Space Programs

Nearly four decades after astronaut Neil Armstrong planted his boot on the surface of the moon, the U.S. is about to take the first small step toward colonizing Earth's tag-along satellite. On Wednesday, NASA is scheduled to launch a robotic mission aimed at finding the best site for Earth's first off-world colony, the centuries-old dream of science fiction writers and utopians.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, the rocket engine manufacturing business in the San Fernando Valley that helped pioneer space exploration in the 1960s, is officially up for sale by its parent company. With headquarters in Canoga Park, Rocketdyne builds rocket engines at a sprawling 47-acre facility near the Westfield Topanga shopping mall. The company is perhaps best known as the maker of the space shuttles' main rocket engines. But it also develops engines for military rockets and missiles.

In his native South Africa, science whiz Elon Musk struck his first business deal when he made $500 selling the code for a "Space Invaders"-style video game he invented. He was 12. It took only another decade or so for him to make some real money: By age 23 Musk had his first significant company in Web software maker Zip2. He banked $22 million when he sold it in 1999 to Compaq Computer. And last year, he pocketed about $150 million in EBay Inc.

Kaushik began shoplifting gum balls at age 7 and eventually graduated to carbonated beverages, books, expensive name-brand deodorant and hair gel, usually from high-end malls. He didn't need to swipe the merchandise; his family was comfortably middle class. But Kaushik, now 28, relished the adrenaline rush and his ability to look calm as his heart raced. "It's totally the thrill, the sense of power of hoodwinking the security," said the New Delhi media employee, who would give only his first name, adding that he had quit stealing six years ago. "I had no moral dilemma, only concern over the legal ramifications if I got caught.

Adolf Thiel, an Austrian-born scientist who helped the United States guide some of its earliest rockets into space, died June 2 in Los Angeles. He was 86. During his three decades with TRW Inc.'s space division in Redondo Beach, Thiel directed the development of the Thor ballistic missile, still the basis for the rockets used today to launch NASA and commercial satellites into space.

Cal State Northridge has been awarded a $2-million NASA grant that will give minority students an opportunity to study how to prevent failures in electronic equipment used in space programs, officials said Friday. The four-year research grant is one of the most important awarded to the school in recent years, said Bezad Bavarian, a professor in the university's department of manufacturing systems, engineering and management and the project's principal investigator.

Allen F. Donovan, 80, nationally lauded engineering consultant on the U.S. space program. A native of Onondaga, N.Y., he earned his degrees in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan. Donovan worked for the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo from its inception in 1960 until his retirement as senior vice president in 1978. The organization provides engineering support for the Air Force and U.S. space programs.

After a 17-year hiatus between lunar missions, Japan launched an unmanned orbiter today that carries the hopes of a nation looking to claim its place as a serious space power. Taking advantage of a lull in rainy weather, the Kaguya orbiter lifted off from Tanegashima island in southern Japan, propelled by a domestically built H-2A solid-fuel rocket.

If the U.S. goes forward with a bold scheme to build a permanent base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars, an economic afterburner could kick in for Southern California's aerospace industry. With the world's largest concentration of space firms, the Southland probably would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of any effort by the Bush administration to explore the moon and the Red Planet, analysts and economists said Friday.

The character of space exploration is changing dramatically as nations with major programs grapple with rising costs and shrinking budgets. And it seems likely that some past alliances will fall apart and the military will play an expanding role in the use of space, experts from around the world said here this week. For example, the Soviet Union has severely curtailed its space program, and Europeans are growing increasingly uneasy with their cooperative ventures with the United States.

As NASA retreats from an ambitious human spaceflight program for the foreseeable future, foreign countries are moving ahead with their own multibillion-dollar plans to go to the moon, build space stations and even take the long voyage to Mars. Although most of the world still lags far behind the United States in space technology and engineering know-how, other nations are engaging in a new space race and building their own space research centers, rockets, satellites and lunar rovers.

L.A.'s water visionary Re "Mulholland's Los Angeles," Editorial, July 10 Though he was a poor geologist (the St. Francis Dam disaster), William Mulholland's environmental legacy is remarkably positive. His 220-mile-long aqueduct is an engineering masterpiece, entirely gravity-fed. It produces hydroelectric power. Contrast this with the California State Water Project of the1970s, which expends more energy than any single operation in California to pump water over the Tehachapi Mountains.

I began covering the space shuttle project in 1972, soon after President Nixon authorized it. I had recently joined this newspaper as a science writer. And the country was enthusiastic about the idea of a reusable spacecraft, which was expected to be sturdy, economical and reliable. The shuttle turned out to be neither economical nor sturdy, and its reliability has been wobbly. But as I watched the shuttle Atlantis blast off into space on what will be the 135th and final space shuttle mission, I found myself feeling a bit nostalgic.

Reporting from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Atlantis lifted off Friday morning, shooting straight into a brightening sky on a 12-day mission that marks the end of the nation's three-decade space shuttle program. There was a brief hold in the countdown at 31 seconds because of a glitch seemingly involving a piece of retractable equipment. As millions of onlookers on the ground and via television held their breaths, officials checked and reported that the equipment had, indeed, been moved.

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

Spare parts were collecting dust in warehouses in Bell, Downey and Palmdale when the urgent call came from NASA: the nation needed another space shuttle. It was the unusual beginning of the orbiter Endeavour, which will streak across the California coastline at hypersonic velocity one last time Wednesday, carrying its six astronauts and two decades of the nation's human space flight history. When it was christened in Palmdale in 1991, it was the newest and most capable of the fleet, fawned over by astronauts for its advanced flight electronics, sinuous skins and, eventually, the first toilet that actually worked.

Despite the Columbia disaster, NASA officials are forging ahead with plans to upgrade the shuttle fleet to keep it flying until at least 2015 and possibly several years longer, a senior space agency official said Monday. Michael C.

In a cavernous structure at NASA's Plum Brook Station near Lake Erie, a concrete chamber five stories high rises from the ground. Its walls are 2 feet thick to withstand the blast of powerful gas-operated horns strong enough to destroy human organs. The $150-million facility was built to contain the next-generation manned spacecraft for the Constellation program, NASA's project to send humans back to the moon. It is the largest acoustic test chamber in the world, created to buffet the spacecraft with intense sound waves, simulating the stresses of launch.

NASA heads into 2010 with the bittersweet assignment of retiring the space shuttle after nearly three decades. But the agency also plans to launch three new satellites aimed at better understanding the sun and Earth's climate and oceans. Two satellites will examine Earth -- specifically, the concentration of salt in the world's oceans and the presence of aerosols, or minute particles, such as dust or ash, in the atmosphere. A third satellite mission will study the sun and its effect on space weather, including solar flares that can disrupt communication on Earth.