SpaceX Dragon capsule - First commercial cargo ship sent to International Space Station

 Marcia Dunn Monday 08 October 2012 The Independent

A commercial cargo ship rocketed into orbit in pursuit of the International Space Station, the first of a dozen supply runs under a mega-contract with Nasa.

It was the second launch of a Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab by the California-based SpaceX company. The first was last spring. 

This time was no test flight, however, and the spacecraft carried 1,000 pounds (453.6 kilograms) of key science experiments and other precious gear on this truly operational mission. There was also a personal touch: chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream tucked in a freezer for the three station residents. 

The company's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight. 

Officials declared the launch a success, despite a problem with one of the nine first-stage engines. The rocket put Dragon in its intended orbit, said the billionaire founder and chief executive officer of SpaceX, Elon Musk. 

"It's driving its way to station, so that's just awesome," noted SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. 

In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission. 

NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions. 

Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts' blood and urine samples. The samples — nearly 500 of them — have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011. 

The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six. 

None of the Russian, European or Japanese cargo ships can bring anything back; they're destroyed during re-entry. The Russian Soyuz crew capsules have limited room for anything besides people. 

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX — owned by PayPal co-founder Musk — is working to convert its unmanned Dragon capsules into vessels that could carry astronauts to the space station in three years. Other U.S. companies also are vying to carry crews. Americans must ride Russian rockets to orbit in the meantime, for a steep price. 

Musk, who monitored the launch from SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, called the capsules Dragon after the magical Puff to get back at critics who, a decade ago, considered his effort a fantasy. The name Falcon comes from the Millennium Falcon starship of "Star Wars" fame. 

An estimated 2,400 guests jammed the launching center to see the Falcon, with its Dragon, come to life for SpaceX's first official, operational supply mission. 

Across the country at SpaceX headquarters, about 1,000 employees watched via TV and webcast. 

It was no apparition. 

"Just over a year after the retirement of the space shuttle, we have returned space station cargo resupply missions to U.S. soil," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr. 

SpaceX is shooting for its next supply run in January. 

Another company looking to haul space station cargo, Virginia's Orbital Sciences Corp., hopes to launch a solo test flight in December and a demo mission to the station early next year. 

Every time SpaceX or a competitor flies successfully, Bolden told reporters, "that gives the nonbelievers one more opportunity to get on board and root for us" and help enable commercial launches for space station astronauts. This will further free NASA up to aim for points beyond low-Earth orbit, like Mars. 

"This was a big night," Bolden concluded.

Serge Haroche and David Wineland awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

Steve Connor Tuesday 09 October 2012 The Independent

Two scientists who independently discovered how to manipulate individual atoms and particles of light have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for their research into the weird world of quantum mechanics, where something can exist in two different states at the same time.

Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland have each helped to pioneer an esoteric field of physics that has already produced the most accurate clocks as well as promising to develop super-fast and intelligent machines known as quantum computers.

Dr Haroche, of the College de France and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, invented a way of trapping particles of light, called photons, by sending atoms through a microwave trap that keeps a photon reflecting off two mirrors for more for than a tenth of a second – equivalent to the photon travelling once around the Earth.

Dr Wineland, of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, used the opposite approach and devised a way of trapping electrically charged atoms or ions and controlling and measuring them with beams of laser light.

In both cases, the scientists were able to use their equipment to observe the highly unusual properties of single atoms and photons when the rules of classical physics break down and the weird laws of the quantum world operate.

“Through their ingenious laboratory methods they have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, enabling their field of research to take the very first steps toward building a new type of super-fast computer, based on quantum physics,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which governs the prize.

“These methods have also led to the construction of extremely precise clocks that could become the future basis for a new standard of time, with more than hundred-fold greater precision than present-day caesium clocks,” it said.

Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey, said: “Until the last decade or two, some of these results were nothing more than ideas in science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists. Wineland and Haroche have shown just how strange the quantum world really is and opened up the potential for new technologies undreamt of not so long ago.”

The weirdness of the quantum world, which operates at the levels of atoms and sub-atomic particles, is reflected in the thought experiment of Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrian physicist who won a Nobel prize in 1933. He proposed that particles can exist in two states or places at the same time, which could in theory mean that a cat trapped in a box with a radioactive poison and isolated from the rest of the world could be both dead or alive at the same time.

Private rocket blasts off for ISS  

Tuesday 09 October 2012 The Independent

A commercial cargo craft has been blasted into orbit bound for the International Space Station, the first of a dozen supply runs under a mega-contract with Nasa.

SpaceX's unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky late on Sunday, putting the company on track to reach the space station tomorrow.

It was the second launch of a Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab by the California-based SpaceX company, but this time was no test flight. The spacecraft carried 450kg of science experiments and other precious gear, along with ice cream tucked in a freezer for the three station residents.

Science prizes - what are they for?

The Nobel prizes recognise outstanding achievements but, in a model reminiscent of the 18th century, science and technology prizes are increasingly being offered to encourage solutions to particular challenges

On Tuesday, the Nobel prize for physics was announced. Like all the Nobels, it will attract considerable interest, publicity and debate. But what are the roles of prizes – as rewards or as incentives – in science?

Because of the large amount of money involved, and the international remit, the Nobels have become hugely prestigious, if often controversial. Yet they are an oddity, founded on an individual's whim, with no consultation with governments or institutions, and resting, as the Guardian's Ian Sample puts it, "on the words of a secretive bunch of Scandinavians". Despite this, the Nobels are typical of the many prizes established within science that reward success, mark approval, consolidate a sense of community and, often, create public interest.

Although numerous, the very notion of prizes in science can be controversial. Making choices about winners and losers is bound to encourage dissent, but prizes also seem to undermine some of the basic assumptions about how science works. They stimulate competition in an endeavour that is often celebrated as collaborative. Sometimes they act to focus minds on particular problems, implying that serendipitous discovery through "blue skies" research is insufficient in meeting society's needs. Finally, offering money suggests that financial success through the market may be elusive, or that the joy of intellectual discovery is not necessarily sufficient reward. 

The way that prizes have been awarded and publicised can offer clues about the status of science through history. The Royal Society, which now offers a huge number of prizes and honours, first awarded its Copley Medal in 1731. The list of winners is wonderfully eclectic, and shows that in the early days the "most important scientific discovery" was often judged to relate to a practical problem. It shows a Society that was keen to demonstrate the public utility of science.

This was typical of the period. The Society of Arts, for example, offered premiums for specific challenges, such as improvements to machines or techniques in agriculture and navigation. Similarly, in 1796, the American Philosophical Society announced rewards for "the best performances, inventions, or improvements" in ships' pumps, calculating longitude by lunar distance, stoves, preventing decay in peach trees, studying native American vegetable diets, and street lighting. Famously, Napoleon offered a prize for the invention of a method of food preservation that would facilitate the feeding of his armies.

Such challenge prizes did not disappear, although, in the following centuries, the most high-profile were offered by individuals and companies and focused on exciting and popular areas of innovation like railways and flight. The X Prize, for commercial space flight, is clearly of the same lineage as the Orteig Prize for flying non-stop between Paris and New York.

Increasingly, though, as science began to offer careers rather than haphazard opportunities, institutional and governmental rewards for science recognised outstanding achievements, rather than attempting to push people and teams into working on particular problems. In part this resulted from the rise of the notion that science benefits mankind as the unpredictable (but nevertheless ultimately assured) result of undirected, curiosity-driven research.

Recently, however, we seem to have stepped back into the 18th century. Nesta, which has set up a Centre for Challenge Prizes with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, sets the tone in this overview of the history and recent rise of challenge prizes. It points to the findings of a recent report that "before 1991, 97% of the prize money offered took the form of recognition prizes for past achievements. Since then, 78% of new prize money has been offered for the future solution of problems."

Inducement prizes are proliferating, and the UK and the US governments are showing increasing interest. They are a particularly good way of getting attention from both public and STEM community, while being seen to be making positive noises about important problems or opportunities, all at a cost greatly lower than that of fully supporting and investing in the required R&D. The winners of the X-Prize put in far more money than they got back and, adding in the amount invested by other competitors for this or, for example, the Saltire Prize, we might see this is a bargain. But is this really how things work?

Nearly every time such prizes are mentioned, as if in proof of their effectiveness, the great granddaddy of them all – the so-called Longitude Prize – is alluded to. In 1714 the British government offered a great deal of money to anyone who could find a practical and more accurate means of finding longitude (i.e. east-west position) at sea. The sum specified, £20,000, was ultimately given to John Harrison for his sea watch. Bingo! Significant issue resolved as the result of a one-off inducement prize.

Well, yes and no. As I have written before, the story is more complicated and the Commissioners of Longitude and Admiralty had to be considerably more flexible in their approach. As far as the development of Harrison's clocks goes, long-term financial support, in the form of a series of smaller rewards between 1737 and 1764, was probably more important than the distant carrot of the ultimate reward. Likewise, it was subsequently necessary to invest in further product development and basic infrastructure to make the use of timekeepers and the (necessary and complementary) astronomical techniques a practical possibility.

If the Longitude Act of 1714 is to be an inspiration for current initiatives, then prize-givers should recall these facts and be in a position to offer a mixed funding model. Unless backed by grants, profitable companies or other institutions, researchers will not have time and leisure to develop new ideas. And those ideas are nothing without further investment. Without these other elements, challenge prizes will reward the already-successful, just as Nobels and other recognition prizes do.

Rebekah Higgitt is working on a project on the history of the Board of Longitude, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, at the University of Cambridge and National Maritime Museum

Germany - Lines of contention

By Gerrit Wiesmann Financial Times October 9, 2012 8:36 pm

Transmission creep: power lines in a field near Berlin. Germany must expand its electricity network if it is to meet Angela Merkel's target to abandon nuclear within 10 years

Peer Schulze holds his arm aloft to trace the path of the high-voltage power line that one day might cut through the green fringes of the town of Stadtilm in central Germany. “It’ll run over this barn, across that field and come within 100 metres of those houses,” says the 48-year-old construction engineer, a member of a local action group. “If, that is, the power line ever gets built.”

The 380-kilovolt transmission line, more than 100km long, is meant to join the hilly, wooded state of Thuringia, in the south-western corner of what was East Germany, with Bavaria. It is running five years late, and Mr Schulze and other local opponents have asked a federal court to rule whether construction permission, awarded in May, is legal. A decision in their favour would deal a blow to Angela Merkel and her ambitious green energy policy, which is being watched closely by governments and power companies around the world.

• 
  ALast year, after the meltdown at the Fukushima reactor in Japan, Ms Merkel declared that Germany would replace nuclear power with renewables by 2022 – a bold move that caught the attention of policy makers in other nations and sent shockwaves through the energy industry. The big bet on green energy thrilled environmentalists, who saw one of the world’s most technologically savvy economies setting a global standard on harnessing wind and solar power.
  

Germany adopted a nuclear phase-out policy more than a decade ago in response to long-held public opposition, but Ms Merkel postponed this on starting her second term in 2009, bowing to industry’s preference for a reliable, cheap energy source. Amid the outcry that followed the Fukushima disaster, however, she brought forward the closure of the last plants from 2036, and shut eight out of 17 in 2011. That first step alone re­moved about a 10th of installed electricity generating capacity.

Ms Merkel will want to show progress on her Energiewende, or “energy switch”, because it will be one of the central issues – along with the eurozone crisis – in next year’s federal elections. She has told voters repeatedly “there will be no energy switch without new networks” to pipe wind-generated electricity from the northern coast to the industrial south. But though they are in favour of the nuclear phase-out, they have not got the message. A poll for the environment ministry in August showed that while 87 per cent of those asked liked offshore wind parks, only 42 per cent could accept new power lines.