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Okay, that was one of the strangest sendoffs in launch history. Not only did space tourist and Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté keep putting on his red clown nose, the whole crew periodically broke into the cheesy pop song “Mammy Blue” as they were getting ready to board their Soyuz rocket for a ride to the International Space Station. Obviously some kind of inside joke.

At some point during his 10 days on the station, Laliberté has said he intends to tickle the professional astronauts while they’re asleep. And he’s carrying up eight more clown noses with him. The Canadian billionaire is also a serious poker player, so my recommendation to the crew is that they not get in a game unless they want to spend the rest of their time in orbit dressed like clowns. (Video: Russia Today)

A space fuel depot, with sunshade for temperature control. (ULA)

The debate over what kind of rocket to use for NASA’s exploration program has become so clouded by politics and salesmanship that it’s hard for outsiders to tell any more which approach would be best, or even if it’s still possible to send people beyond Earth orbit. The Augustine commission says it isn’t, at least not without more money. Meanwhile, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin continues (as in this recent Congressional testimony) to defend the agency’s proposed Ares launchers against all criticisms.

Based on the presentations at a recent workshop on advanced Earth-to-orbit concepts, it doesn’t appear that anyone has cracked the basic, decades-old problem of space economics: It still costs thousands of dollars per pound to deliver stuff to orbit, whether that stuff is astronauts, weather satellites or water. The only agreed way to bring down launch costs—and this applies to today’s chemical rockets as well as tomorrow’s space elevators—is to increase the traffic rates.

NASA’s current plan, though, is to build large, expensive rockets that would seldom be used—just as it did with the Saturn V in the 1960s.

Another approach, championed most recently in a series of papers posted by United Launch Alliance (the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that builds and operates Delta and Atlas rockets), would be to use a lot of launchers to carry the tons of supplies required for a lunar mission—75 percent of which is fuel—to orbit. The fuel would be stored in orbital propellant depots, a scheme that ULA’s mission architects claim would allow moon landings by 2018 without busting the budget.

Orbital gas stations are hardly a new idea. But ULA says it has found a way to make them simple and relatively cheap in the near term, by adapting existing upper stages. If true, it would be quite an advance. The Augustine commission was high on the concept of orbital refueling, at least in principle:

All of the [launch] options would benefit from the development of in-space refueling, and the smaller rockets would benefit most of all.  The potential government-guaranteed market for fuel in low-Earth orbit would create a stimulus to the commercial launch industry.

Griffin, though, is skeptical. In his Congressional testimony he said:

An architectural approach based upon the use of numerous smaller vehicles to stock a fuel depot is inevitably more expensive than putting the necessary payload up in larger pieces.  Further, a fuel depot requires a presently non‐existent technology—the ability to maintain cryogenic fuels in the necessary thermodynamic state for very long periods in space.  This technology is a holy grail of deep‐space exploration, because it is necessary for both chemical‐ and nuclear‐powered upper stages.  To embrace an architecture based upon a non‐existent technology at the very beginning of beyond‐LEO operations is unwise.

Who’s right? Who knows? Griffin often criticizes engineering “solutions” based on vague promises. “Your vugraphs will always beat my hardware,” he’s fond of saying. Fair enough. But ULA’s Deltas and Atlases have launched 850 payloads into space in the past half century, while the Ares V is still just a vugraph.

If the nation’s most experienced launch company steps forward with a near-term concept that could potentially change the economics of spaceflight, why wouldn’t we at least pay for a couple of test flights to see if it works? The ULA authors say they could have a proof-of-concept depot ready to fly by 2011.

Old Wernher the rocket scientist, if he were alive, would want one of these babies on holiday. It’s a water-powered jet pack conceived in Canada by JetLev and licensed to German company MS Watersports GmbH, and it appears to address at least two major problems of jet packs: If the engine quits, you fall into water—notice that most of these guys aren’t even wearing a helmet—and it keeps foolish humans from going any higher than about 28 feet before the yellow feeder tube comes out of the lake, interrupting the water source. That tube would, theoretically, keep those same humans from flying over land, but that doesn’t mean someone someday won’t cross the beach and become a flying grocery cart.

The military might not find much use for it in Afghanistan, so don’t expect to see any units tested at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. But the company hopes later versions will lift a thousand pounds, and could offer beach patrol, search-and-rescue, bridge inspection/maintenance, harbor security, and maybe even anti-piracy missions.

For now, rich thrill seekers will play with it. The company plans to make it available before the end of September for only 99,000 Euros. To convert to dollars, tack on another thirty grand.

These will cost you $50,000 per lens.

Normally, the folks at Profiles in History, based outside Los Angeles, auction off Hollywood memorabilia. On October 8-9, they’ll sell what they’re billing as “the single most important flight-worn aviation artifact to ever be offered at public auction”—the goggles worn by Amelia Earhart during her 1932 solo crossing of the Atlantic. The auctioneers expect the glasses to go for somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000.

Earhart’s 1932 flight was a vindication of sorts. This time she made the Atlantic crossing alone, not as some other pilot’s passenger. About the goggles, she wrote to aerial cinematographer Ray Fernstrom, “That particular pair are rather historic.  Also they have grown accustomed to me, and cling around my unconventional nose more effectively than new ones.”

Armstrong (right) wearing his $10,000 cap in 1969.

The October auction includes another bit of headgear from a famous pilot—a cap worn by Neil Armstrong during his quarantine on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet following his return from the moon in July 1969. That piece of history is expected to go for only about $10,000. Maybe because there are two others just like it?

It’s the biggest open secret in the space community: the Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will not be leaving for the Red Planet this year, as scheduled, and will have to wait for 2011 when the orbits of Earth and Mars synch up again.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos, which is responsible for the engineering of the project, and the Russian Academy of Sciences, responsible for the science packages on board, haven’t gone public, but Marsdaily.com, the Planetary Society, and the BBC are a few of the horses out of the barn ahead of the official announcement. Russianspaceweb.com is awaiting the official announcement before going public, but has been predicting this delay for some time.

A model of the Phobos-Grunt base at the 2007 Paris Air Show. (Photo: Wikibob http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wikibob)

The Planetary Society was to have sent a package called LIFE, or Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, to Mars aboard the craft, which will eventually land on the Mars moon Phobos, collect a sample of soil (the Russian word is “grunt”), and return it to Earth. LIFE was to be a sealed container of Earth’s microbes that would test the theory of transpermia, that life can survive interplanetary and intergalactic spaceflight while sealed in a (simulated) space rock.

The Chinese are surely disappointed as well, as they planned to fly Yinghuo-1, a tiny satellite that Phobos-Grunt would have released into Mars orbit. That satellite would have measured the Martian ionosphere and magnetic field, and taken medium-resolution pictures of the Martian surface, among other studies.

Now, in a flashback to Soviet days, the only ones left to announce the delay are the Russians themselves.