For April Fool's day, Virgin Galactic and Google teamed up to form Virgle. The mission of Virgle is to create a colony on Mars. That is, assuming Virgle wasn't a joke - which it is. Every year Google surprises me with the amount of effort they put into their April Fool's jokes. Last year was http://www.google.com/tisp/, the proposed business to put internet through the sewer system. Both ideas are somewhat thought out, and a decent of effort goes into the presentation of the idea.

This year Richard Branson had a short video calling for applications to be a Mars pioneer. Well, I took some time and made a little video in response. If you look really closely, you can see my freakishly large collection of Heinlein books...Once I put them all together in one place, I was a little ashamed of myself.

Lowell Wood, a physicist and recent retiree of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a long-time visiting fellow of the Hoover Institution, presented his 'Mars Manifesto' at the Aspen Institute flight school last week. Mr Wood believes that there is a 50/50 probability that humanity could terraform Mars within the next century. Given enough selective pressure in our natural earth bound environment humanity may elect to pursue this option.

Wood said that Mars currently is "stuck" in a semi-permanent "thermal depression." But there is a multiplicity of design solutions, he foresees, such as engineering an artificial greenhouse effect at the planet that warms the world and makes it "a more preferred planet."

New Mexico voters are in the voting show down over taxes to support the local spaceport, dubbed 'Spaceport America' since Richard Branson came and signed a document stating that Virgin Galactic would probably use the spaceport once it's built. At the moment results show 51.5% of the voters in favor of the new tax to support the spaceport. It looks like the PR blitz may have worked. The name is a nice touch.

NASA is engaging the Second Life crowd through an online emissary of sorts. Thus far they have created a replica of the Space Shuttle in the online world. They call their emissary the 'CoLab' complex, which exists on it's own island within the game. Some of the in-game personalities are working on lava tube habitats, others on Martian habitat's and terraforming. There is talk of creating worlds that look and feel like the moon or other heavenly bodies.

Here is another article about 'Spaceport America', the spaceport slated for development in New Mexico. This article precedes the signing of the letter of agreement by Richard Branson. This article speaks almost exclusively to the unwillingness of the local New Mexican county, Dona Ana, to sign into law a tax increase for the project. I'm starting to see a particularly interesting public relations campaign by Virgin Galactic.

The French space agency (CNES) has posted their UFO files online. The first day after the launch the site was swamped with traffic.

Those guys at NASA are budgetary wizards. There was the press release earlier in the week about how funds would not be available to undertake the search for 'Planet Killer' asteroids. The Planet Killer project has been mandated by Congress and has a deadline. However NASA is structuring the money that Congress proposed to give NASA in such a way that there will not be available funding for this project. After stating that funding is not available, NASA seems to be making a public appeal through the press for the continuation of this project.

NASA claims that the $545 million difference in the budget proposed by President Bush and the US congress will cut the asteroid hunting project. Personally I think that this is amazing insight into how the US budgetary process works. NASA has several projects that have recently peaked popular imagination. One of them is the asteroid hunter, the other is the international space station, and the third is the moon colony project. This week NASA released statements about how the asteroid hunter project and the new orbiter (to resupply the space station) were both going to be pushed back or completely nixed by the budget 'short fall'.

A budget cut for NASA will delay the Orion shuttle launch. Congress has appropriated $545 million dollars less to the NASA budget than President Bush requested for the agency. NASA administrators claim that this will delay the Orion shuttle launches for an additional 4 to 6 months. The Orion shuttle is scheduled to replace the current Discovery shuttle, which will be retired in 2010. The original schedule called for Orion to start flights in 2014.

Here's what MSNBC reported from NASA administrator Michael Griffin:

Griffin said the gap between the shuttle's retirement and Orion's debut raises practical and strategic concerns.

The National Space Society has an informative article on the history of the L5 society. The L5 society was started by Gerard K. O'Neill and others with the intention to put human space colonies at L5. L5 and L4 are spots in earth orbit that a mass can orbit indefinitely without expending energy. The L5 society envisioned space colonies that were large bio-sphere's, spinning in order to create an artificial gravity. The space colonies would have provided solar power to earth, among other economic activities. NSF funding for research projects, most notably the Solar Power Satellite project, stopped in 1981.

Despite the ticket cost of $200,000, no shuttle in existence, no guarantee that the shuttle will ever take off, and a tentative launch date in 2009, Virgin Galactic has 200 people waiting to take off with money deposited. 82,000 people have expressed an interest in the flight, but many are waiting until the shuttle is actually built.

This story talks about Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and their attempts to build Space Ship Two, the planned sub orbital shuttle of Virgin Galactic.

George and Loretta Whitesides will be the first couple to honeymoon in space. They will be traveling aboard Virgin Galactic as one of the first 100 travelers because they are both founders. Here's their website with detailed information about their interesting careers.

Donald Davis has released some of the futuristic drawings that he did for NASA in the 70's into the public domain.

Other images are available at blogspot.

'Space Potatoes' and other fruits and vegetables are all the rage in China right now. The Space Potatoes are assumed to have mutated during China's most recent manned space flights. The potatoes are a little sweet and purple, according to CNN. Other fruits and vegetables, seeds of which were taken into space and presumably mutated, often have different characteristics than their non-space going counterparts. The Chinese claim that the fruits are often healthier, produce higher yields, or are more hardy.

The article also claims that zero gravity caused some of the mutations, which sounds like BS to this Biology minor.

Fact. Sex in Space is a fascinating subject that captures the public imagination. In the last three days two articles have appeared on major online news aggregations (fark and disinfo).

For years I have had an idea festering in my mind. That idea has been the creation of a video series documenting sex in space. Tons of people in the world wants to know what the kinetics of sex (ie, how does booty jiggle) in space are like. While the idea at first sounds pornographic, I imagine that there will be many other distribution avenues open for the entrepreneur who undertakes this venture.

The Idea