Less than a month after the failure of its third launch attempt, the California-based firm Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) is poised once more to loft a Falcon 1 rocket.

Launch of SpaceX’s fourth Falcon 1 rocket is set for sometime between 7:00 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) tonight and 12:00 a.m. EDT (0400 GMT) on Monday, according to an update from the firm’s CEO Elon Musk.

“Of course, if we see anything that requires investigation, the launch will be postponed, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know,” Musk wrote in an update posted to the SpaceX Web site on Saturday.

Tonight’s planned liftoff will be staged from SpaceX’s launch site at the U.S. Army’s Ronald Reagan Ballistic Defense Test Site on the Kwajalein Atoll in the about 2,500 miles (4,023 km) southwest of Hawaii in the central Pacific Ocean.

The launch will be broadcast live on the SpaceX Web site (http://www.spacex.com) when the attempt begins.

SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket is a two-stage rocket with a reusable first stage that stands 68 feet tall (21 meters) and can haul payloads of up to about 1,256 pounds (570 kg) to low-Earth orbit. The $6.7 million rocket weighs 60,000 pounds (27,200 kg), but has failed three consecutive times since its 2006 debut.

On Aug. 2, SpaceX launched its third Falcon 1 test flight only to watch it fail when the booster’s first stage separated, then impacted the second stage as both flew 135 miles (217 km) above Earth. An engine shutdown timing error was cited as the cause and could be fixed relatively easily, Musk said at the time.

“The fix was also very simple, requiring one line of code to be changed,” SpaceX officials said in a weekend update.

While all three of SpaceX’s first Falcon 1 launches have carried small satellite payloads, the fourth rocket is carrying “a a payload mass simulator of approximately 165 kg (364 lbs), designed and built by SpaceX specifically for this mission,” SpaceX officials said.

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China is just a week away from launching its third manned spaceflight into orbit and apparently hoping for a sell-out crowd.

The country is selling tickets to watch for the planned late night Sept. 25 launch of its Shenzhou 7 spacecraft, but buyer beware: Each seat goes for about 15,000 yuan, or about US$2,206 and ticket buyers will need to provide identification and a reference from their employer to vie for the limited spaces, according to the Chinese Web site China Daily and the newspaper Wenhui Daily.

While hefty, the ticket price apparently includes a flight to China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern Gansu province, as well as a four-day stay to watch the planned space shot, state media reported.

China first invited space fans to buy tickets for a rocket launch last year, when the country launched the Chang’e 1 moon probe from the Xichang launch center in southwestern Sichuan province. But those tickets went for about 800 yuan, or US$117, per person. Some 2,000 people watched the lunar mission’s launch from a pair of platforms about 1.5 miles (2.5 km) away, according to press reports.

But the northwestern-located Jiuquan launch site is much more remote than Xichang, and offers fewer amenities and other tourist hot spots, China Daily reported.

China’s Shenzhou 7 mission will launch atop a Long March 2F rocket carrying the first-three man crew for the country. During what is expected to be a three or four day mission, Chinese astronauts Zhai Zhigang, Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng are expected to fly China’s third manned spaceflight and make the country’s first-ever spacewalk.

Zhai, a fighter pilot with the Chinese Air Force, is billed as the one making the 40-minute spacewalk, and will apparently toss out a small satellite designed to beam images of the landmark orbital excursion to Earth, according to Chinese media reports. China is the third nation, after Russia and the U.S., to launch humans into space. It launched a one-man mission (Shenzhou 5) in 2003 and a two-man flight (Shenzhou 6, pictured here) in 2005.

Chinese space officials, meanwhile, are apparently planning their new spaceport - the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island - with an eye towards space enthusiasts.

According to China Daily, the China National Space Administration expects some 21,000 people to be living around the Wenchang spaceport by 2010, which should also sport enough surrounding development to handle up to 12,000 space fans.

So that’s good, if fairly expensive, news for Chinese space aficionados.

Incidentally, China isn’t the only country to sell tickets for space launch viewers.

Here in the U.S., you can put down cash to watch NASA launch space shuttle missions from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., like next month’s Atlantis flight to the Hubble Space Telescope. But you’ve got to get yourself to Florida first.

You can also watch a Russian Soyuz rocket launch astronauts toward the International Space Station from the Central Asian spaceport of Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, courtesy of the folks at the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures. Like China’s Shenzhou 7 offer, Space Adventures has an all-inclusive travel package (it is a long way to Baikonur, after all) for the upcoming Oct. 12 launch of Expedition 18 astronauts and millionaire computer game developer Richard Garriott, who is paying US$30 million for a short space station trip.

• China’s First Spacewalk: A Prelude of Things to Come
• Shenzhou Rising: China’s Second Manned Spaceflight
• Special Report: Emerging China, Engaging China

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took some time to update their orbiting laboratory’s antivirus software to ensure their laptops are safeguarded against intrusions like one caught in July.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko spent some time today updating the antivirus protection software on laptop computers in the station’s Russian segment, said NASA spokesperson Kelly Humphries at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The activity is one that would be familiar to computer owners on Earth with machines that use constantly updated commercial antivirus software, he told me.

“It’s a continuing process,” said Humphries, who mentioned the upgrade during NASA’s daily mission commentary.

The updates are aimed at ensuring the space station’s computers continue to quarantine viruses like W32.Gammima.AG, a Windows-based worm detected and properly quarantined in the outpost’s computers in late July. The low-risk virus, which is designed to steal passwords for online computer games, was first reported on July 25 after being detected by the station’s protection software. It did not infect the station’s command and control computers and posed no threat to the orbiting lab, though NASA engineers were hoping to find out exactly how the virus reached the station.

The space station’s various international laboratories and modules rely on a network of more than 50 computers for daily operations.

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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
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Scientist-turned-astronaut Gregory Chamitoff got a serenade of sorts aboard the International Space Station today when Mission Control rang up to sing him a Happy Birthday.

Chamitoff, who turned 46 today, is in the midst of a half-year mission aboard the station as part of its Expedition 17 crew. NASA’s Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston beamed up a birthday video to Chamitoff, complete with bloopers, with biomedical engineer Marcus Higgins - who oversees the station’s biomedical systems - singing the astronaut the traditional birthday song.

“Yay! That’s funny,” Chamitoff said. “Thank you very much, I appreciate it.”

NASA astronaut Greg Chamitoff aboard the space station. Credit: NASA

Born in Montreal, Canada, Chamitoff grew up in Southern California and is a planetary geologist and engineer. By chance, he watched the launch of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing mission first hand with his family in July 1969 at age 6, and decided then and there he wanted to be an astronaut.

“I told [my father] then that that’s what I want to do and kind of never gave up on that,” Chamitoff has said in a NASA preflight interview. “I have to admit that I kind of grew up on ‘Star Trek.’”

Chamitoff joined NASA’s Mission Operations group at JSC in 1995 and was selected for the astronaut corps three years later. He is making the first spaceflight of his career with his Expedition 17 mission and launched to the station in June aboard NASA’s space shuttle Discovery. Chamitoff is due to return to Earth, and to his wife Chantal and fraternal twin toddlers Dmitri and Natasha, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in November.

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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.

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Forget Maui, get hitched in space! That’s the message of one Japanese firm that is teaming up with an American private spaceflight group to offer suborbital weddings for just over $2 million a pop.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., are apparently planning to host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen), according to media reports and both firms’ Japanese Web sites.

An illustration advertising space weddings from Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: First Advantage/Rocketplane Global/http://www.spacewedding.jp.

A translation of First Advantage’s Space Wedding site suggests a four-day training regime that would culminate in a wedding ceremony that would start on the ground and be completed during a one-hour flight into suborbital space about 60 miles (100 km) above Earth, according to the AFP news service.

An artist’s illustration advertising space weddings by Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: （C）2008 eraliy/Misuzu Onuki/Rocketplane Global, Japan.

Such a ceremony could include a space wedding photo album, marriage certificate, as well as the capability to broadcast the cosmic union live in some way, read First Advantage’s site. Apparently, the couple could take up to three guests – assumedly a priest and two witnesses – along for the near-space nuptials, reported Russia’s RIA Novosti, adding that the first flight could be in 2011.

According to the AFP, First Advantage spokesperson Taro Katsura said his firm expects the main customers for its space weddings to come from China or the Arab gulf region.

This is a good point to note, by the way, that there is a precedent for space weddings. In 2003, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko wed his bride - then Ekaterina Dmitriev - while flying 240 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. His wife, of course, was on Earth with the rest of the wedding party next to a cardboard cutout of her groom.

Based in Oklahoma City, Okla., Rocketplane Global is developing the XP Spaceplane for private suborbital spaceflights. The four-seat spaceship is slated to be about the size of a fighter jet and designed to carry two jet engines and a rocket engine to reach space.

Initially, the spacecraft is expected to fly missions based out of the Oklahoma Spaceport and give passengers about four minutes of weightlessness during their short trip. Basic space tourism seats, not a full-up space wedding charter, carried ticket prices ranging from the base $200,000 to $250,000 for a premium view up front with the pilot, Rocketplane officials have said.

So that’s the lowdown on Rocketplane Global and Japan’s First Advantage space weddings of the future. If you’re counting down, another space tourism firm – Virgin Galactic – will roll out the WhiteKnightTwo mothership of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceliners on July 28.

The only problem I can think is: once you get married in space, where do you go for a honeymoon?

You know, Space Adventures in Virginia is offering $100 million trips around the moon aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. So, there’s an idea.

• Video: Rocketplane’s XP Spaceplane
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More space wedding information: http://spacewedding.jp/ (in Japanese)

More Rocketplane Global, Japan info: http://rocketplane.jp/index.html (in Japanese)

It’s a banner day today for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, which hit the 30-day mark of its initial three-month mission to study the bleak Martian arctic for buried water ice.

Not only is today Sol 30 (a sol is a Martian day) for Phoenix, but it’s also the summer solstice on Mars, where the sun hits the northernmost point of its path across the sky. Earth’s own summer solstice was last Saturday, June 21.

Phoenix is poised to “taste” Martian soil in this image taken on June 24, 2008. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A & M.

So what do we know about the Martian arctic at the one-third mark of Phoenix’s initial mission?

Well, there’s apparently ice in them thar trenches for sure. In a coup for Phoenix, images of the probe’s robotic arm-dug trenches caught ice evaporation in action over the course of a few days last week. Scientists hailed it as a major milestone showing that Phoenix’s can in fact reach local ice stores buried beneath the dirt covered surface.

It’s also cold, like super-frigid cold. Even in the eternally day arctic summer, where the sun strays close but never below the Martian horizon, the temperatures tend to range between minus 20 and minus 120 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 30 to minus 85 degrees Celsius).

Scientists now know that the Martian arctic soil tends to be a bit clumpy, with the first sample clogging one of Phoenix’s eight small ovens before the probe managed to shake some dirt inside.

The focus of today’s work on Mars for Phoenix was aimed at delivering a sample of Martian dirt into the probe’s wet chemistry laboratory, suite of teacup-sized beakers designed to serve as “electronic tongues” to taste the stuff and determine its composition, NASA officials.

Mission managers even hope to run Phoenix at least one extra month beyond its initial three-month mission, so long as the $420 million probe is still healthy and able to do science. Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, 2008 and is designed to hunt for buried water ice to learn if the Martian arctic could have once been habitable for primitive life.

Editor’s note: If you want to be nitpicky, today is actually Phoenix’s 31st day on Mars. On landing day, mission scientists opted to start at Sol 0, not Sol 1.

Editor’s note 2: And if you REALLY want to get technical, you’d have to factor in the fact that days on Mars are longer than they are on Earth, with on Martian day running about 40 minutes or so longer that their Earthly counterparts. This space reporter is not getting that technical.

It’s Father’s Day on Earth, and just in time for the seven-astronaut crew of NASA’s shuttle Discovery, which landed yesterday in Florida after a two-week flight to the International Space Station.

Discovery’s commander Mark Kelly and his crew are returning home to Houston, Texas today to wrap up their successful flight and reunite with their families and children on a day normally reserved for dads.

Of Discovery’s returning six-man, one-woman crew, four are parents and today’s Father’s Day return is a timely bookend of sorts for Kelly, himself a father and the identical twin brother of fellow astronaut Scott Kelly. Discovery’s May 31 launch, it turns out, occurred on the 68th birthday of his father Richard.

Meanwhile, up in orbit aboard the International Space Station, three fathers are spending today’s Day of Dads resting up after a busy docked mission with Discovery’s crew.

New station crewmember Gregory Chamitoff of NASA, who arrived aboard Discovery, has three-year-old fraternal twins Natasha and Dmitri, and had to take some extra time explaining that his son couldn’t join him on his six-month mission.

The space station’s cosmonaut commander Sergei Volkov is a father too, with a seven-year-old son. But he is also the world’s first second-generation spaceflyer to reach orbit. His own father is Alexander Volkov, a veteran cosmonaut who logged up 391 days in space on three separate space missions in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The station’s third crewmember is Oleg Kononenko, a flight engineer with four-year-old fraternal twins Alisa and Andrey. (This is a good time to mention that Discovery astronaut Ron Garan has three sons, two of them twins too!)

“I think I’m going to call them,” Kononenko told me before flight about staying in touch with his kids, adding that he tried to prepare Alisa for his six-month flight before launching into space in April. “And I told her, your dad is going to go into space for quite awhile and so I will be gone and you will be okay. Her question was, ‘Are you going to bring us any presents?’ I told her that there are no stores in space and I’m probably not going to be able to bring her anything and she seemed pretty upset by that.”

Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide may flying in space, but his orbital menu can be found right here on Earth.

Hoshide took packages of curry noodles, veggie pancakes and skewered chicken as part of his daily menu aboard the shuttle Discovery and International Space Station. To give us an idea of his food, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency passed some out to the press pool here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Everybody likes the noodles,” JAXA spokesperson Kumiko Tanabe told me as we chowed down.

JAXA’s three dishes for Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide’s menu during the June 2008 flight of Discovery’s STS-124 mission. Credit: SPACE.com/T. Malik.

The food is provided by Nissin Food Products, Co., Ltd., in Japan under a collaboration with JAXA and its astronauts. Some of them also flew in March with Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, Tanabe said.

Each of the different meals come dehydrated, and need to be pumped up with hot water for about five minutes.

The Space Noodles come with a drippy curry sauce, while the Space Negima, the skewered chicken, comes complete with green onions and sauce. There’s also Space Okonomi, a sort of vegetable pancake soaked in a sweet fruit-based sauce.

Asking around, the Space Noodles were in fact a hit, especially among the Japanese reporters. Some of the space center folks, though, enjoyed the chicken most all. This space reporter, however, confesses that the Space Okonomi was the tastiest.

Versions of JAXA’s current food selection, plus others like green tea drinks and salmon rice balls, will accompany Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata when he launches to the station as Japan’s first long-duration astronaut next year during the Expedition 18 mission.

Click here for SPACE.com’s ongoing coverage of NASA’s STS-124 mission to deliver Japan’s $1 billion Kibo laboratory and NASA astroanut Greg Chamitoff to the International Space Station.

Click here for more images of JAXA’s Japanese space food.

And in case you want to see what eating space food on Earth looks like…

JAXA’s Space Negima in action. Credit: Robert Pearlman/collectSPACE.com.