The on/off switch for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is now in the “on” position.

It now will be held at the Las Cruces International Airport in New Mexico, with hardware to fly on October 24-25. A few weeks ago, the word was that a conflict at neighboring Holloman Air Force Base caused the cancellation of the Challenge. Inside word was that a classified program was to be evaluated at Holloman and the Challenge was asked to depart the scene.

But things are now back on track - a two-level, two million dollar competition requiring a team’s vehicle to simulate hops between the Moon’s surface and lunar orbit.

The State of New Mexico is the event sponsor, with the Challenge hosted by the X Prize Foundation, with additional financial support coming from Northrop Grumman.

The Centennial Challenge Prize of two million dollars is being provided by NASA.

For updates on this event and other space activities in New Mexico - specifically, the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, go to:

http://spacegrant.nmsu.edu/ispcs/

So…the countdown is back on. Rockets away!

Tomorrow, a NASA decision may be forthcoming on the cost-overrun and highly complex Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. Will a decision be made to stay the course to Mars with a liftoff next year…or move it to 2011?…or decide its fate at a later time? But time is running out. The call itself is expected to come from NASA chief, Mike Griffin.

MSL is being tagged as “the first real astrobiology mission to Mars” - with a price tag sailing past $2 billion. The project has already exceeded the 15 percent “overguide”, (that’s an “overrun” in taxpayer parlance) set by Congress in the fiscal year 2008 NASA authorization law.

The next overguide benchmark is 30 percent. MSL’s total cost overrun is expected to be between 33 and 40 percent.

Why not delay the launch to 2011? Doing so will cost NASA an additional $300 million - $400 million.

MSL almost certainly will reach the 30 percent overguide ceiling say NASA insiders, at which point Congress has the authority to cancel the mission.

NASA officials anticipate that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) — where MSL has been designed and is being built — has its hand out for more than $100 million extra that’s to be spread out over Fiscal Years 2009 and 2010.

Finding all the needed Mars moola for MSL is sure to have a ripple effect in other space science efforts. Possible sources of extra money for MSL include impacting the Jupiter Juno mission, the lunar Grail and LADEE missions, the newly picked MAVEN Mars Scout mission, and even NASA instruments to be flown on Europe’s ExoMars rover.

The technical readiness of the mission has to be weighed - and there’s worry that JPL’s MSL workers are already pushed to the limit in readying the huge Mars rover. They could be pushed even harder if a go for 2009 is given, raising the risk of errors and failure, according to senior management at NASA.

All concerned don’t want to see an expensive “smoking hole” or a “nuclear crater” on Mars instead of an MSL rock-solid soft landing on the red planet.

Indeed, one concern is MSL’s nuclear power sources. Smacking into Mars at high speed with those heat sources might lead to a subsurface melting of possible ice - a no-no in astrobiology circles.

The space grapevine was a buzz late last week - looks like the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico will not be held there October 24-25th.

According to Sarah Becky Ramsey, Director of Communications at the X Prize Cup Foundation, the official word is that “because of some other activities on the base, we will not be able to hold the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge there on our previously scheduled dates.”

Ramsey added that other options are being investigated, “with an eye toward rescheduling the competition as soon as practical in southern New Mexico.”

“While we are eager to see our teams compete,” Ramsey added, “we do expect them to put the extra time to good use, and we know we will have a better competition for it.”

NASA’s mega Mars rover — the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) — seems to be headed for a major decision point next month. Will it fly in 2009 or be delayed until 2011?

A major review meeting on the nuclear-energized MSL is slated for NASA Headquarters in October - with the space agency then or shortly after deciding whether the powerful rover is ready to set sail toward Mars next year.

Meanwhile, the folks building the mechanized wonder at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are number crunching, coming up with current dollar numbers for the already over-budget mission. At last ka-ching of the cash register the planetary mission was roughly $2 billion.

There are cost implications for delaying MSL’s sendoff to the red planet to 2011.

Hall talk at yesterday’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) meeting in Monrovia, California seems to suggest that the 2009 launch is still the plan. MEPAG is chartered by NASA Headquarters to assist in planning the scientific exploration of Mars.

The buzz at MEPAG is that the cost of missing the launch is so high that JPL and the MSL team are running hard to get the spacecraft off to Mars in the fall of 2009.

So a go/no go decision on the one-off MSL appears to remain up in the air at the moment…so keep an eye on this one.

Listen up…to Mars!

Word from the trenches is that the Phoenix lander team is going forward with turning on the spacecraft’s microphone. Phoenix, like the lost-to-Mars 1999 Polar Lander, carried a tiny microphone to hear the sounds of the descent to the red planet.

The microphone is part of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) system built by Malin Space Science Systems, but for Phoenix was turned off due to the small risk that it could trip up a critical landing system.

But the go-ahead has been given to turn the microphone on, right there on-the-spot at the Phoenix Martian polar north landing spot. Other good news is that NASA has given the lander an extended lease on life for an additional two months - into November.

If the microphone gives an ear to Mars, no telling what you might hear. Wind? The sounds of the robot’s arm digging away? Howling Mars dogs?

BTW: Is there some sort of a Phoenix song in this, borrowing from Beck:

“Where it’s at!
I got two turntables and a microphone
Where it’s at!”

Look for a new mission to be picked for Mars.

The folks at the University of Colorado at Boulder are holding a news briefing today to announce the selection of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) by NASA to lead a multimillion dollar mission to study the past climate of Mars - supported by the largest research contract ever awarded to CU-Boulder.

And that bit of news seems to indicate they’ve been selected for a Mars Scout mission. Their entry is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) - a Mars orbiter that would provide unique, first-of-its kind measurements and address key questions about Mars climate and habitability, as well as improve understanding of dynamic processes in the upper Martian atmosphere and ionosphere.

By the way, this is the selection that got delayed back in December 2007, slipped because of an “organizational conflict of interest” in one of the teams vying for the mission. That problem pushed the Mars Scout from a planned launch in 2011 to a targeted liftoff in 2013, according to a NASA release at the time.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems near Denver is building the spacecraft - the same folks that cranked out the Phoenix Mars lander - also a Scout mission.

The MAVEN orbiter is to be a collaborative effort among CU-Boulder, Lockheed Martin, the University of California, Berkeley, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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.

Beaming energy to Earth from space has been more chat than reality over the decades. But things may be changing.

First, look for a National Press Club address in Washington, D.C. this Friday that will detail a demonstration project concerning point-to-point wireless power transmission.

What’s being spotlighted is a project that involved a wireless power transmission effort between two Hawaiian islands 148 kilometers apart - that’s more than the distance from the boundary of space to the surface of Earth.

The press event at the National Press Club is being hosted by the National Space Society.

For those folks that have not been given a positive charge of advocacy regarding satellite solar power, the key idea is that space-based solar power satellites in Earth orbit would harvest plentiful solar energy in orbit - then convert that energy for transmission down to terra firma for distribution over power grids.

Such spacecraft, it’s hoped, would help reduce our carbon emissions to virtually zero as proponents showcase the idea as the only energy technology that is clean, renewable, constant and capable of providing power to virtually any location on Earth.

By the way…that Hawaiian demonstration is to be featured in an hour-long special Friday night on the Discovery Channel - one small part of an eight-part series on geoengineering concepts meant to tackle global climate change - as well as pushing new and sustainable energy source concepts.

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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[new updates throughout]

There’s a bit of confusion over exactly when China’s third piloted space mission will take place. Originally, China space authorities have cited October for the three-person Shenzhou 7 flight.

But earlier this week, according to ShanghaiDaily.com – citing a Guangzhou-based newspaper account — liftoff of China’s third piloted space mission has been moved ahead to the end of this month.

The news piece explains that the Yangcheng Evening News is reporting that the three-person Shenzhou 7 mission is now expected to take place before October 1.

That space trek has been billed as an expansion of the previous two space missions - with this mission to include China’s first space walk to prepare for construction of larger facilities in Earth orbit.

Also, the story notes that Shenzhou 7 will dispatch a small inspection satellite to survey the scene as the piloted spacecraft spins around the Earth.

Then there’s a report by Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, without quoting any Chinese space authorities, stating that the Shenzhou 7 is to head spaceward sometime between September 17 and October 1.

Then there was an update from China Daily. They indicate that a source on the Shenzhou program says the report of an earlier than October launch was “not reliable.”

Then there’s the report from Danwei, a Hong Kong news outlet that points to a report in the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post that refutes stories of a Shenzhou 7 departure this month.

That story cites a contact within the General Armament Department — which is affiliated with the China Manned Space Engineering Office — explaining that the group has never released such news of an earlier liftoff.

So…let’s wait and watch how this launch shapes up and ships out.

I trust that China isn’t getting a case of launch fever!