Virgin Galactica taking bookings

And now they are taking bookings over at Virgin Galactica http://www.virgingalactic.com/htmlsite/book.htm

The year sofar:

Stephen Hawking to go into Space
"This year I'm planning a zero-gravity flight and to go into space in 2009," Stephen Hawking said in an interview earlier this week.
Hawking, 65, suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Special arrangements would be necessary for both trips to become a reality.

The zero-gravity flight would be aboard a Boeing 727. Little is known about the arrangements, but assistants would take care of him during the flight.

For his trip to space, Hawking plans for a flight aboard Virgin Galactic's space plane. The head of Virgin Galactic is very determined to make it happen.

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william Shatner on the other hand turned out to be a sissy:


William Shatner has said no to a free trip to space. Billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson reportedly offered the 75 year old actor a free seat on the first of his space-bound Virgin Galactic ships. Tickets are projected to cost £114,000.
Captain Kirk apparently commented, "I'm interested in man's march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me. I do want to go up but I need guarantees I'll definitely come back." Not a ringing endorsement.

I say Shatner should give his seat to Lance Bass of 'N Sync. If you remember, Lance was the only civilian to complete full cosmonaut training with the Russian space program but failed to raise the 20 Million dollars for his ticket into the great yonder. That way, Shatner can play the nice guy while skirting the responsibility of playing Branson's guinea pig in his own private space race. And who can blame him? After all, Shatner doesn't want to see his life come crashing down to earth in a giant flaming ball - probably his biggest fear next to his career and ego suffering the same fate



The year sofar - In short:

January 9, Professor Stephen Hawking uses his birthday to announce his intention to become a space tourist aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo in 2009. Like Toyohiro Akiyama, his trip is being sponsored, this time by Sir Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Galactic. ( Akiyama's flight to Mir was paid for by his employer, Tokyo Broadcast System).
March 21, SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket successfully reaches space but fails to achieve orbit.[Article]
March 26, Virgin Galactic agrees to pay $27.5m over 20 years to lease facilities at Spaceport America, located near Las Cruces, New Mexico.
April 3, Residents of Dona Ana County, New Mexico, vote to approve a 0.25% increase in sales tax to help fund Spaceport America.
April 7, Dr Charles Simonyi becomes the fifth space tourist to pay $20m for a trip to orbit.

Approach too ‘Earth-centric’

WASHINGTON - Scientists taking their first "sniffs of air" from planets outside our solar system are baffled by what they didn't find: water.

One of the more basic assumptions of astronomy is that the two distant, hot gaseous planets they examined must contain water in their atmospheres. The two suns the planets orbit closely have hydrogen and oxygen, the stable building blocks of water. These planets' atmospheres — examined for the first time using light spectra to determine the air's chemical composition — are supposed to be made up of the same thing, good old H2O.

But when two different teams of astronomers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope for this new type of extrasolar planet research, they both came up dry, according to research published in Thursday's edition of Nature and the online version of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The study of one planet found hints of fine silicate-particle clouds. Research on the other planet found no chemical fingerprints for any of the molecules scientists were seeking.

Approach too ‘Earth-centric’
"We had expected this tremendous signature of water ... and it wasn't there," said the study leader for one team, Carl Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology and Spitzer Science Center. "The very fact that we've been surprised here is a wake-up call. We obviously need to do some more work."

Grillmair's colleague, Harvard astronomy professor David Charbonneau, said these surprising "sniffs of air from an alien world" tell astronomers not to be so Earth-centric in thinking about other planets.

"These are very different beasts. These are unlike any other planets in the solar system," Charbonneau said. "We're limited by our imagination in thinking about the different avenues that these atmospheres take place in."

Our own solar system has two planets without water in the atmosphere, Grillmair noted: Mercury, which doesn't have an atmosphere, and Venus, which is a different type of planet from the huge gaseous ones that would be expected to have the components of water in the air.

Water may be hiding, scientists suggest
So far, scientists have found 213 planets outside our solar system, but only 14 have orbits that make it possible for this type of study; only eight or nine of those are close enough to see. Grillmair's team studied the closest, which goes by the catchy name HD 189733b. It's a mere 360 trillion miles from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. The other planet, HD209458b, is about 900 trillion miles away in the constellation Pegasus, and it's the one with the strange silicate cloud.

So where'd the water go?

Maybe it's hiding, scientists suggest. The water could be under dust clouds, or all the airborne water molecules have the same temperature, making it impossible to see using an infrared spectrograph. Or maybe it's just not there and astronomers have to go back to the drawing board when it comes to these alien planets.

The other finding on the more distant of the two planets seems to indicate that the atmosphere is full of silicon-oxygen compounds, said study lead author L. Jeremy Richardson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"They'd be like dust grains and they would form clouds," Richardson said. And that cloud of silicates could be blocking the space telescope from measuring lower-lying water, he and other scientists said.

Water detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system

Astronomers have detected water in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time.

The finding, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal, confirms previous theories that say water vapor should be present in the atmospheres of nearly all the known extrasolar planets. Even hot Jupiters, gaseous planets that orbit closer to their stars than Mercury to our Sun, are thought to have water.

The discovery, announced today, means one of the most crucial elements for life as we know it can exist around planets orbiting other stars.

“We know that water vapor exists in the atmospheres of one extrasolar planet and there is good reason to believe that other extrasolar planets contain water vapor,” said Travis Barman, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona who made the discovery.

HD209458b is a world well-known among planet hunters. In 1999, it became the first planet to be directly observed around a normal star outside our solar system and, a few years later, was the first exoplanet confirmed to have oxygen and carbon in its atmosphere.

HD209458b is separated from its star by only about 4 million miles (7 million kilometers)—about 100 times closer than Jupiter is to our sun—and is so hot scientists think about it is losing about 10,000 tons of material every second as vented gas.

"Water actually survives over a broad range of temperatures," Barman explained. "It would need to get quite a bit hotter to completely break the water molecules apart."

Using a combination of previously published Hubble Space Telescope measurements and new theoretical models, Barman found strong evidence for water absorption in the atmosphere of the extrasolar planet HD209458b.

Barman took advantage of the fact that HD209458b is a so-called “transiting planet,” meaning it passes directly in front of its star as seen from Earth. It transits every three-and-a-half days.

When this happens, water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere causes the planet to appear slightly larger in the infrared part of the starlight than in the visible portion.

Barman found the water signature after applying new theoretical models he developed to visible and infrared Hubble data collected by Harvard student Heather Knutson last year, which measured the perceived size of the planet over a broad range of wavelengths.