June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk changed the way people shop on the Internet when he helped start the online-payment service PayPal. Tomorrow, he will try to take a step toward changing the way NASA carries supplies and people into space.

Musk’s Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is scheduled to launch its Falcon 9 on an initial test flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a four- hour window that begins at 11 a.m. The company plans to use the rocket to carry into Earth orbit its Dragon spacecraft, which is intended to take cargo to the International Space Station after the space shuttles are retired and may later ferry astronauts.

“If it is successful, it is an important initial step toward the creation of a new kind of industry,” said John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington.

SpaceX’s vessels are part of President Barack Obama’s new strategy for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which calls for the agency to develop systems capable of taking humans to Mars while helping entrepreneurs build vessels to carry astronauts to the space station.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told a Senate panel last month that he expects SpaceX to be able to fly its first manned mission in 2015. Musk said the company may be able to take astronauts to the station as early as 2013 if it receives a contract this year.

Obama’s plan scrapped Constellation, the program that would send U.S. astronauts to the moon as a precursor to missions to Mars. The shift drew criticism from space travelers such as Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, and lawmakers from states with NASA operations.

Musk Companies

The South Africa-born Musk, 38, founded closely held SpaceX in 2002 after selling other companies that he helped start -- directory provider Zip2 Corp., sold to Compaq Computer Corp. for $300 million in 1999, and PayPal, bought by EBay Inc. for $1.2 billion in 2002. Musk is also chief executive officer of Tesla Motors Inc., an electric-car maker planning to raise $100 million in an initial share sale.

Musk helped inspire the film version of Tony Stark, the billionaire in the “Iron Man” movies, director Jon Favreau wrote in Time magazine in April. Musk plays a cameo in “Iron Man 2,” and parts of the film were shot at SpaceX headquarters.

Falcon’s Competition

The 180-foot-tall (55-meter) Falcon 9 is intended to compete with the Delta IV and Atlas V from United Launch Alliance, a Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. joint venture, and Orbital Science Corp.’s Taurus II, set for its first flight next year.

The Atlas and Delta rockets have an advantage over the Falcon 9 in the race to become the next vehicle to take astronauts to the space station because they have a track record of successful launches, Logsdon said.

The shuttles and European vessels have carried cargo and people to the station since construction began in 1998. The shuttle program is scheduled to shut down this year, and NASA signed a $335 million contract extension with the Russian Federal Space Agency in April to buy transport for U.S. astronauts to the outpost through 2014.

In 2008, NASA awarded contracts valued at as much as $3.5 billion through 2016 to SpaceX and Orbital to deliver cargo to the outpost. On Feb. 1, the day Obama announced his new strategy, NASA said it was giving $50 million to a group of companies to develop concepts for a station ferry, including United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin LLC, founded by Jeff Bezos, chairman and CEO of Amazon.com Inc.

NASA expects as much as 70 percent of its cargo delivery to the station to be handled by Orbital and SpaceX, with the rest delivered by Japanese and European ships. SpaceX’s 2008 contract calls for at least 12 flights, with an option for more missions.

SpaceX launched Falcon 1 in September 2008 after three failed attempts, and Musk said there is likely to be an anomaly that will postpone tomorrow’s test.

“There’s a very good chance of something delaying the launch that we just don’t know right now,” Musk, the company’s chief executive, said in a May 26 interview. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”

--Editors: Edward DeMarco, Mark Silva.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in New York at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net.

Shamma Al Qassim, 19, Hazza Bani Malek, 20 and Hamad Rajab, 21 were selected for the education initiative run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) gaining the opportunity to work with top scientists on projects including the space shuttle and international space station, deep space missions, exploring the solar system and aircraft research.

They are the first of the 12 UAE nationals who will be engaging in the programme as part of an agreement between the not-for-profit Arab Youth Venture Foundation (AYVF) and NASA.

The students who are being sponsored by Mubadala DevelopmenCompany are flying out today to start their 10-week training at the Ames Research Centre in California. Khaleej Times was exclusively invited to meet the students at their send-off, Wednesday night.

According to Dr Peter Worden, head of NASA Ames Research Centre space exploration is platform to create an alliance of great nations and pursue common dreams.

“Under this programme, the goodwill generated by students working side by side (with NASA scientists and researchers) will serve as a bridge between the USA and UAE, opening the doors for future collaboration in scientific research. I can only imagine what discoveries might be achieved through such cooperation,” Dr Peter Worden.

Qassim, a computer engineering major at the American University of Sharjah will intern with the team responsible for analysis and modelling of multispectral satellite 
date for earthquake prediction.

Malek who is pursuing a major in mechatronics at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Ras Al Khaimah will join the optical spectroscopy data analysis of the radiative environment for planetary entry group.

UAE University student Rajab who is completing his electrical engineering will intern with experts involved in the Sustainability of Base Water Recycling Systems for both the NASA Green Building and Testing on the new NASA Spacecraft Recycling 
System.

The young nationals that passed a stringent application process will help advance the aerospace ambitions of the UAE said Jassem Al Zaabi, Executive Director of Mubadala Information and Communications Technology.

NASA's latest big-ticket space observatory – the James Webb Space Telescope – took center stage alongside space and science luminaries on Tuesday here at the World Science Festival.

The festival's opening ceremonies were held at Battery Park, where a giant life-sized model of the observatory will be displayed all week for the public to see.

"It's exciting and humbling to stand next to this model of the James Webb Space Telescope," said famed physicist Brian Greene, co-founder of the World Science Festival.

Greene spoke to an audience of about 150 New York public school students who came to view the model and learn about the future of U.S. space exploration.

The World Science Festival will include science-themed lectures and events throughout the city from June 2 through June 6. A gala performance on Wednesday featuring Alan Alda, John Lithgow, Yo-Yo Ma and other celebrities will honor physicist Stephen Hawking.

Next generation space telescope

The $5 billion James Webb observatory, envisioned as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will launch in 2014 to scan the skies in infrared light. Scientists hope it will reveal some of the youngest galaxies in the farthest reaches of space, helping to solve some fundamental cosmic mysteries such as how the universe formed.

The mockup, built by prime contractor Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, stands 40 feet (12 meters) tall, with a heat shield the size of a tennis court.

"It's really thrilling – it makes it so tangible that we can really do these things," Greene told SPACE.com.

Also on hand at the ceremonies was NASA's deputy administrator Lori Garver, who said she hoped James Webb's appearance in New York might help to build its image as a future space observatory.

"Everyone's very excited for this telescope to launch," Garver told SPACE.com. "I think we have every hope that as the Webb telescope gets ready to launch, people understand this really is that next generation. It's a real exciting time and a significant program for NASA."

Visiting the Webb?

The students also got to meet a real-life astronaut, former NASA spaceflyer John Grunsfeld, who visited the Hubble Space Telescope during three separate space shuttle missions. Grunsfeld now heads the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

A big difference between Hubble and its successor, he said, is that James Webb is designed to travel much farther out in space, to a point about a million miles away from Earth, which is about four times farther than the moon.

At that distance, it won't be feasible for astronauts to hop into a spacecraft and visit if the telescope needs an upgrade.

"With the Hubble, I always felt like if something goes wrong, it's OK, we'll just go fix it," Grunsfeld said in an interview. "With the Webb Space Telescope, if something goes wrong, that's really bad. What that means is that the engineers and designers have to be that much more careful."

Still, NASA is researching novel means of space propulsion for future manned missions, so it's not completely out of the question that astronauts could one day travel to the Webb, though that's not the current plan.

"We have, in NASA's history, done the amazing," Garver said. "We never say never at NASA."

The telescope is a cooperative effort among 15 nations, with primary contributions from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Europe will aim to launch James Webb in mid-2014 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana.

"It's a wonderful feeling now we're in sight of launch," said John Mather, James Webb Space Telescope senior project scientist. "We're actually building the parts."

The utterances of James Hansen, the Nasa climatologist who is widely credited with being the first scientist to successfully megaphone the risks of climate change to the wider world back in the 1980s, always attract attention.

He is nothing less than a Marmite figure within the climate debate; sceptics hate him for his sometimes emotive political advocacy, whereas advocates for action on climate change respect his scientific authority and the role he has played in spelling out to our political masters the potential dangers of climate change.

So a new draft paper , co-authored with colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which has just been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, is sure to get noticed. Particularly so because it tackles head on the unique pressures facing climate science at the moment, namely, calls from a doubting public and media for climatologists to be more transparent about how they arrive at their conclusions.

For anyone interested in how climatologists collate and interpret the all-important average global temperature datasets the paper (which is yet to be peer reviewed) is an illuminating read, but perhaps the most interesting section for a wider audience – which Hansen admits "might not survive depending on the advice of the [journal's] editors" – is the final concluding section (pdf):

Human-made climate change has become an issue of surpassing importance to humanity, and global warming is the first order manifestation of increasing greenhouse gases that are predicted to drive climate change. Thus it is understandable that analyses of ongoing global temperature change are now subject to increasing scrutiny and criticisms that are different than would occur for a purely scientific problem.
Our comments here about communication of this climate change science to the public are our opinion. Other people may have quite different opinions. We offer our opinion because it seems inappropriate to ignore the vast range of claims appearing in the media and in hopes that open discussion of these matters may help people distinguish the reality of global change sooner than would otherwise be the case. However these comments, even though based on experience over a few decades, are only opinion. Our primary contribution is quantitative results discussed in the numbered paragraphs below. [Leo: certainly worth reading, but too long to include here on this blog.]
Communication of the status of global warming to the public has always been hampered by weather variability. Lay people's perception tends to be strongly influenced by the latest local fluctuation. This difficulty can be alleviated by stressing the need to focus on the frequency and magnitude of warm and cold anomalies, which change noticeably on decadal time scales as global warming increases.
A greater obstacle to public communication has arisen with the politicization of reporting of global warming, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the economic and social implications of efforts required to alter the course of human-made climate change. We have the impression that the effect of politicization on communication of the science is aggravated by the fact that much of the media is owned by or strongly influenced by special economic interests.
The task of alleviating the communication obstacle posed by politicization is formidable. The difficulty is compounded by continual attacks on the credibility of scientists. Polls indicate that the attacks have been effective in causing many members of the public to doubt the reality of global warming.
Given this situation, the best hope may be repeated clear description of the science and passage of sufficient time to confirm validity of the description. A problem with that prescription is the danger that the climate system could pass tipping points that cause major climate changes to proceed largely out of humanity's control [Hansen et al., 2008]. Yet continuation of this approach seems to be essential for the sake of minimizing the degree of inevitable climate change, even while other ways are sought to draw attention to the dangers of continued greenhouse gas increases.
One lesson we have learned is that making our global data analysis immediately available, with data use by ourselves and others helping to reveal flaws in the input data, has a practical disadvantage: it allows any data flaws to be interpreted and misrepresented as machinations. Yet the data are too useful for scientific studies to be kept under wraps, so we will continue to make the data available on a monthly basis. But we are making special efforts to make the process as transparent as possible, including availability of the computer program that does the analysis, the data that goes into the analysis (also available from original sources), and detailed definition of urban adjustment of meteorological station data.

There is, of course, plenty of urgent discussion going on at the moment about how to better communicate the climate change message following the events of recent months, such as the hacked/stolen/leaked/[for the purposes of avoiding a tedious debate, insert your own term] UEA emails, which have caused public confidence in climate science to nose dive. For example, Bob Ward was writing about just this issue in New Scientist last week.

But it is still interesting to hear the thoughts of one of climate science's leading voices, particularly one who has never shied away from implicitly politicising the communication of the science via his often strident advocacy of certain solutions.

Hansen lays out the efforts he has made to be transparent and open with his data. Advocating this approach despite the danger that flaws could be "interpreted and misrepresented as machinations" could be taken as an implicit criticism of the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. They have come under attack for discussions in the stolen emails that were published in November which suggested they were withholding information from their critics.

Does this mean that Hansen will now temper his campaigning role and solely stick to "doing the science" though? After all, the paper also states that "our principal task remains the scientific one; trying to describe with increasing clarity and insight the global temperature change that is occurring".

One thing that Hansen and other climatologists will be desperately trying to communicate - as he does in this paper – is that 2010 is currently on course to challenge for the title of the hottest year on record, despite popular perception to the contrary following a cold winter in much of the northern hemisphere. As the paper states:

The 12-month running mean global temperature in the GISS analysis has reached a new record in 2010. The new record temperature in 2010 is particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect. At the time of this writing (May 2010) the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed from El Nino conditions to ENSO-neutral and is likely headed into the cool La Nina phase of the Southern Oscillation. The 12-month running mean global temperature may continue to rise for a few more months before the ENSO change causes the next decline. It is likely that global temperature for calendar year 2010 will exceed the 2005 record, but that is not certain if a deep La Nina develops quickly.

As Hansen acknowledges, the race is now on to present news such as this in a dispassionate, transparent, authoritative manner to a public that is also at the same time being aggressively courted by a noisy, anarchic blogosphere and a politicised media who are repeatedly urging them to shoot the messenger.

Yes, to a certain degree the messengers have conspired to shoot themselves in the foot of late, but what Hansen and his colleagues are now urgently trying to do is reboot the climate debate and start afresh. The message seems to be: if it means going back to basics and starting from the beginning all over again, then so be it.

The global temperature has risen to a record for a 12-month period, according to Nasa.

The analysis undermines the case made by climate sceptics, who have used the slight cooling trend in recent years to argue that man-made emissions are not causing global warming.

The average surface temperature for the year to the end of April was about 0.65 of a degree Celsius (1.17 degree Fahrenheit) higher than the 1951 to 1980 average, according to Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. That makes it a fraction warmer than the previous peak detected by Nasa in 2005.

The Nasa study said: “We conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

The Met Office said its own analysis of temperature records suggested that the global temperature remained just below the 12-month record achieved in 1998. However, Vicky Pope, head of climate advice, said it was possible that Nasa was correct because the Met Office had underestimated recent warming detected in the Arctic.

There are very few weather stations in the Arctic and the Met Office, unlike Nasa, does not extrapolate where there are no actual temperature readings.

Ms Pope said that other information, including that from satellites, indicated that the Arctic was warming more rapidly than other parts of the world. She said this evidence supported Nasa’s results but neither it nor the Met Office had taken it into account in their assessments of global temperatures.

“Nasa may be correct that we have just seen a new 12-month record in global average temperature. The Met Office continues to predict that 2010 is more likely than not to be the warmest calendar year on record, beating the 1998 record.”

She added that Met Office analysis showed that the four months to the end of April were probably the third warmest for that time of year.

Nasa and the Met Office both interpret information from 6,300 monitoring stations around the world and their results are used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compile its advice to governments.