I didn't think they'd manage it....

[unixronin]

The da Vinci Project has postponed its planned October 2 launch for "several weeks", citing inability to obtain carbon-fiber winding filament for their motor casing.  Waitaminnit, it's days before their scheduled launch date and they haven't started winding their motor casing yet?

"We have everything we need to fly except the parts," says company spokeswoman Una McAvoy.

Yeah, and I have everything I need to make an X-Prize attempt myself, except a spaceship.

She dismisses reports that the Canadian government had yet to approve a launch from Kindersley, Saskatchewan, saying the project had filed all the necessary documents and secured insurance for the flight.

That's not what the Canadian Government says:

But a spokesperson at the government agency Transport Canada said on Friday that the launch had in fact not yet been authorised because the agency had not received all the required paperwork.

Even if Scaled Composites -- which now looks to have a clear shot with no real competition -- fails in their X-Prize attempt, da Vinci must make their two qualifying flights by midnight December 31 to secure the X-Prize.  If they still don't even have a motor casing, I have considerable skepticism that they can do it unless they plan to fly it without a static test, and if they're flying it without a static test, I sure as hell don't want to be on board.

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Orbital studies of the Hilda asteroids yield evidence that Jupiter formed about 10% further out in the Solar System and migrated inward.  This is the first clear evidence for gas-giant migration.  Speculation is that in protosystems with thick gas and dust discs, gas giants form far out then spiral in due to the hihger drag, sweeping up gas, dust and other planets as they go and eventually resulting in the superjovian "hot Jupiters" now frequently observed orbiting close around other stars.  Sounds like if you want Earthlike planets in a solar system, you don't want too much building material present.

The "International" Space Station's oxygen supply is safe for now, but if they can't get more oxygen candles up there soon or get the oxygen generator fixed, the station may have to be "de-manned".  ("Evacuated" just sounds too negative, I guess.)  No oxygen candles will be available until early 2005, and the next scheduled Shuttle resupply launch had been expected to slip from its scheduled mid-March date even before the last four hurricanes.

The asteroid Toutatis will fly close by Earth tomorrow.  Toutatis, about 2.9 miles by 1.5 miles, is the largest asteroid known to pass this close to Earth since NEO observations began, and would make a hell of a bang if it hit -- but "close" is a relative term; Toutatis' closest approach will be about a million miles, four times the distance to the Moon.  Its orbit is very well mapped, and its position is known to within two or three miles.

Researchers at Imperial College, London think they can boost the capacity of DVDs to terabyte levels by combining either multiple layers or a blue laser with a technique for using the polarity of the light reflected from the DVD to encode information.  They plan to control the polarity by incorporating angled ridges into the microscopic pits in the DVD.  They haven't yet explained how they're going to accomplish this feat, let alone how an end-user writer could be made.  Personally, I'm betting on them not getting it to market before upcoming nanotech storage technologies, denser and multiple orders of magnitude faster, make it moot.

And the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep have formally applied for a licence to clone human embryos to find a cure for motor neurone disease.&nbswp; Unsurprisingly, the application has drawn fire from pro-life protesters, but therapeutic cloning for research purposes has been legal in the UK since 2001.  Plans call for removing cells from the blastocyst for study after six days and then destroying the deliberately-diseased blastocysts.

Related to the above, biological heart pacemakers made from human embryo cells have been successfully tested in pigs, raising the possibility that tissue transplants could replace electronic pacemakers.  The research, carried out in Israel, is a preliminary proof-of-concept at this point, but nevertheless developed a "regular, sustained and haemodynamically stable rhythm" in six out of 13 porcine subjects.

Last for now, but maybe not least, an immunologist in Africa has developed a therapeutic vaccine which he claims can prevent and even cure HIV infection.  Despite controversy over his research, he has tested the vaccine on around 4000 HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients, including himself, over a six-year period.  Most of the 4000 HIV-positive patients showed little effect, but 20 exhibited seroreversion (disappearance of antibodies from the blood, implying disappearance of the virus) for HIV, along with 16 for hepatitis C and 50 for hepatitis B.