Spacecraft

Russell Brown's hilarious, acutely knowing "The Blue Tooth Virgin" takes its title from a screenplay an aspiring screenwriter, Sam (Austin Peck), has given to his friend David (Bryce Johnson), a successful magazine editor, to read. David finds the script terrible, a murky business about a troubled young woman with an urge to morph. David tries to let Sam down easy, but Sam, who did write a well-received TV series that ran one season, can't take criticism. Returning to his apartment, Sam is further dismayed to discover that his wife (Lauren Stamile)

The long-lived rover Spirit is stuck in the sand on Mars, and controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge are scrambling to find a way to extricate the vehicle before it becomes entombed on the Red Planet. "This is quite serious," said JPL's John Callas, the project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. "Spirit is in a very difficult situation. We are proceeding methodically and cautiously. It may be weeks before we try moving Spirit again."

Entrepreneur Richard Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hoped would be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis as soon as next year. Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is charging $200,000 for a short trip into space, said his SpaceShipTwo would start test flights this year.

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.

A souped-up aircraft that would help boost well-heeled thrill seekers into the outer atmosphere was unveiled Monday, lifting the prospects for travelers to one day fly in a commercial spaceliner. After keeping the project shrouded in secrecy for more than three years, project developers dropped the curtain on the White Knight Two, an odd-looking aircraft with two airplane bodies joined at the wings and resembling a flying catamaran.

NASA rolled out its next-generation space capsule here Wednesday, revealing a bulbous module that is scheduled to carry humans back to the moon in 2020 and eventually onward to Mars. Unlike the space-plane shape of the shuttles, the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle looks strikingly similar to the old Apollo space capsule that carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon and back in 1969, with Armstrong and Aldrin becoming the first humans to walk on the lunar surface.

The death watch is on for NASA's Phoenix lander, the first spacecraft to sample water on another planet. Buffeted by dust storms and chilled by temperatures as low as minus-141 degrees Fahrenheit from the impending arrival of the Martian winter, Phoenix is clinging to life, but barely, NASA officials said Friday. "We knew this was coming," said project manager Barry Goldstein. "It's bittersweet." Days earlier, Phoenix fell silent, going into safe mode to save battery power.

After hearing nothing from the Phoenix spacecraft in more than a week, NASA officials on Monday declared an end to the nearly six-month mission at Mars' north pole, the first to touch and taste the water on an alien planet. Phoenix sent its last message on Nov. 2 before a lack of power caused it to go to sleep -- permanently, it now appears.

For half a century, life in Downey revolved around the 167-acre NASA site in the middle of town. It was there, in airplane hangars erected on former bean fields, that the city's men and women designed and built the spaceships that took the first Americans to the moon. Then came 1999, when Boeing, which was operating the site at the time, moved its operations out of town.

India's space agency said an orbiting capsule had returned to Earth, a major step toward the development of a manned space program. The capsule was launched Jan. 10, 60 miles north of the city of Chennai. It splashed down in the Bay of Bengal on Sunday, and the space agency reported the arrival Monday.