The space grapevine was a buzz late last week - looks like the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico will not be held there October 24-25th.

According to Sarah Becky Ramsey, Director of Communications at the X Prize Cup Foundation, the official word is that “because of some other activities on the base, we will not be able to hold the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge there on our previously scheduled dates.”

Ramsey added that other options are being investigated, “with an eye toward rescheduling the competition as soon as practical in southern New Mexico.”

“While we are eager to see our teams compete,” Ramsey added, “we do expect them to put the extra time to good use, and we know we will have a better competition for it.”

NASA’s mega Mars rover — the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) — seems to be headed for a major decision point next month. Will it fly in 2009 or be delayed until 2011?

A major review meeting on the nuclear-energized MSL is slated for NASA Headquarters in October - with the space agency then or shortly after deciding whether the powerful rover is ready to set sail toward Mars next year.

Meanwhile, the folks building the mechanized wonder at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are number crunching, coming up with current dollar numbers for the already over-budget mission. At last ka-ching of the cash register the planetary mission was roughly $2 billion.

There are cost implications for delaying MSL’s sendoff to the red planet to 2011.

Hall talk at yesterday’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) meeting in Monrovia, California seems to suggest that the 2009 launch is still the plan. MEPAG is chartered by NASA Headquarters to assist in planning the scientific exploration of Mars.

The buzz at MEPAG is that the cost of missing the launch is so high that JPL and the MSL team are running hard to get the spacecraft off to Mars in the fall of 2009.

So a go/no go decision on the one-off MSL appears to remain up in the air at the moment…so keep an eye on this one.

Listen up…to Mars!

Word from the trenches is that the Phoenix lander team is going forward with turning on the spacecraft’s microphone. Phoenix, like the lost-to-Mars 1999 Polar Lander, carried a tiny microphone to hear the sounds of the descent to the red planet.

The microphone is part of the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) system built by Malin Space Science Systems, but for Phoenix was turned off due to the small risk that it could trip up a critical landing system.

But the go-ahead has been given to turn the microphone on, right there on-the-spot at the Phoenix Martian polar north landing spot. Other good news is that NASA has given the lander an extended lease on life for an additional two months - into November.

If the microphone gives an ear to Mars, no telling what you might hear. Wind? The sounds of the robot’s arm digging away? Howling Mars dogs?

BTW: Is there some sort of a Phoenix song in this, borrowing from Beck:

“Where it’s at!
I got two turntables and a microphone
Where it’s at!”

Look for a new mission to be picked for Mars.

The folks at the University of Colorado at Boulder are holding a news briefing today to announce the selection of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) by NASA to lead a multimillion dollar mission to study the past climate of Mars - supported by the largest research contract ever awarded to CU-Boulder.

And that bit of news seems to indicate they’ve been selected for a Mars Scout mission. Their entry is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) - a Mars orbiter that would provide unique, first-of-its kind measurements and address key questions about Mars climate and habitability, as well as improve understanding of dynamic processes in the upper Martian atmosphere and ionosphere.

By the way, this is the selection that got delayed back in December 2007, slipped because of an “organizational conflict of interest” in one of the teams vying for the mission. That problem pushed the Mars Scout from a planned launch in 2011 to a targeted liftoff in 2013, according to a NASA release at the time.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems near Denver is building the spacecraft - the same folks that cranked out the Phoenix Mars lander - also a Scout mission.

The MAVEN orbiter is to be a collaborative effort among CU-Boulder, Lockheed Martin, the University of California, Berkeley, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

New details about a milestone step toward space-based solar power beaming.

A press briefing today in Washington, D.C. will detail a “first-of-a-kind” long-range demonstration of solar-powered wireless power transmission. The experiment made use of a solid-state phased array transmitter planted on the U.S. island of Maui (on Haleakala) and receivers placed on the island of Hawai’i (Mauna Loa) and airborne.

The power demo done May 5-9 was carried out by Managed Energy Technologies LLC of the U.S. - with Discovery Communications, Inc. bankrolling the 5 month project at less than $1 million.

The transmission of radio frequency (RF) energy shot across some 90 miles distance - and that’s almost 100-times further than an experiment done by NASA back in the 1970s.

Even better, a host of technologies were integrated and tested together for the first time, such as a “field-deployable” system.

Project leader of the test was a former NASA technologist, John Mankins, with professor Nobuyuki Kaya of Kobe University in Japan and Frank Little of Texas A&M University also key participants, as was Neville Marzwell of CalTech. Students were largely responsible for fabrication of the hardware for this unique experiment.

Mankins has advised me that the end-to-end efficiency of the experiment was very, very low - but by design. Budget limitations cut into the scale of the testing, with only a tiny fraction of the RF power going “straight” along the plane of the transmitter array.

“That wasn’t really the purpose of this test,” Mankins told me. “Rather, we were after the end-to-end integration” of hardware used in the power beaming experiment, he said.

The wireless demonstration was spotlighted today at a press briefing pulled together by the National Space Society.

The project was sponsored by Discovery Communications as part of its Project Earth series, produced by Impossible Pictures Ltd. of the U.K. Look for the September 12th showing of the series that will detail the wireless power transmission experiment.

By the way, there is increasing chatter in various circles to make use of the International Space Station to carry out a power beaming experiment, coupled with a select receiving site on the ground. So stay tuned, be it via grape vine or radio frequency transmission.

Beaming energy to Earth from space has been more chat than reality over the decades. But things may be changing.

First, look for a National Press Club address in Washington, D.C. this Friday that will detail a demonstration project concerning point-to-point wireless power transmission.

What’s being spotlighted is a project that involved a wireless power transmission effort between two Hawaiian islands 148 kilometers apart - that’s more than the distance from the boundary of space to the surface of Earth.

The press event at the National Press Club is being hosted by the National Space Society.

For those folks that have not been given a positive charge of advocacy regarding satellite solar power, the key idea is that space-based solar power satellites in Earth orbit would harvest plentiful solar energy in orbit - then convert that energy for transmission down to terra firma for distribution over power grids.

Such spacecraft, it’s hoped, would help reduce our carbon emissions to virtually zero as proponents showcase the idea as the only energy technology that is clean, renewable, constant and capable of providing power to virtually any location on Earth.

By the way…that Hawaiian demonstration is to be featured in an hour-long special Friday night on the Discovery Channel - one small part of an eight-part series on geoengineering concepts meant to tackle global climate change - as well as pushing new and sustainable energy source concepts.

[new updates throughout]

There’s a bit of confusion over exactly when China’s third piloted space mission will take place. Originally, China space authorities have cited October for the three-person Shenzhou 7 flight.

But earlier this week, according to ShanghaiDaily.com – citing a Guangzhou-based newspaper account — liftoff of China’s third piloted space mission has been moved ahead to the end of this month.

The news piece explains that the Yangcheng Evening News is reporting that the three-person Shenzhou 7 mission is now expected to take place before October 1.

That space trek has been billed as an expansion of the previous two space missions - with this mission to include China’s first space walk to prepare for construction of larger facilities in Earth orbit.

Also, the story notes that Shenzhou 7 will dispatch a small inspection satellite to survey the scene as the piloted spacecraft spins around the Earth.

Then there’s a report by Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, without quoting any Chinese space authorities, stating that the Shenzhou 7 is to head spaceward sometime between September 17 and October 1.

Then there was an update from China Daily. They indicate that a source on the Shenzhou program says the report of an earlier than October launch was “not reliable.”

Then there’s the report from Danwei, a Hong Kong news outlet that points to a report in the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post that refutes stories of a Shenzhou 7 departure this month.

That story cites a contact within the General Armament Department — which is affiliated with the China Manned Space Engineering Office — explaining that the group has never released such news of an earlier liftoff.

So…let’s wait and watch how this launch shapes up and ships out.

I trust that China isn’t getting a case of launch fever!

Squeezing the grapevine, looks like there’s an issue with the Russian-supplied RD-180 engine used in the Atlas V booster.

Talk is that there’s a “flight constraint” that’s cropped up with the Russian-developed powerhouse. The issue is being wrestled with by engineers to clear the problem. Meanwhile, what impact this condition will have on the Atlas launch manifest for the rest of the year remains unknown.

What is known is that a look downrange on the calendar shows the Atlas V is manifested to power several spacecraft into orbit, such as the Air Force’s nifty X-37B military space plane. That mission is slated for December, a flight that pushed the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — also to ride an Atlas 5 — into 2009.

Other spacecraft missions on the Atlas V launch books for the remaining months of this year: A Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP) satellite; a Wideband Global SATCOM spacecraft, formerly known as the Wideband Gapfiller Satellite; as well as a couple of National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spacecraft launches.

How all this shakes out in lofting these satellites this year is definitely indefinite, at least for now.

Here’s a couple of short blasts from the world of space transportation.

At the recent rollout of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane in Mojave, California, one topic that got little in the way of chatter: what’s the status on the engine that’s to power SpaceShipTwo?

SpaceDev of Poway, California has just announced that it has signed a multi-year contract with Scaled Composites, to assist Scaled in development of a production rocket motor for the passenger-carrying SpaceShipTwo suborbital rocket plane.

Under the new contract, SpaceDev will be the lead rocket motor team member for SpaceShipTwo and will collaborate with Scaled’s internal design team to develop a production ready hybrid rocket motor. SpaceDev will provide engineering services to refine the design of the hybrid rocket motor being developed by Scaled Composites, as well as providing the development, manufacture and integration of key rocket motor system components.

Also, SpaceDev will be carrying out ground tests on those motor components, working to assist Scaled in the full-scale rocket test program both on the ground and during SpaceShipTwo flight tests.

The contract — which runs through 2012 — has an initial value of roughly $15 million for work to be primarily completed over the next two years.

In another bit of upstart space news, check out this video clip from my good friend, Bob Martin, a TV reporter at KRQE in Albuquerque.

It’s a smashing bit of reporting about that recent hush-hush Lockheed Martin prototype space plane test at New Mexico’s Spaceport America - and used with permission.

Check out: http://www.krqe.com/Global/story.asp?s=8832212

Spaceport America in New Mexico announced today a successful launch of a test flight vehicle under development by Lockheed Martin. The test shot was a non-public, unannounced event that took place early this morning - making use of a winged vehicle to evaluate proprietary advanced launch technologies.

Lockheed Martin and UP Aerospace teamed to carry out the hush-hush shot, similar to a flight that was first flown from the site last December.

To take a read on that test flight last year, go to:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/080424-lockheed-spaceplane-test.html

Meanwhile, the New Mexico Spaceport Authority currently projects that licensed vertical launches can begin in the first quarter of 2009…and that the terminal and hangar facility for horizontal launches should be completed by 2010.

Spaceport America is billed as the nation’s first purpose-built commercial space facility, being readied to handle launch traffic from various customers, including Virgin Galactic and its suborbital spaceliner service for paying passengers.