In fact there were no major catastrophes, and Mir got the best view of all. The occupants got to see an eclipse from above, watching the inky-black circle of the moon's shadow track its way swiftly and silently across the globe. They were the first people in history to do do so, and probably the last to do it on Mir.

The aerospace business provides some eye-watering close incidents. In the Space Shuttle Columbia's flight last June, one of the power busses shorted during takeoff. As these supplied power to two of the three engines, the bits that control the direction of flight, how much very explosive fuel gets pumped where, and a few other important aspects of life for your average astronaut, losing power at the wrong moment causes some concern. It turns out that someone had trodden on a cable. This cable was resting on top of an enthusiastically-turned screw, and the chewed metal edge of the screw head penetrated the insulation on the cable, then sprung back. As the shuttle shook during takeoff, the cable hit the screw head and shorted the power out.  One screwed Space Shuttle.
Laingholm has been contributing to the space race once more, this time helping with TransOrbital Inc.'s lunar satellite called TrailBlazer seen here on the left. This is an incredibly low-cost mission to the Earth's moon, designed to take extreme close-up pictures of the lunar landscape. It is cheap enough to be funded without government assistance, and a number of contributors have stepped forward to help foot the bill. The spacecraft itself is built around a telescope and a video camera, which should remain operational in lunar orbit for at least a month. More details as I'm allowed to release them.

NASA meanwhile have been working on the amazing Rubber Rocket^TM, a curious hybrid design which combines the guts of one of those steaming, liquid-fuelled rockets with the simple - and cheap - design of a solid rocket motor. Basically a huge piece of thick rubber tube is formed by pouring a black, rubbery resin into a rocket casing. Liquid oxygen is pumped in at the top, a light is applied, and an almighty great flame wooshes out of the bottom.

The new thing here is that the engine can be throttled up and down - and even extinguished - making the new engine as controllable as the more powerful liquid-fuelled rockets with the low cost and simplicity of a solid-fueled rockets. Not only a boon for space flight, but also when things go wrong. It's safe enough to hit with a hammer, and the new rocket stands half a chance of being turned off. With the solid-fuelled rockets like the ones on the side of the Space Shuttle, the best you could hope for was dropping them before they blew. Putting out 38 tonnes of thrust at ground level this rocket is already powerful enough for service, probably launching its first payload around March next year.

The Poms are building rockets again too. Not very big rockets, it is true, but big enough that you wouldn't want it falling down around here. Salford University lecturer Steve Bennett (on the right) launched his 6.6 metre tall Starchaser 3A up approximately 6 kilometres into the air this August, shattering the previous pommie rocket record. The parachutes worked too, lowering his payload safely to Earth. The rocket will be dismantled to see how it stood up to the launch, in preparation for the production of an 8 metre rocket next year.

What's it all about?  Manned spaceflight. Steve wants to claim the US$10 million X-Prize, which will be awarded to the first person to launch three people 100 kilometres into space. He reckons he's on target, with another launch of the 3A coming soon, and the larger Starchaser 4 on the drawing board, the final manned rocket should be ready by 2003.

NASA are busy with another kind of new motor too, one that outperforms even the fancy ion motors that powered Deep Space - you know, the spacecraft that couldn't take a picture of an asteroid. The name is incomprehensible enough: Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion system (or M2P2 to its friends). Anyway, this clever motor puffs out a cloud of plasma 60 kilometers wide and then hangs onto it with a magnetic field as shown in the pictures on the left. The solar wind then pushes the cloud along, and the spacecraft gets accelerated out of the solar system so fast - 288,000 kilometres per hour -  that the prototype might even leave the solar system before the Voyager spacecraft does. Even with a 10 billion kilometer head start.

Using only a kilo of fuel per month, and with an engine core the size of a Milo tub, this is a very efficient engine - as long as you don't want to put it in reverse. Any minute now I'm expecting Scotty to explain how he's going to do that with tractor beams, dilithium crystals and a cunning modification to the shields.
The Artemis Society is making slow but steady progress towards its plans to get to the moon. I'm pleased to announce the publication of the first edition of the Artemis Magazine. It has articles on science and fiction, all revolving about the moon, with a little bit of artwork by yours truly. If you're on the internet, have a look at http://www.lrcpubs.com to see what's in the current copy. By a coincidence, we now have a web page too (that's why the layout looks different this month). For those of you wanting to see this edition of "Launchpad" in colour, or just wanting to print off a copy for your friend, point your web browser to http://family.gen.nz/launchpad.