Space-based solar power has been mostly all-talk - now it’s time to energize the idea with some electrifying experiments!

And that’s the goal of the “One Lightbulb” project.

In December, the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy will begin the process of building two small satellites.

The bright idea here is demonstrate by doing - that is, power beam between low Earth orbit and the Earth to illuminate a single one-tenth of a watt LED lightbulb.

The project as now blueprinted involves the building of two satellite systems concurrently, one “heavy” and one “light.” This dual approach using different methods provides a measure of assurance that success can be attained given technical, legal, financial, or other challenges that might bog down one of the two satellite designs.

Each satellite would weigh some 400 pounds or less, with the desired launch dates in 2010.

The “heavy” satellite mission represents a more complicated set of tasks and greater expense than its counterpart. It involves placing on orbit a satellite that will collect power and broadcast it to Earth via laser, broadcasting it to a special ground receiving station where a lightbulb would be illuminated.

The “light” satellite mission would receive laser energy from the ground, lighting up a lightbulb. Visual observation of the light on the satellite being illuminated during the laser broadcast will indicate success.

If given the chance, both satellites may fly, said M.V. “Coyote” Smith, leader of the effort and a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, now a PhD student at the University of Reading in the UK. He is also Associate Director for Space Solar Power Projects at the Eisenhower Center, U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

“We are trying to prevent resource wars by developing yet another source of safe, clean energy that can be shared widely across the planet,” Smith told me.

To keep an eye on this energetic idea, along with more details on the project, go to:

http://spacesolarpower.wordpress.com/

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

When we all start hearing things about the economy that we never heard of before … nay, when we all start actually paying attention to the economy … you know something must be really wrong.

And try as they might, economists, business leaders, regulators, politicians and business journalists don’t seem to be helping much. I mean, c’mon, do you know what’s going on right now? More important, do you have any clue at all what’s going to happen tomorrow?

Let’s look at just some highlights of the craziness:

Yesterday, people actually bought 3-month Treasury bills — considered one of the safest short-duration investments because they’re backed by the government — that had negative yield. First time since 1940. That means in 3-months time, you get back less than you loaned the government. Nice to see people helping out in this way, as obviously the Feds need that money because …

The Feds just pumped another $180 billion into the markets today (on top of how much in socialistic bailouts and other unfathomably costly measures lately?). That seemed to ease some jitters for the moment. But these dollar figures are getting to sound pretty meaningless to most of us, aren’t they? And where does that money come from (besides the selling of T-bills). Best I can figure, they just print more and the national debt goes up…

The U.S. national debt, as of 1:11 p.m. ET today, was $9,643,005,101,724.49. I think that’s trillions, for whatever perspective that might provide. Given the current population of 304,751,034 at this moment, each citizen’s share is $31,642.24. You have that under your mattress, right? I mean, it’s somewhere, right? Because soon you’ll need a bunch more. 11 minutes later, the total debt had risen by about $35,000. Anyway …

Find someone who really understands all this and you probably have someone who is very, very rich and did not just destroy his huge company. Which brings us to …

The Forbes 400 richest list just came out. These 400 people collectively have a net worth of $1.57 trillion. Maybe they could lend a hand? (Though even if they all liquidated everything, they could not pay off our national debt.) And anyway, who would buy all their stuff? Maybe the Feds …

If you haven’t already, check out our Clara Moskowitz’s account of how the current debacle stacks up to history, and what several economists think about our collective economic future. The range, and they might actually be right this time, is from pretty bleak to really bleak, with some hope that in a few years it’ll get better.

Why is all this on a science Web site? In part because we wanted to take a look at just how inexact the science of economics is. As one glaring example of how little the experts know (and therefore why you should be careful whose rosy pronouncements you trust): consumers, collectively, can predict inflation as accurately as economists.

I have no worthy advice for what you should do with your money, other than to suggest you might as well just use a crystal ball to help you decide.

When people argue about evolution vs. creationism (or the disingenuous alternative to creationism called “intelligent design”) it often comes off as a debate between science and religion.

This is the case with some conservative Protestants in the United States. However, the Catholic Church has made it clear that it has no problem with evolution.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s culture minister, said today that the theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible. The Vatican discourages literal interpretations of the Bible, including the literal interpretation of creationism that is at odds with the very solid scientific theory of evolution.

School districts in many U.S. states have wrestled with whether or not to teach intelligent design, which has no basis in science whatsoever, as an alternative to evolution in science classes. Scientists argue that you have to teach science in a science class, and keep religion (and fantasy ideas, like intelligent design) out of science class. The debate crept into national politics recently with reports that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin might be a creationist. Meanwhile, a recent Pew survey found that for the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Americans think religious organizations should stay out of politics.

Ravasi said it this way: Creationism belongs to the “strictly theological sphere” and could not be used “ideologically in science.” According to Reuters, however, no apologies are forthcoming for Charles Darwin.

(Worth noting here that the Vatican’s chief astronomer said earlier this year that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.)

• God and Science Collide in Nation’s Capital

New details about a milestone step toward space-based solar power beaming.

A press briefing today in Washington, D.C. will detail a “first-of-a-kind” long-range demonstration of solar-powered wireless power transmission. The experiment made use of a solid-state phased array transmitter planted on the U.S. island of Maui (on Haleakala) and receivers placed on the island of Hawai’i (Mauna Loa) and airborne.

The power demo done May 5-9 was carried out by Managed Energy Technologies LLC of the U.S. - with Discovery Communications, Inc. bankrolling the 5 month project at less than $1 million.

The transmission of radio frequency (RF) energy shot across some 90 miles distance - and that’s almost 100-times further than an experiment done by NASA back in the 1970s.

Even better, a host of technologies were integrated and tested together for the first time, such as a “field-deployable” system.

Project leader of the test was a former NASA technologist, John Mankins, with professor Nobuyuki Kaya of Kobe University in Japan and Frank Little of Texas A&M University also key participants, as was Neville Marzwell of CalTech. Students were largely responsible for fabrication of the hardware for this unique experiment.

Mankins has advised me that the end-to-end efficiency of the experiment was very, very low - but by design. Budget limitations cut into the scale of the testing, with only a tiny fraction of the RF power going “straight” along the plane of the transmitter array.

“That wasn’t really the purpose of this test,” Mankins told me. “Rather, we were after the end-to-end integration” of hardware used in the power beaming experiment, he said.

The wireless demonstration was spotlighted today at a press briefing pulled together by the National Space Society.

The project was sponsored by Discovery Communications as part of its Project Earth series, produced by Impossible Pictures Ltd. of the U.K. Look for the September 12th showing of the series that will detail the wireless power transmission experiment.

By the way, there is increasing chatter in various circles to make use of the International Space Station to carry out a power beaming experiment, coupled with a select receiving site on the ground. So stay tuned, be it via grape vine or radio frequency transmission.

When my laptop goes kaput, my first instinct is to chuck it out the window, but astronauts in space don’t have such luxuries.

Consider this: Yuri Malenchenko, a veteran cosmonaut and flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, had the unenviable job this week of wrestling with a glitchy computer laptop in the outpost’s Russian segment.

While I can call tech support, my computer programmer brother-in-law, or just pay someone to take it out of my sight until it’s fixed, Yuri and his Expedition 16 crewmates have to keep those space laptops running or the $100 billion station doesn’t work.

“It says software license warning,” Yuri told Mission Control in Korolev, Russia, just outside of Moscow on Wednesday during NASA’s daily hour of live video from the space station.

Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko works with communication equipment on the ISS.

Flight controllers and engineers there were talking Yuri, who has commanded the station in the past, through the steps to reinstall programs from a software DVD. They were speaking Russian, with a handy English translator, but frustration knows no language.

“[It says] the computer cannot copy the file, and data error,” said Yuri, as he and Mission Control hammered through their troubleshooting.

I may not be a spaceman, but I know how it feels to have that blue screen of death standing between me and my files. At least I only have to face off against one computer at a time, but it’s a different story for station astronauts.

According to the folks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas - home of the U.S. astronaut corps and shuttle/space station Mission Controls - there are no less than 69 laptop computers watching over the International Space Station right this minute. Here’s a breakdown:

• 50 computers govern all NASA core functions on the station, including operations and many of the payloads.
• 5 of those 50 NASA machines are directly linked to the station’s core avionics computers to send commands and receive telemetry
• 12 laptop computers support all of the station’s Russian core functions, operations and payloads
• 7 new laptops watch over the new, European-built Columbus laboratory for the European Space Agency.

And there’s more coming, I’m sure. On March 11, NASA’s shuttle Endeavour will launch with the first segment of Japan’s massive Kibo laboratory - the station’s largest research module - along with a Canadian-built, two-armed robot called Dextre that will be mounted outside. Kibo will likely need its own laptop computers.

Luckily, flight controllers in Russia and the U.S. have extensive - if not altogether desired - experience working through minor and major computer glitches aboard the ISS. Just last summer, the station’s primary Russian command and navigation computers crashed due to a faulty circuit. Cosmonauts jerry rigged a workaround until the computers could be replaced later.

The station’s main U.S. computers inside NASA’s Destiny lab have also experience their own growing pains, including a major crash back in April 2001.

The folks with NASA’s computer resources and architecture department say that space station computers receive new software updates for different applications several times a year to support new requirements, interfaces and new arrivals of modules and other hardware as the orbital laboratory’s construction continues.

You know, when I first heard that J.J. Abrams was doing the next retcon-ed Star Trek movie with a trip to Starfleet Academy I got a little squeamish. Let’s face it, Mission Impossible III was “Alias” with a prettier lead. Still, the first teaser trailer is up and it’s all nerd-bump-inducing. Go HERE to see it as I can’t seem to embed it.

The National Science Board rolled out Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) 2008 today - a biennial report on the state of science and engineering research and education in the United States.

The report also documents public attitudes about science and technology - and there are some observations — albeit few of them — regarding space.

For example, the report notes that, while support for federal research investment is at historically high levels, other kinds of federal spending generate even stronger public support.

“Support for increased spending is greater in numerous program areas, including education (73%), health care (72%), assistance to the poor (68%), environmental protection (67%), and Social Security (61%),” the report explains.

And here’s a kick-in-the-head for space fans: “Scientific research ranks about on a par with mass transit (38%) and well ahead of space exploration (14%) and assistance to foreign countries (10%) in the proportion of the U.S. population favoring increased spending.”

The SEI report also points out that television and the Internet are Americans’ primary sources of science and technology information. While the Internet is favored below the TV tube for info, “to learn about specific scientific issues, more than half of Americans choose the Internet as their main information source.”

Regarding environmental quality here on Earth, the report observes that in 2007, 43% of Americans expressed “strong concern” about the environment, up from 35% in 2005. However, concern about the environment ranks somewhere in the middle among 12 issues. Global warming has recently become more prominent among environmental issues of concern to the public, the report states, although it still ranks 8th among 10 issues.

The Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 is prepared by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Science Resources Statistics on behalf of the National Science Board.

Dig into the just-released report by dialing in your Internet feed-line to:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/

They’re calling it the world’s cheapest car, priced same as the DVD player in a Lexus.

While I can’t vouch for that comparison, you can’t argue that $2,500 will draw some buyers. The price actually includes 4 tires, 4 doors and a steering wheel, not to mention an engine and all the other basics one needs. Indeed, the car costs far less than the bill for a used engine we just had to stick in our son’s car.

But, for now you’ll have to go to India to get one. The Tata company unveiled the 10-foot Nano there today.

From a Times article:

Citing moments in history including the first manned flight by the Wright Brothers and man’s landing on the moon, Ratan Tata, the chairman of the company, revealed a cute, compact car designed to appeal to first-time car buyers in one of the world’s fastest growing car markets.

There might be some seductive science behind the world-famous pipes of Barry White — the “Walrus of Love” — and other low-voiced males.

Researchers asked Tanzanian women of the Hadza people to pick a voice they preferred from sample of men saying “hello” in Swahili. Most of the time, they went for the deeper voices, according to a Jan. 3, 2008 article by Sean Bowditch of NPR. Turns out that men with deeper voices also had more children than the average Hadza daddy.

Harvard anthropologist Coren Apicella commented on the curious data in Bowditch’s piece:

“Why there’s this relationship, we’re not entirely sure yet,” Apicella said. “It could be that these men have greater access to mates. Maybe these men that have deeper voices have higher levels of testosterone. Or maybe they’re better hunters and they’re able to bring more food home to their wives.”

Whatever the case, other scientists agree that voices may be “signaling some biologically relevant information to potential mates.” Apicella and her colleagues aren’t yet sure, however, if the the deep-voice preference extends to other cultures — including the United States.