Squeezing the grapevine, looks like there’s an issue with the Russian-supplied RD-180 engine used in the Atlas V booster.

Talk is that there’s a “flight constraint” that’s cropped up with the Russian-developed powerhouse. The issue is being wrestled with by engineers to clear the problem. Meanwhile, what impact this condition will have on the Atlas launch manifest for the rest of the year remains unknown.

What is known is that a look downrange on the calendar shows the Atlas V is manifested to power several spacecraft into orbit, such as the Air Force’s nifty X-37B military space plane. That mission is slated for December, a flight that pushed the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — also to ride an Atlas 5 — into 2009.

Other spacecraft missions on the Atlas V launch books for the remaining months of this year: A Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP) satellite; a Wideband Global SATCOM spacecraft, formerly known as the Wideband Gapfiller Satellite; as well as a couple of National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spacecraft launches.

How all this shakes out in lofting these satellites this year is definitely indefinite, at least for now.

The International Space Station fired its rocket engines to dodge space junk for the first time in five years on Wednesday.

According to a daily NASA status report, the European-built cargo ship Jules Verne docked at the station’s aft end fired its rocket engines in a 5-minute, 2-second maneuver to avoid the potential collision with a piece of orbital trash. The last time the station performed the so-called “Debris Avoidance Maneuver” was on May 30, 2003, the report added.

The offending piece of space hardware: Object #33246, part of a Russian satellite formerly known as Kosmos-2421.

NASA projections predicted that, without the avoidance maneuver, the space station and chunk of orbital debris would likely pass silently by each other with just under a mile (1.627 km) of clearance between them. The probability of an impact: 0.0139 (That’s 1-in-72 chance odds, according to NASA, if you’re counting).

Mission requirements call for an avoidance maneuver if there’s a greater than 1-in-10,000 chance that a piece of orbital debris could collide with the space station.

For you rocket hounds, the unmanned Jules Verne cargo ship - Europe’s first Automated Transfer Vehicle - fired two of its four rocket thrusters at 12:11 p.m. EDT (1611 GMT) on Wednesday to put some more elbow room between the station and Kosmos-2421 remnant. Jules Verne is due to undock from the aft end of the station’s Russian-built Zvezda service module on Sept. 5.

And if you’re still interested, if Kosmos-2421 (also known as Cosmos-2421) was a Russian Navy electronic ocean surveillance satellite that apparently shut down and began breaking apart earlier this March, according to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office.

As of June, the satellite had undergone three different fragmentation events that left a total of 500 or more bits of debris floating around an orbit 242-257 miles (390-415 km) above Earth. The space station typically flies in an orbit about 220 miles (354 km) above Earth.

• Video - Inside Europe’s Jules Verne Cargo Ship
• Video - ESA’s Special ISS Delivery
• Video - A Successful Satellite Kill

Here’s a couple of short blasts from the world of space transportation.

At the recent rollout of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane in Mojave, California, one topic that got little in the way of chatter: what’s the status on the engine that’s to power SpaceShipTwo?

SpaceDev of Poway, California has just announced that it has signed a multi-year contract with Scaled Composites, to assist Scaled in development of a production rocket motor for the passenger-carrying SpaceShipTwo suborbital rocket plane.

Under the new contract, SpaceDev will be the lead rocket motor team member for SpaceShipTwo and will collaborate with Scaled’s internal design team to develop a production ready hybrid rocket motor. SpaceDev will provide engineering services to refine the design of the hybrid rocket motor being developed by Scaled Composites, as well as providing the development, manufacture and integration of key rocket motor system components.

Also, SpaceDev will be carrying out ground tests on those motor components, working to assist Scaled in the full-scale rocket test program both on the ground and during SpaceShipTwo flight tests.

The contract — which runs through 2012 — has an initial value of roughly $15 million for work to be primarily completed over the next two years.

In another bit of upstart space news, check out this video clip from my good friend, Bob Martin, a TV reporter at KRQE in Albuquerque.

It’s a smashing bit of reporting about that recent hush-hush Lockheed Martin prototype space plane test at New Mexico’s Spaceport America - and used with permission.

Check out: http://www.krqe.com/Global/story.asp?s=8832212

LOL. That’s the first and hopefully last time I start a blog that way. But c’mon.

The claim of three guys that they had remains of Bigfoot was, we all knew, silly. So they did DNA testing and … get this: Bigfoot is either a human or opossum (which is about the size of a house cat). Or, as they now claim, the DNA testing wasn’t done right. Yeah, that’s it!

Let’s just put this story to bed right there, unless you want to read the real story behind the stunt.

What it means to be a planet seems to be up there with what it means to be human, or at least the debate has drawn just as much philosophical banter and passionate personas.

One reason for the tug-of-war between differing views is our beloved Pluto. One definition would keep the tiny world in the planet line-up and another boots it out. That’s what happened in 2006 when the organization that names celestial bodies, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), voted in a new definition of planet that demoted Pluto to “dwarf planet.” (Under a more recent IAU decision, Pluto and similar objects are classified as “plutoids.”)

Many astronomers were disgruntled over the 2006 IAU decision, which they said involved a vote of just 424 astronomers out of some 10,000 professional astronomers and many other planetary scientists around the globe.

Possibly to rectify the vote or just as a scientific discussion of the puzzling planet question, astronomers are gathering for “The Great Planet Debate: Science as Process” conference from Aug. 14-16 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.

As part of the conference, an open-to-the-public debate between Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute and Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History will start at 4:30 pm EDT on August 14th. The debate, which will be moderated by Ira Flatow, the host of Science Friday on National Public Radio, is free to everyone and will be streamed live on the web.

Whether or not the debate is fruitful in producing a consensus, there is sure to be some heated back and forth.

• Great Planet Debate: Scientists Could Overturn Official Definition
• The History of the Pluto Controversy
• Gallery: Our New Solar System

Spaceport America in New Mexico announced today a successful launch of a test flight vehicle under development by Lockheed Martin. The test shot was a non-public, unannounced event that took place early this morning - making use of a winged vehicle to evaluate proprietary advanced launch technologies.

Lockheed Martin and UP Aerospace teamed to carry out the hush-hush shot, similar to a flight that was first flown from the site last December.

To take a read on that test flight last year, go to:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/080424-lockheed-spaceplane-test.html

Meanwhile, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority currently projects that licensed vertical launches can begin in the first quarter of 2009…and that the terminal and hangar facility for horizontal launches should be completed by 2010.

Spaceport America is billed as the nation’s first purpose-built commercial space facility, being readied to handle launch traffic from various customers, including Virgin Galactic and its suborbital spaceliner service for paying passengers.

All that chatter this week about the Phoenix Mars lander possibly tasting perchlorates in the martian soil sent everybody to the chemistry books.

Finding perchlorates, if confirmed, is neither bad nor good for the prospect of life on Mars, according to Michael Hecht, lead scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer — MECA for short, thank goodness — the instrument that includes a wet chemistry laboratory.

But what caught my attention is that perchlorates are an ingredient used in rocket fuel and fireworks.

Immediately, I could see future Mars adventurers saluting their own independence day from Earth by shooting off fireworks. If that’s the case, why not process the soil to make the red planet a convenient refueling spot for blasting off to other destinations?

I shot a note off to a couple of Mars futurists about using perchlorates as a resource gold mine.

Robert Zubrin, the spark plug behind the Mars Society, responded: “It conceivably could be used to create solid rocket propellants or explosives.”

But Gerald Sanders, NASA’s guru for on-the-spot resource utilization, had a different take about made-on-Mars solid rocket propellant.

“One, solid propellants are much lower performing than liquids. Two, while solid rockets are simpler than liquid systems, it is easier to fill an empty liquid tank than to cast a solid motor. Three, if I am going through the trouble to dig up and process Mars dirt, I would get the water first. Even at low water concentrations (three to eight percent), water and carbon dioxide can allow me to make oxygen, methane, or a large number of other hydrocarbon fuels.”

I also wondered like others whether perchlorate on Mars had been sprinkled in the Phoenix landing zone by all those pyros that had to fire to deploy spacecraft hardware - that the lander has detected its own detritus.

Ed Sedivy, Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, said that they’ve been looking into this prospect, but “can find no credible connection between the lander itself and the perchlorate detected by MECA.”

Sedivy told me that the pyros used on Phoenix are NASA Standard Initiators - a device that contains a charge that is captured (non-vented) and does contain some perchlorates (potassium, titanium, zirconium) - all of a 100 milligrams per charge.

“So our pyros are not consistent with the MECA signature, they are not vented, and the quantity of material is very small,” Sedivy said. “So at this point, I don’t see a credible connection to the spacecraft.”

The  projections of warming temperatures, melting ice and sea level rise made by climate models can be a little abstract and hard to imagine. But a new Google Earth feature provides two new animations that can help visualize the effects of global warming over the next century.

One animation shows how world temperatures will change over the next hundred years, assuming a mid-range increase in greenhouse gas emissions, with projections from the United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre. The other shows the retreat of Antarctic ice caps since the 1950s, courtesy of the British Antarctic Survey.

The tool also links to stories of how people are already being affected by changing weather patterns, especially in poor countries, and provides information on ways to take action.

Hopefully people can see just what kind of impact climate change could have if we don’t take more notice and make a few changes.

While poking around Google Earth’s Outreach Web site, I also spotted a couple of other interesting tools, such as one that shows Earth’s disappearing forests.

Physics may not be the most obvious subject of a rap song (in fact, it’s probably the least), but that’s exactly what inspired Katherine McAlpine over at the CERN (the acronym in French for the European Organization for Nuclear Research) press office.

In a, well frankly, hilarious video (courtesy of the New Scientist) the scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider can be seen doing their best rapper impressions as they put together the parts of the enormous particle accelerator.

While the rapping isn’t exactly up to P. Diddy’s (or whatever he’s calling himself these days) standards, it’s certainly a pretty entertaining explanation of what some of the LHC’s components will be doing once it switches on this month: namely, smashing together very tiny particles at very high speeds to see what happens. Its experiments could yield insights into some of the big mysteries of the universe, perhaps providing a glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson or answering the question of just what exactly dark matter is made up of.

China news services are reporting today that a Long March 2F booster has arrived at the Gansu Province launch site - a step forward in prepping for that country’s third human spaceflight this October.

Along with the rocket, expert teams have also arrived at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center after a three day train ride, ready to carefully check out major Shenzhou 7 systems for flight. This liftoff of three taikonauts will include a spacewalk - China’s first outing in extravehicular activity, and a step useful for later construction tasks in Earth orbit.

Xinhuanet.com reported that 36 technological improvements have been made to Shenzhou 7, contrasted to the previous two spacecraft missions. Those improvements, the news service reported, include better seats, remote testing devices, and extra cameras so ground controllers can supervise taikonaut duties.