When Paul Allen and company discussed their vision for a new kind of private space launch on Tuesday, they made a few nods to an audience member who knows something about the subject: Former Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi, the only private citizen to fly in space twice.

While Allen said that he’s planning to wait some time before journeying beyond Earth himself—even on one of his own Stratolaunch vehicles—Simonyi said he’s actually lobbied the Microsoft co-founder to take the leap.

“I’m urging him to take weightless flights,” through parabolic airplane trips that allow passengers to briefly experience zero-gravity. “Do it step by step, that’s how I did it.”

Seats on a spaceflight when Simonyi went were being quoted in the neighborhood of $25 million-$35 million, but the cost now has risen to above $60 million. Asked if he’d fly on a launch from Allen’s new company once it gets up to speed with possible human crews, Simonyi said he’d be game “if my wife agrees and if the price is right.”

“I think it’s very audacious. I think it’s doable,” Simonyi said of Allen’s project. “The people are all within their sphere of competence, and integrating it together, I think, will be a successful project.”

“It’s a whole different (thing) than what I’ve been flying on, which was a legacy vehicle that had practically 50 years of history. It was a second-generation for the soviets, the Soyuz,” he said. “So this is much more advanced, and the training requirements will be minimal compared to the training that I had to go through.”

So, of course it has to be asked: What’s it like to be in space? “It’s an amazing thing,” Simonyi said.

“What was it the first time that one flew on an aircraft, and looking at the fields and the houses and the city from the air? It’s a whole different experience. And space is not unlike that. It’s just that it’s like a super wide-angle lens, and you see so much.

“Things change very fast. Daytime is only 45 minutes, and then you see a fantastic sunrise or sunset, which itself plays out 16 times faster than on Earth because you are doing 16 orbits a day.

“You know, one minute you are over Australia and 15 minutes later you are on the West Coast. You make radio contact from amateur radio, and soon you are talking to somebody—first you are talking to Seattle, and when you finish the conversation, you are in Florida. It’s just amazing.”

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[Corrected 4/26/11] John Fisher, CEO of San Francisco-based CrowdOptic, has led a $1 million Series A funding round for the company, according to a report today from Dow Jones VentureWire. CrowdOptic is developing software for smartphones that shows users information about moving objects tracked with the phones’ cameras. CrowdOptic also said yesterday that it will work with San Francisco-based Moon Express, which is developing a robotic lunar lander as part of Google Lunar X Prize competition, to provide spectators with augmented-reality smartphone views of the craft’s launch. “Our system senses when a plurality of cell phone users focus on moving objects (as a function of GPS/Compass heading) thereby establishing triangulation,” Fisher tells Xconomy. “The more users that focus the more accurate our system.”

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A pretty big merger in defense tech this morning. Waltham, MA-based Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) announced it has agreed to acquire Sunnyvale, CA-based Applied Signal Technology (NASDAQ: APSG) for $38 per share—about $490 million in cash. The deal is slated to close in the first quarter of 2011, and is not expected to have a material effect on Raytheon’s earnings.

Defense contractor Raytheon made the acquisition to complement its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies, said CEO and chairman William Swanson, in a statement.

Applied Signal, which makes communications, analytics software, and cyberwarfare technologies primarily for government agencies, will be integrated into Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems business unit. Advanced sensor systems will be a particular area of interest for the two companies as they move forward together.

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Kent, WA-based LaserMotive has won $900,000 in a NASA competition to build a small prototype device that one day could help lead to a commercial “space elevator,” a cable that could transport cargo to and from outer space. The news was reported by the New York Times and other outlets. LaserMotive, a laser power-beaming company, is led by Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, who both also work with Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. The power-beaming project and competition was reported by TechFlash earlier today.

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Do you ever sit down with a friend who wants to show you all their latest vacation pictures? (Maybe not as much since photo-sharing sites took off.) Well, yesterday’s kickoff of the Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering was just like that—if your friend were Charles Simonyi, a software billionaire, showing you videos from a $35 million vacation in space.

Simonyi, the father of Microsoft Word and Excel, and now head of Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software, regaled the crowd of a couple hundred students, faculty, and guests with stories and videos from his second trip to space last March. Simonyi rode a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), docked and spent some time there, and returned safely to Earth, looking none the worse for wear. He is an outspoken proponent of space tourism, and he pointed out that Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, is currently making his way aboard the space station as “the first clown in space” (and the seventh space tourist ever).

Just a few interesting tidbits that stood out to me:

—Seattle and Mercer Island look very pretty from space. “You can’t see the Great Wall or the Pyramids, but you can see Sea-Tac,” Simonyi said. You can also see clouds, lightning storms, and jet contrails, the latter especially over North America. Watching the sunrise from orbit is spectacular.

—The instruments on the spacecraft look refreshingly antique. You think they’d be slick and modern-looking, but the inside of the Soyuz and space station look like they’re out of a 1970s sci-fi movie. In fact, some instruments date back to 19th century designs (“tried and true”), and software on the rocket runs on an Intel 386 processor from the ’80s. “Older chips are more resistant to radiation,” Simonyi explained.

—Bodily functions are funny in space. You wear a lightly applied tourniquet to keep blood flowing in your legs; you get a puffy face from lack of circulation; the toilet is an engineering marvel … Next Page »

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If President Obama ever has a question about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, he can just pick up his Presidential Blackberry and call or e-mail Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Of course, the President of the United States could just as easily call Richard A. Muller—the U.C. Berkeley professor who literally wrote the book on Physics for Future Presidents. He also was a leading member of the Berkeley team that theorized how an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Now Xconomy has tapped Muller and his talent for eye-opening explanations as the featured speaker at our San Diego premiere event. We are hosting the MacArthur “genius” award-winning physicist as the inaugural speaker for our Xconomy Forums here, to be held Monday at 4 p.m. at UCSD’s Institute of the Americas Complex. If you’re interested in attending, you can register here.

The book Physics for Future Presidents grew out of Muller’s popular class for non-science majors at Cal—which was voted “The Best Class at Berkeley” last year in a readers’ poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Muller’s book and lectures have gained renown for explaining the important science underlying terrorism, energy, electric cars, nukes, space, and global warming—and for empowering our electorate with a better understanding of science and technology.

Please join us Monday afternoon to hear this engaging presentation by one of the foremost speakers on science and technology. I hope to see you there.

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Paul Allen just got a new addition to his Flying Heritage Collection of vintage aircraft. Yesterday, the Paine Field facility in Everett, WA, held a media event in which the museum hoisted a full-scale replica of SpaceShipOne to the ceiling. Just thought Xconomy readers would be interested to see these photos (courtesy of Jennifer Bragg and Adrian Hunt).

SpaceShipOne was funded by Allen and received the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 as the first low-cost, civilian, manned spacecraft launched into suborbital flight (to an altitude of around 100 kilometers). The craft, and its replica, were built by Mojave Aerospace Ventures and Scaled Composites. The original ship is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Back in August, Luke took a tour of the Everett hangar facility, which opened to the public last June. It looks like the SpaceShipOne replica will feel right at home, as it is placed near the collection’s ME-163, the world’s first operational rocket-propelled aircraft—an inspiration to the design team of SpaceShipOne.

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San Diego defense contractor SAIC said today NASA has awarded the company a technology services contract to support its Constellation program at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The company, also known as Science Applications International Corp., said the contract could be worth as much as $69 million over the next five years if all options are exercised. The Constellation program, which intends to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, calls for developing technologies needed to open the lunar frontier.

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Less than two weeks after the death of its founder, Jim Benson, San Diego-based SpaceDev (OTCBB: SPDV) has announced that it’s inked a deal to be acquired by a privately held Nevada firm, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), for $38 million in cash.

SpaceDev blasted into the headlines in 2004, when its hybrid rocket engine technology helped Burt Rutan and his SpaceShipOne—the first commercial reusable manned spacecraft—win the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. The company has also produced Internet-controlled microsatellites, actuators for the Mars rover, and a host of other space technologies. SNC, which after certain deductions will pay between $0.68 and $0.72 per share for the firm, a premium of 42 percent to 50 percent over the stock’s price a month ago, plans to form an integrated space technologies unit by combining its subsidiary, MicroSat Systems, and its other space operations with SpaceDev. (SNC also has operations in electronics, avionics, communications, and other industries.)

SpaceDev shareholders must approve the acquisition, and are expected to vote on it in December. A group of SpaceDev officers and principal shareholders, who together own about 37 percent of the company’s common stock, have already agreed to the transaction.

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Space exploration doesn’t captivate the public imagination like it once did—and small wonder, considering that the Space Shuttle is limited to endless circles in low-earth orbit, a mere 250 miles up. So now the small group of people who have had the privilege of looking down on Earth are doing something about it. They are going on a barnstorming tour of Washington state to whip up excitement among schoolchildren about seeking discoveries beyond this planet’s atmosphere.

The Association of Space Explorers started its 21st Planetary Congress yesterday at the Sheraton in downtown Seattle, marking only the third time the group has met in the U.S. The group includes 320 astronauts and cosmonauts from 32 countries who have been on missions in space. About 60 of them will tell stories about the wonders of space to an estimated 50,000 children in grades K-12 across the state tomorrow. To give their talks some added oomph, they won’t just talk about the Apollo glory days, but plan to grab the kids’ attention with an issue currently on a lot of minds—global climate change.

“It’s an eye-opening experience to see the parts of the atmosphere of the earth that are about the width of your little finger,” says John Fabian, the co-president of the space exploration group, and an astronaut who flew on the shuttles Challenger and Discovery in the mid-’80s. “It’s fragile, and we need to protect it.”

Fabian, 69, a resident of Port Ludlow, WA, is leading the charge. He’s one of seven Washington residents who have flown in space. The local contingent also includes shuttle astronauts Bonnie Dunbar, president of the Museum of Flight, George (Pinky) Nelson, John O. Creighton, Wendy Lawrence, and Apollo astronauts Bill Anders and Richard Gordon.

I must say they have their work cut out. My most vivid memory of the U.S. space program is the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in 1986, when I was in fifth grade. The No. 2 memory: Columbia’s disintegration over Texas five years ago. NASA’s big successes came before I was born—and well before today’s schoolkids came along—and it shows in public support. One telling statistic: the space program accounted for about 4.4 percent of the federal budget in the peak years of Apollo, a figure that’s dwindled to about 0.5 percent in the current federal budget, Dunbar says.

The public doesn’t appear very motivated to back space exploration. Even during the heat of a presidential election, neither major candidate has had a lot to say about the right future direction for the nation’s space program, Fabian says.

Still, the group has rounded up prominent sponsors for its new mission, including Boeing, Microsoft, the University of Washington, the Museum of Flight, and the Suquamish Tribe. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels appeared at the opening ceremony, welcoming the astronauts, and cracking a joke about Starbucks’ desire to open new stores on other planets (which I’m not sure all the foreign visitors really got.)

Boeing’s Jim Albaugh, the CEO of the Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems unit, stressed in his opening keynote speech that the astronauts are in a unique position to push for more resources for space exploration. NASA technologies have contributed to our ability to monitor climate change, hurricanes, artificial hearts and even new high-speed Olympic swimsuits, Albaugh says. It’s also churned out a steady of supply of some of Boeing’s best engineers, he noted. The country’s lack of interest in science and math careers has amounted to “intellectual disarmament,” he says.

“An entire generation was lost,” Albaugh says. “We need a curriculum for the information age, not the industrial age. We can’t wait for another Sputnik to galvanize government to action.”

Exactly what the space program’s priorities ought to be is another matter, which the astronauts and cosmonauts talk about a fair bit, Fabian says. The space explorers have their own views about whether to continue the shuttle program past its scheduled retirement in 2010, and some are clearly nervous about what will happen during the years we’ll have to wait for NASA’s new spacecraft program, called Constellation. “A lot of us are nervous” about the end of the shuttle program and the lack of funding for Constellation, Fabian says. I suggested that if the shuttle were extended past its retirement date it could increase the risk of another disaster. Fabian’s reply: “We always take risk in space flight.”

You get the idea pretty quickly this is an optimistic bunch of people. One of the Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Usachev, was unfazed when asked whether tensions between the U.S. and his country over hostilities in Georgia could derail future cooperation between the two countries’ space programs. “We’ve had situations in the past and we resolved them, and I think we will resolve them again,” he said through an interpreter. That sounds like the kind of hopeful attitude that just might rub off on some children across the state this week.

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Last October marked the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. And next month, Sputnik’s American offspring, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, will also hit its 50th birthday. The milestone has occasioned the biggest flurry of media retrospectives on the space program since Ron Howard’s 1995 film Apollo 13, including two well-made documentaries that aired this week on the Discovery Channel’s HD Theater, When We Left Earth and In the Shadow of the Moon.

If you missed them, it’s worth searching your local listings to catch these two programs when they’re shown again. (They’re also available on DVD and Blu-Ray disc.) Though much of the footage in the two films is familiar, they’re notable because this is the first time most of this material has been shown in high definition. Also, both programs contain extensive new interviews with the surviving astronauts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo days—plain-spoken rocket jockeys who are just plain fun to listen to.

I’m a veteran space buff—my first piece of “technology journalism” was a poster on the Saturn V rocket that I designed when I was in the fourth grade—and the Discovery Channel programs sent me on a trip across the Web to see what else I could find in the way of historical images from the Apollo missions. If you follow NASA at all, you know that the Web is the best place to see the raw data coming back from current-day missions like the Mars Phoenix lander and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (which are still trucking across the Martian surface, four years after they were expected to expire). But it turns out that the Web also holds a vast mine of original data from the Apollo project, and in today’s column I thought I’d point you toward some especially rich veins.

While NASA itself has a large collection of Web resources about the Apollo days, they aren’t particularly well organized, and they tend toward the hagiographic. The two Apollo sites that impress me the most are labors of love created by amateur historians with no direct connections to NASA. One is the Project Apollo Archive, assembled by a Lynchburg, VA, native named Kipp Teague.

Pay no attention to the 1994-era Web graphics and ugly HTML tables (Teague deliberately labels his collection of history sites the “RetroWeb”). The glory of the Project Apollo Archive is the material itself: thousands of photographs scanned from NASA originals, including large-format Hasselblad images captured by astronauts on Apollo 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17; hours of MP3 recordings of communications between flight controllers and the astronauts; and a few MPEG videos covering events you don’t see in the TV shows about the moon landings, such as the moment when Apollo 12 lunar module pilot Alan Bean accidentally points the television camera at the sun, destroying its vidicon sensor (and preventing the world from witnessing the rest of the mission on TV).

An even more detailed resource—hosted on a NASA web server but assembled and edited by a former Los Alamos scientist named Eric Jones and a Canadian space buff named Ken Glover—is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. Destined to be used by historians far into the future, the site is a collection of transcripts of all the recorded conversations between the lunar surface crews and Houston, interwoven with after-the-fact commentary from the editors and from 10 of the 12 astronauts who were actually there. It’s supplemented by MP3 and RealAudio clips of the same transmissions, as well as hundreds of photos, Quicktime VR panoramas, and flight documents, right down to the technical checklists the astronauts wore on the cuffs of their spacesuits.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the journals. This is from Apollo 17, at the moment when Harrison Schmitt—a PhD geologist, and the only trained scientist to go to the Moon—noticed something unexpected:

145:26:22 Schmitt: Oh, hey! (Very brief pause)
145:26:25 Schmitt: Wait a minute…
145:26:26 [Eugene] Cernan: What?
145:26:27 Schmitt: Where are the reflections? I’ve been fooled once. There is orange soil!!
145:26:32 Cernan: Well, don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:35 Schmitt: (Very excited) It’s all over!! Orange!!!
145:26:38 Cernan: Don’t move it until I see it.
145:26:40 Schmitt: I stirred it up with my feet.
145:26:42 Cernan: (Excited, too) Hey, it is!! I can see it from here!
145:26:44 Schmitt: It’s orange!
145:26:46 Cernan: Wait a minute, let me put my visor up. It’s still orange!
145:26:49 Schmitt: Sure it is! Crazy!
145:26:53 Cernan: Orange!
145:26:54 Schmitt: I’ve got to dig a trench, Houston.
145:27:00 [Bob] Parker [EVA Capcom]: Copy that. I guess we’d better work fast.
145:27:01 Cernan: Hey, he’s not going out of his wits. It really is.
145:27:07 Parker: Is it the same color as cheese?

It turned out that Schmitt had discovered an unusual deposit of volcanic glass—formed under the surface of the moon billions of years earlier and stirred up by a relatively recent meteor impact—with a colorful orange cast that strongly contrasted with the Moon’s generally gray-black soil. (The moment is recreated fairly faithfully in From the Earth to the Moon, a wonderful 1998 TV mini-series produced by Tom Hanks, who, of course, played astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13). If people ever go back to the Moon, … Next Page »

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Hello World, come on down… You’re the next contestant on the PRIZE is Right. That’s right, play the game, solve the challenge…and we ALL win.

Competitions and prizes are nothing new, but the era of high-profile, world-changing contests is upon us. History has seen its share of successful prizes, such as the 20,000 pound, British Longitude Prize of 1714, for determining a ship’s longitude. Or how about the $25,000 Orteig Prize, awarded to Charles Lindbergh for the first transatlantic flight between New York and Paris. But now, such competitions are raising more international publicity and awareness than ever before—setting goals that were once unimaginable, offering staggering sums to the winners, and attracting notable partners (who help publicize and pay for the prizes) who want to be associated with the radical change the prizes hope to inspire.

Last week, in partnership with Google, the X PRIZE Foundation (where I work) announced its latest challenge; The Google Lunar X PRIZE. Up to $30 million will be awarded for landing robots on the moon, transmitting high-quality photos and accomplishing various tasks. The X PRIZE, best-known for the success of the $10 million Ansari Space X PRIZE, awarded for launching a human into space twice within two weeks, requires that the teams in all competitions be 90 percent privately funded. This is meant to ensure a path to commercialization and benefit for all of humanity, not just governments.

But it’s not just space travel that the foundation is seeking to blast into orbit. Following the success of the first X PRIZE, the foundation launched the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, a $10 million competition for rapid and cost effective DNA sequencing technology, which, when successful, will usher in a new era of personalized medicine. Such goals, while so far unattainable, still attract support from pioneers such as Richard Branson and Stephen Hawking, who will be among the first to have their DNA sequenced by the competition’s winning team. I came on board with the X PRIZE Foundation in March to lead this effort. But I took on this responsibility only after careful consideration and realization of the power of such a prize to provide leverage to accelerate technology and spur the radical change we can make towards human health, happiness, and longevity.

The colors are shining. Al Gore has shown that green is good. Bono proved that red is supportive. And now Google, with its multicolored logo, is demonstrating its support and belief in the prize model. What’s most important, though, is the celebration. Our world, our culture, must celebrate these competing teams, the scientists, the engineers, the visionaries. Together, they are the problem solvers who are trying to save the world—and not just entertain it.

Inspiration, Creativity, Innovation… These are not just words meant for posters in an office. They are happening all around us, and corporate leaders, governments, and individuals have a responsibility to step up and cheer it on!

Marc Hodosh leads the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics and is chairman of Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics competition in Boston, which inspires thousands of high school students to pursue careers in science and technology.

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