Built by the National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL) of Tokyo, Japan, the SST prototype flew all of 10 seconds, then went into a wild spiral before crashing into the ground. The device was slated to fly for some 12 minutes, rocketing to high altitude, then parachute to the ground.

The unpiloted, rocket-boosted device was test fired from a remote launch range in South Australia.

The NAL of Tokyo, Japan conducted the flight experiment under cooperative agreement with the Australian government. The sub-scale plane is a mini-version of a proposed 300-seat SST that incorporates cutting-edge technology. The Japanese group has been hard a work on the supersonic plane effort since the mid-1990s.

A team of experts has begun analyzing cause of the multi-million dollar failure.

NAL officials plan a trio of follow-on scale model flights this year into 2003 from the Woomera rocket range, one of the largest test areas in the world.

Got any space science and human spaceflight news and tidbits? Send them to Leonard David .

The Russian Northern Fleet's nuclear-powered submarine Ryazan, commanded by Capt. Tagir Kayaev, launched a Demonstrator-2 spacecraft from beneath the surface of the water, Capt. Igor Dygalo, head of the Russian Navy's press service, told Interfax Friday.

The spacecraft, which has an inflatable braking system is intended to deliver cargo from space orbit and is capable of landing on other planets.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The White House has formally nominated Frederick Gregory, a former space shuttle commander, for the No. 2 job at NASA.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe said Thursday that the White House has officially presented Gregory's nomination to the Senate, to serve as deputy administrator. If confirmed by the Senate, Gregory will report directly to O'Keefe and handle day-to-day operations of the space agency.

Gregory, 61, has served as NASA's space flight chief since December. He previously headed NASA's safety office and was a three-time space flier.

A former Air Force combat pilot, Gregory was selected as an astronaut in 1978.

In March, the White House withdrew its nomination of Marine Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden for the deputy administrator position because of the desire to keep him in his military job during the war against terrorism. Bolden is also a former shuttle commander.

"When you are wearing one of these suits you cannot hear anything more than a few feet away, you cannot smell anything outside the suit, you cannot touch anything except through thick ski gloves. Communication over any distance must be done by suit radio, and the wearers are so enclosed that an electrical fan system is required to supply the user with air."

"The Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission is the best opportunity for exploration of these objects for decades, if not centuries," said Friedman. "If the Pluto mission is delayed, costs will rise and other missions, including the Europa orbiter, will also be delayed."

With the Cassini spacecraft due to arrive at Saturn in 2004, NASA is gearing up for a public relations effort designed to bring the ringed planet -- the agency has decided it is "the most beautiful planet of all" -- into more back yards. Astronomers with reasonable knowledge of the planet and the mission, and access to a telescope, are invited to apply to be ambassadors of a sort in the Saturn Observation Campaign.

Selected data will simultaneously become available to the public. The two agencies also this week made public the mission's research-quality 30-meter (98-foot) resolution topographic data for the entire continental United States.

Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data are being processed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., into research-quality digital-elevation models one continent at a time. When each continent is completed, the data will be sent to NIMA for additional finishing and then to the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation Systems Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D., for final archiving and distribution.

From Robert to Jim Banke: Did the recovery of the Liberty Bell Seven determine what caused the hatch to blow?

Jim Banke replies: The short answer is no.

Pad leader Guenter Wendt has long theorized that because that panel fell off, the plunger inside was warmed by the heat of the capsule's skin from re-entry. When it splashed down, the seawater cooled the device and that change in temperature caused the hardware to shrink enough where the slight movement mechanically triggered the hatch release circuit.

That's the best theory I've heard and, again, the recovery did nothing to dispute that idea.

The universe's age is generally put at between 12 billion and 15 billion years, depending on who does the figuring. But news today from Europe suggests that accuracy might not even be found within those bounds.

Astronomers peering at a distant object that is thought to be 13.5 billion years old say it contains way too much iron, implying that the universe may be older than current theory predicts. The object, a very bright galaxy called a quasar, produces X-rays when its central black hole gobbles matter. Using the XMM-Newton satellite, the European Space Agency's Norbert Schartel and colleagues studied the X-rays and learned the quasar, APM 8279+5255, contains concentrations of iron three times higher than in our solar system.

Thing is, iron is forged in exploding stars and thought to build over time. Our solar system, which is only about 5 billion years old, ought to have the higher concentrations, since it was created out of material that had gone through more stellar life cycles.

What's going on? Could be that the way astronomers measure the age and distance of objects -- a complex thing called redshift -- is all wrong, says Fred Jansen, an XMM-Newton scientist. Or, Jansen said, somewhere in the early universe there might be undiscovered iron factories producing the metal by unknown physical means. "This is the less likely solution in my opinion," he said. A paper on the work is published in the July 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A Tulsa-based company has been ordered to pay more than $300,000 in fines and restitution for lying about the welding jobs it did on three tiny parts it supplied for the International Space Station and a government spy plane.

Copeland Manufacturing Corp. admitted it lied about the certification of two titanium fittings it fixed for a Tier II Plus Global Hawk unmanned aircraft. It also said an aluminum battery guide for the ISS had been falsely certified. A grand jury indictment in April 2000 held that the parts were repaired with unapproved welds. In a previous plea, criminal charges against the company were dropped. A federal judge issued the financial penalty yesterday.

The first space missions were highly focused: Leave Earth; orbit the planet. Then projects became complex: Take men to the Moon; land a robot on Mars and send pictures back. Lately, NASA has gone back to its roots in creating highly specialized, somewhat low-cost missions for devoted tasks, including two new satellites approved yesterday.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will measure atmospheric carbon dioxide around the globe in an effort to better understand whether and how humans contribute to global warming. Aquarius will provide the first-ever global maps of salt concentration on the ocean surface, a key to understanding the oceans' capacity to store and transport heat, which in turn affects Earth’s climate and the water cycle.

The $175 missions, part of NASA's Pathfinder small-satellite program, were selected from 18 proposals and will go into full planning about 9 months from now. No launch dates were announced.

July 9, 2002

According to the Russian Interfax news agency, the Russian Defense Ministry is quickly developing the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region.

"The president has instructed us to transfer all launches from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to Plesetsk," Deputy Defense Minister and Head of Construction and Troops Quartering Alexander Kosovan told journalists in Moscow on Tuesday. All rockets, including heavy Angara rockets, but not including manned spaceships, will be launched from Plesetsk, the general said.

A prototype for an innovative NASA air-breathing rocket engine reached a major milestone last week, three months earlier than originally planned. Dubbed "ARGO" by its design team, the engine is named for the mythological Greek ship that bore Jason and the Argonauts on their epic voyage of discovery.

ARGO"s design team completed its first major engine systems requirements review -- an exhaustive examination of the engine's design and performance parameters in record time. The engine's unique engine design allows it to function as a rocket, ramjet and scramjet. Key among its technical advantages: the ability to use air as an oxidizer. Compared to conventionally powered rocket vehicles, this technology will significantly reduce vehicle weight by eliminating a significant amount of its required on-board oxidizer.

The rocket is the offspring of a veritable orgy of aerospace stalwarts: the Rocketdyne Propulsion & Power business of The Boeing Co., the Pratt & Whitney space propulsion business unit of United Technologies Corp. and the Aerojet missile and space propulsion business unit of GenCorp, Inc. Keep the cigars handy, fellas. Looks like you've got a winner on your hands.

The Boeing communications satellite, UHF Follow-On (UFO) F-2, launched nine years ago and formerly used as an in-orbit spare, has a new mission providing critical military communications capacity for U.S. forces in Operation Enduring Freedom.

The spacecraft is the oldest active UFO satellite built by Boeing Space and Communications for the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego. Launched in September 1993 and stationed over Africa, UFO F-2 was an on-orbit spare for the UFO constellation. It now provides nine additional channels of vital voice and data communications capacity to U.S. forces in the Afghanistan region.

For a stretch of 32 months back in the mid-1990s, a fast-spinning pulsar that had been regularly emitting strong pulses of X-rays went off astronomers' radar. For years, they assumed the pulsar, a dense remnant of a supernova explosion that emits X-rays when it feeds off a companion star, had stopped eating.

New analysis of old data shows that instead, the pulsar was simply outshone by a black hole that happened to be in the same part of the sky and had become more active during the period, NASA astrophysicist Colleen Wilson-Hodge told SPACE.com. Wilson-Hodge and her colleagues used data collected by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. They developed a new technique to distinguish the signals of the more massive black hole, called Cygnus X-1, and the pulsar, named EXO 2030+375. The results were reported in the May 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal and announced by NASA today.

Next thing you know, they'll adopt the euro. OK, maybe not, but Britain has agreed to fork over $152 million (that's about 155 million euros) in the next decade in return for access to the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) heavy-duty celestial-gazing hardware.

According to the ESO website, "UK astronomers will now be able to use the four 8.2-metre and several 1.8-metre telescopes that comprise the Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility located at the Paranal Observatory in the northern part of the Atacama desert in Chile, as well as two 4-m class telescopes and several smaller ones at the ESO La Silla Observatory further south. The UK will also benefit from increased involvement in the design and construction of the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), a network of 64 twelve-metre telescopes also sited in Chile, and play a defining role in ESO's 100-metre Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL)."

The news from the Kennedy Space Center is that NASA managers will not make any decisions on when the next shuttle will fly until after inspections are complete on Endeavour. Its three main engines have to be removed before the inspections can begin on the propulsion system plumbing and that isn't expected to happen until later this week, with inspections probably beginning on Friday, said KSC spokesman George Diller. Diller also said that inspections are finished on Columbia and the final tally is there were three cracks found on the flow liners, similar in size and scope to those found inside Atlantis and Discovery.

Meanwhile, workers are continuing to prepare each of the shuttles for their next flights as best they can pending the results of the crack analysis and there still is strong belief at least one shuttle mission will fly in August. Which one remains the question.