an everyday accessory, many people will not stand for even a short walk without the ability to reach out to others wherever they may be (yeah, public restrooms are not off limits!).

Look for a step forward in creating an international network of science gear to be planted on the Moon.

The stage is set at NASA’s Ames Research Center for some seven to nine nations to sign a Statement of Intent today to work together on putting a geophysical network across the Moon - one that could gather data from locations on both the nearside and farside of our celestial companion.

Early candidate devices include seismometers, laser reflectors and heat flow equipment. Working groups have been busily sorting through ideas of what core geophysical instruments each country will contribute to the automated network, as well as formats, data rates, and other communication needs. A future working group will begin the process of where the constellation of nodes that make up the network would be positioned on the lunar landscape.

The International Lunar Network would carry out high-priority science explained Jim Green, Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters. “There’s a lot of work to do…but we’ve started the process,” he told me at this week’s NASA Lunar Science Institute meeting, held at the space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

NASA has no current plans to buy Japanese space freighters for cargo runs to the International Space Station (ISS) despite recent media reports contending the contrary, the U.S. agency said Monday.

A Sunday report attributed to the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri and later picked up by other media outlets suggested NASA was unofficially in talks to purchase flights of unmanned H-2 Transfer Vehicle (HTV) from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to haul future U.S. cargo to the space station.

But NASA said the reports were erroneous, with no talks - unofficial or otherwise - under way to buy such flights.

“NASA is committed to domestic cargo resupply to the space station and does not plan to procure cargo delivery services from Japan,” NASA officials said in a statement.

An artist’s interpretation of Japan’s HTV cargo ship arriving at the International Space Station. Credit: JAXA.

Japan’s HTV cargo ship, a 16.5-ton cylinder about 33 feet (10 meters) long, is slated to make its launch debut atop a Japanese H-2B rocket next year. It follows this year’s first flight of Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, also unmanned, and would join Russia’s unmanned Progress cargo ships and the crewed NASA shuttles and Russian Soyuz vehicles already in the station’s flotilla of service craft.

NASA’s human spaceflight workhorse, a fleet of three U.S. space shuttles, is set to retire in 2010 after the construction is complete on the International Space Station. While NASA is facing a gap between shuttle fleet’s end and the first operational flights of its successor - the Orion crew capsule and its Ares I booster - the agency is banking on private firms like California-based SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, Corp., of Virginia, to provide unmanned cargo service to the space station in the future.

The agency also has a $700 million contract in hand to use Russian spacecraft for space station support.

While NASA has no current plans to buy Japanese spacecraft, it does already have agreements in place with JAXA and the European Space Agency to include U.S. cargo on its partner’s spacecraft as compensation for the shared costs of operating the $100 billion International Space Station, the U.S. agency said.

• Video: Grand Opening for Station’s Kibo Lab
• Video: Moving Day For Station’s Kibo Attic
• Video: Shuttle Discovery’s Space Station Victory Lap

Like sunscreen and ocean air, the scent of a freshly mowed lawn is one of those quintessential summer smells in America.  And there is a lot of lawn in America.

An article by Elizabeth Kolbert in last week’s New Yorker traces the evolution of the American lawn from the days when only the wealthy could afford to keep such a luxurious expanse of green to today, when Americans spend an estimated $40 billion on keeping up their grass. According to satellite data from the Department of Defense, Kolbert writes, turfgrasses take up an area of the United States the size of New York State.

The most interesting part of the article covers the burgeoning “anti-lawn movement,” a rag-tag assortment of individuals and groups who are calling for an end to the lawn as we know it, favoring replacing it with trees, gardens or more natural meadow.

How is grass not natural, you might ask? Well, as Kolbert discusses in the article, most of the grasses covering American lawns, including Kentucky bluegrass and Bermuda grass, are not native to North America. They’re also effectively grown as a monoculture (like so many other plants and crops), which makes them more vulnerable to pests.

Herbicides and synthetic fertilizers make it possible to grow the grasses into the intensely green expanses we see today, by boosting their growth and keeping out “weed” species. Of course, these chemicals have side-effects: Herbicides and other pesticides can kill birds and other native species, while excess fertilizer can run off of lawns into streams and rivers, and eventually into the sea, where it creates a “dead” zone where marine species can’t survive.

Lawns also require water; a third of all residential water use in the United States goes to landscaping, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Another study cited by Kolbert estimated that watering lawns in the United States uses up 200 gallons of water per person per day.

What proponents of the anti-lawn movement suggest is ditching all the chemicals and mowers and maintenance and just letting nature take over — whatever nature happens to be in any particular region of the country, be it prairie, forest or scrub. This is already done to a certain extent in the Southwest. On my trip to Tucson to cover NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander mission earlier this summer, the lack of lawns in favor of pebbles and desert flora certainly stood out. It stood as an example for me of how normal we consider lawns in the eastern United States, and how arresting it can be to see anything else in front of a house.

Others propose using the lawn space for more productive purposes, such as growing food in the space that now supports grass. Kolbert cites a book, “Food Not Lawns,” that says that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. (Growing food in our front yards would also do a lot to localize food production, though that’s a blog for another day.)

While the anti-lawn ideas are intriguing, and personally, I think, preferable, to the large lawns prevalent in some suburbs now, I doubt the green is going away anytime soon. I think Kolbert’s article gives pause for thought though – it might be worth pulling up a little of that sod and planting a vegetable garden, or letting nature reclaim a little of the lawn.

A NASA Lunar Science Conference is being held here at the NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, a major confab of Moon experts brought together by the space agency’s new Lunar Science Institute.

A public day was held on Sunday, July 20th - marking the anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic mission of human exploration of the Moon way back in 1969.

Meanwhile, NASA’s 21st century Vision for Space Exploration — the Moon, Mars and Beyond mandate — was set in motion by President George W. Bush in January 2004.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is touted as the first mission in that vision, kicking off a series of robotic treks to the Moon starting no later than 2008, as called for in the Bush push.

But the word here is that LRO is being delayed until February 2009 - kind of reaching its own escape velocity in terms of calendar date and sticking to the vision script of action items.

In another Moon memo, it was announced at the meeting that the world’s first astronomical observatory bound for the lunar landscape will be a joint venture between the International Lunar Observatory (ILO) Association and Google Lunar X Prize contender Odyssey Moon.

Odyssey Moon is one of several groups vying in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition.

The ILO would be delivered to the Moon aboard the second lunar lander that Odyssey Moon intends to fly early in the next decade. The association consists of a consortium of scientists from, to date, Canada, China, India, Europe, Japan and Hawaii/USA.

In Moon-breaking news, it was also noted that Space Age Publishing Company — the ILO Association’s commercial affiliate, intends to broadcast its Space Calendar weekly and Lunar Enterprise Daily via the International Lunar Observatory.

China Radio International this week added some interesting bits of information regarding this October’s projected Shenzhou 7 mission - that nation’s third human-carrying space trek.

Six taikonauts have been divided into two groups - one group of three will fly the mission, the other three will be the backup team.

Shenzhou 7 will orbit the Earth for five days, with a one-hour long spacewalk to take place during the flight, as well as the launching of a small satellite. Also, during the trip, the taikonauts will do experiments using new satellite communications technologies.

The spacecraft has been transported to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Technicians there are busily checking and double-checking the readiness of the craft.

Regarding the spacewalk, the Shenzhou 7 has been outfitted with two air-lock doors in a special module imbedded between the craft’s return module and its orbital module. According to the radio report, the taikonauts will seal the first door and discharge air pressure in the orbital module. When the air pressure inside and outside that module matches, then the spacewalk can proceed. A reverse procedure will permit a spacewalker to reenter the module.

For the spacewalk, Chinese space engineers have readied two kinds of spacesuits. One design makes use of China’s own technologies…the other was purchased from Russia. Space program officials will make the final suit choice as the Shenzhou 7 mission draws closer.

The radio report explained that the upcoming mission will be the first flight of a second phase human space program. Establishing a space station is the next step for China’s space planners.

Meanwhile, the Xinhua news agency in China reported July 19 that the Long March 2F rocket to be used in the Shenzhou 7 sendoff will be sent to the launch center in a few days. An official with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) said that the group of 200 launch team members are dedicated to having a safe and successful launch of the Shenzhou 7.

Texas state officials gave the nod today to the largest wind-power project in the country.

The project, to cost at least $3 billion, will include significant new transmission lines to get power from windy areas, where the turbines will be, to urban areas. Texas electric customers will pay about $4 more per month on their electric bills to help cover the costs of investment.

State officials aren’t just blowing hot air.

According to MSNBC: Texas is already the national leader in wind power, and wind supporters say Thursday’s move by the Public Utility Commission will make the Lone Star State a leader in moving energy to the urban areas that need electricity.

“We will add more wind than the 14 states following Texas combined,” said PUC Commissioner Paul Hudson. “I think that’s a very extraordinary achievement. Some think we haven’t gone far enough, some think we’ve pushed too far.”

Meantime, one town in Missouri is entirely powered by wind.

Not everyone is hot on wind. Some argue the giant turbines (not windmills anymore) are noisy and can kill birds. And one study suggested the drag o turbines could actually alter the climate.

• Whatever Happened to Wind Energy?

You likely saw some of the recent stories coming out of the UK that NASA chief, Mike Griffin, has spotlighted the prospect that China could possibly place people on the Moon, perhaps before the U.S. replants its own boots there.

“As a matter of technical capability, it absolutely can,” he told the BBC News in London.

But one little nugget of newness caught my eye from Griffin. That is, some early scientific partnerships between the two space powers are being eyed.

I contacted NASA public affairs officer, Mike Braukus, for a little more info.

Turns out that there’s been some recent NASA chat with China following Griffin’s September 2006 space trek to that country - the first time a NASA administrator had visited there.

Discussions between NASA and China National Space Administration (CNSA) leaders concern the establishment of Earth and space science working groups, Braukus advised.

“The areas of discussion centered on complementary measurements and data exchange on missions that are already being pursued in each country in the fields of Earth and space science,” Braukus said. “It could be beneficial to NASA to cooperate with CNSA in these areas to share data, reduce mission cost and duplication, and advance scientific knowledge,” he added.

This all reminds me of U.S.-Soviet Union Cold War thawing in the space arena - steps that led to an Apollo-Soyuz docking, shuttle visits to the Mir space station, and open airlock policy that led to the International Space Station.

Small science steps can lead to giant leaps of collaboration.