Space Travel

First there was Google Earth. Now its co-founder wants to take on the universe. Sergey Brin, the 34-year-old president of technology for the search-engine company, has put down a $5-million deposit for a seat aboard a Russian spacecraft, tourism company Space Adventures said Wednesday. With a launch date set for 2011, Brin will join an exclusive club of the super-rich who have used their fortunes for the ultimate in adventure travel.

'In a sense, right here in the backyard of the L.A. Times, you have what some of us say is the center of the universe," says Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. "We have 19 spacecraft across the solar system right now. For the past decade, our country has had a permanent presence on Mars.

Virgin Galactic, billionaire Richard Branson's space travel venture, plans to order five more spaceships and aims to turn a profit within five years of its commercial launch in 2010, a company official said this week. Prospective space travelers have so far placed deposits totaling more than $31 million for tickets that cost $200,000 each and would give them five minutes in space, said Alex Tai, the company's group director.

Peter Staudhammer, a former USC executive who helped design the engine that landed astronauts on the surface of the moon, died Monday at his home in La Quinta from complications of cancer. He was 73. He served as vice president and chief technical officer for former military giant TRW before becoming chief operating officer of the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC.

A Soyuz craft carrying the international space station's first female commander, American Peggy Whitson, veteran Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Malaysia's first space traveler, Sheik Muszaphar Shukor, docked at the orbital outpost after a two-day trip from Russia's launch facility in Kazakhstan.

Since Robert Goddard launched a 10-foot rocket from a New England farm more than 80 years ago, the basic principles of space travel haven't changed much. Still required: a violent combustion of fuel and oxygen to propel the vehicle. Unless, maybe, you have a laser and a couple of mirrors. Young K.

Germs sent into orbit on the space shuttle last year came back to Earth three times more virulent, a finding that could have major implications for astronauts on the International Space Station or on proposed voyages to the moon and Mars.

Lunar exploration has a corporate benefactor: Google Inc. The Internet search giant hopes to fuel a new technological revolution by sponsoring the Google Lunar X Prize, which would award as much as $30 million in prizes for landing unmanned rovers on the moon and having them perform certain tasks. Before Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, its founders cautioned that they were not running "a conventional company."

European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co. unveiled a model of a jet designed to take tourists into space, rocketing paying passengers to weightlessness at more than 62 miles above the Earth. EADS said it hoped that the space jet -- which looks much like a conventional aircraft although it is outfitted with rocket engines -- would be operational by next year, with the first flight scheduled for 2012.

Cremated remains of actor James Doohan, who portrayed engineer Scotty on "Star Trek," and of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper soared into suborbital space Saturday aboard a rocket. It was the first successful launch from Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert. Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan fired the rocket carrying small amounts of their husbands' ashes, and those of about 200 other people.