Usually when someone asks me to name a single product of space research that affects them, I blurt out ‘Tang!’ Now I can finally trump that argument with ‘Space Beer!’

The Sapporo brewing company in Japan is cooking up a batch of beer distilled from barley that originated in the bowels of the International Space Station. Nobody knows what the end result will be just yet, but the mere fact that it can be called Space Beer is a marked improvement on the terrestrial variety.

China’s latest space shot was so successful, that they’ve managed to breach the 4th dimension - travelling into the future and sending back reports which were published before the craft even took off. The Associated Press besmirches China’s claims of a successful launch, going so far as to claim that the reports were not in fact sent from THE FUTURE, but were fabricated in advance of the launch.

For shame, AP…this is shoddy journalism at its’ worst.

A news story describing a successful launch of China’s long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground.

The country’s official news agency Xinhua posted the article on its Web site Thursday, and remained there for much of the day before it was taken down.

A staffer from the Xinhuanet.com Web site who answered the phone Thursday said the posting of the article was a “technical error” by a technician. The staffer refused to give his name as is common among Chinese officials.

Are the Chinese close to cracking a new form of space-propulsion that will put them at the forefront of the new Space Race, or is it just a bunch of scientific propaganda?

Chinese researchers claim they’ve confirmed the theory behind an “impossible” space drive, and are proceeding to build a demonstration version. If they’re right, this might transform the economics of satellites, open up new possibilities for space exploration –- and give the Chinese a decisive military advantage in space.

To say that the “Emdrive” (short for “electromagnetic drive”) concept is controversial would be an understatement. According to Roger Shawyer, the British scientist who developed the concept, the drive converts electrical energy into thrust via microwaves, without violating any laws of physics. Many researchers believe otherwise. An article about the Emdrive in New Scientist magazine drew a massive volley of criticism. Scientists not only argued that Shawyer’s work was blatantly impossible, and hat his reasoning was flawed. They also said the article should never have been published.

“It is well known that Roger Shawyer’s ‘electromagnetic relativity drive’ violates the law of conservation of momentum, making it simply the latest in a long line of ‘perpetuum mobiles’ that have been proposed and disproved for centuries,” wrote John Costella, an Australian physicist. “His analysis is rubbish and his ‘drive’ impossible.”

….and, fuuuuck that. I have serious acrophobia problems. Like - can’t climb ladders acrophobia problems. There’s no way I’m getting in an elevator that rockets you 20,000+ miles off the ground. Nuh uh. No. Fucking. Way.

Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables — or flat ribbons — will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.

In the carriages, the scientists behind the idea told The Times, could be any number of cargoes. A space elevator could carry people, huge solar-powered generators or even casks of radioactive waste. The point is that breaking free of Earth’s gravity will no longer require so much energy — perhaps 100 times less than launching the space shuttle.

“Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space,” Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, said.

Anyone but me, pal…

Japan’s first orbital laboratory has opened its’ doors…and you know what that means…

Off-topic, but I’m excited about it (being a big Ray Bradbury fan and all): NASA’s Phoenix lander has successfully made it to Mars! The last polar lander, uh….didn’t quite make it.

(In space, no one can hear you explode).

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080525b.html

The Phoenix will be scooping up stuff and analyzing it to see if Mars once held water (and if it still might). I prefer to see it as NASA taking another step toward getting me to Mars before I die.

Okay, maybe I’m jumping the gun a little…but when I read that “Japan’s lower house authorized the use of outer space for defense purposes…” I get a little misty-eyed and start hoping they’ll dredge the wreck of the Yamato off the ocean floor and retrofit it with batteries of laser cannons and wave motion guns. C’mon, I know I’m not alone here…

The upper house may pass the bill into law as early as next week, said Yoshihiko Noda, an opposition Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker who worked on the bill. The DPJ holds the most seats in the upper house.

The legislation provides for a new cabinet position to oversee Japan’s space program, including defense. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Japan’s largest aerospace company, is among companies that may win contracts, said Kazuto Suzuki, an associate professor at Tsukuba University northeast of Tokyo.

“This is a historic shift of Japan’s space program from research and development to practice,” said Suzuki, author of a book on European space policy.

This is not an ecouraging start for Korea’s fledgling space exploration effort. Astronaut Yi So-yeon suffered a handful of injuries when the Soyuz space capsule she was aboard hit a rough patch on re-entry.

South Korea’s Science Ministry said Yi bruised her spinal column and had a minor injury to her neck muscles as a result of the landing in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz TM-11 spacecraft carrying Yi and two members of the ISS Expedition 16 crew made a steeper-than-planned re-entry that subjected the crew to g-loads as high as 8.2 before it landed almost 300 miles short of its targeted landing zone. Russia has convened a state commission to investigate the ballistic re-entry, the second in two Soyuz landings (Aerospace DAILY, April 22, 23).

Yi told a South Korean television interviewer that she was hit by unsecured objects in the Soyuz cabin during the re-entry and screamed out in pain at the unexpected g-loads. She said for a moment she thought the spacecraft had malfunctioned and she would be killed.

I guess that’s why astronauts wear diapers…

…and, boomerangs behave in space exactly the same as they do in the Earth’s atmosphere. I know, kind of a letdown, eh? I blogged about this last month (which you can no longer read since our archives went down the tube when I moved everything over to Wordpress), and I’ve been wondering ever since what came of it. See for yourself.

Now I want to know what’s going on with the origami paper spaceship.