We’re hearing reports that someone (name/gender/orientation/favorite color unknown) has paid a tidy $1.5 million for the pleasure of cruising into space with actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

Insert eye-rolling Great Gatsby space pun here.

At the amfAR Cinema Against AIDS charity auction last night in Cannes, where DiCaprio was promoting his new Jazz Age film, bidding rose to 1.2 million euros for the trip, which will take place aboard Virgin Galactic’s new commercial spaceliner, SpaceShipTwo.

The craft is a suborbital, air-launched spaceplane designed for space tourism. The first flights are scheduled to take off in 2014. Ticket prices have increased from $200,000 to $250,000 this year, but apparently DiCaprio makes the whole experience worth around $1.25 million more. Now we know the value of one of his aging-but-still-dimpled smiles.

What’s more, we read on Space.com that two other tickets for the same flight sold at the same auction for $2.3 million. Now we know the value of the glorious halo that radiates throughout the interior of a spaceplane from one of this aging-but-still-dimpled smiles.

Image credits: 20th Century Fox, Jeff Foust/Flickr

Mars One, one of our favorite commercial space projects, has just released an interesting figure: More than 78,000 people have signed up for the mission’s one-way trip to Mars.

The Mars One mission aims to send a group of humans to Mars for permanent colonization. To fund the expedition, the Mars One founders plan to treat the whole thing as an extraterrestrial version of The Real World, selling $6 billion in sponsorships against one what is potentially of the most enthralling programs the world has ever seen.

For its astronaut selection process, Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp told VentureBeat in a recent interview, the mission is going to be difficult and dangerous, but for different reasons than you might think.

“We are finding the right people for the job,” he said. “Our medical director ensured me that the difficult part is living on a new planet with a small group of people in a dangerous environment and staying friends. It’s the most dangerous part. … So we’re not looking for engineers and pilots. We’re looking for people who have this inherent quality, being the kind of person you want to be stranded with. We can teach them any skill they need to have. Basically, what they need to do is survive. Anything that breaks, a machine or a person, it needs to be fixed. That’s the most important thing they need to learn.”

So far, just two weeks have passed since the mission opened its application process, which involves sending in YouTube clips as well as filling out an online application form.

To date, Mars One has received applications from more than 120 countries. The majority of applications come from the United States (17,324) and China (10,241), with 3,581 from the United Kingdom and fewer applicants from nations like Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Argentina, and India.

“With 78,000 applications in two weeks, this is turning out to be the most desired job in history,” said Lansdorp in a statement. “These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants.

“Mars One is a mission representing all humanity and its true spirit will be justified only if people from the entire world are represented. I’m proud that this is exactly what we see happening.”

Mars One, a commercial space mission intended to put humans in a permanent Martian colony by 2023, has just announced its first science and education partner, University of Twente, a Dutch institution with an entrepreneurial edge.

The mission sounds like a crazy one at the outset: without the support of any governmental space agency, sending human beings to a faraway planet with no plans to ever bring them back to Earth. But founder Bas Lansdorp remains undeterred, following through on his dream with practical financial plans and the million baby steps between an idea and a launch.

Mars One started recruiting civilian astronauts early this year. The company got its first funding a month later and followed that up with its first federally approved contract for developing materials and equipment for the mission.

Today’s baby step brings in the organization’s intellectual partner for the mission. University of Twente will put its scientific research and educational weight behind the startup and its goals, helping Mars One to develop survival techniques for life on an alien world.

For starters, Mars One employees will be contributing to a new engineering college within the university. Called the ATLAS College, the program will launch this September and will encourage engineering students to focus on breadth of study to solve big societal, global problems.

The university’s robotics and mechatronics departments, in turn, will be making contributions to Mars One’s robotic vehicles, and behavioral scientists will be working with the mission’s astronaut recruits on coping mechanisms for high-risk, low-certainty living situations.

“The Mars One mission shows a lot of courage and ambition, and the team clearly dares to think big,” said University of Twente rector magnificus and professor Ed Brinksmain an emailed statement on the partnership.

“As an entrepreneurial university, their enterprising spirit appeals to us a great deal. We hope that from the complexity of an expedition to Mars new research projects will sprout as spinoffs in the fields of solar energy and recycling- solutions for problems we now face on Earth.”

Merlin, SpaceX’s new breed of rocket engines, has finally achieved flight qualification for use on the company’s mission-ready rockets.

The Merlin 1D engine was put through its paces: a total of 28 tests including 1,970 seconds of total testing time. SpaceX says that time is the same amount of time it would take Merlin to complete 10 full missions, making the engine more than capable fo flying on the Falcon 9 rocket.

“The Merlin 1D successfully performed every test throughout this extremely rigorous qualification program,” said SpaceX founder Elon Musk in an emailed statement on the news.

“With flight qualification now complete, we look forward to flying the first Merlin 1D engines on Falcon 9’s Flight 6 this year.”

The first flight of the Falcon 9/Merlin 1D combo will be the low-Earth orbit launch of a weather and communications satellite for the Canadian Space Agency. Later this year, Merlin is set for a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO) launch.

The latest iteration of the Merlin engine began development two years ago. A new feature for the Merlin 1D is the ability to throttle from 100 percent to 70 percent. Other improvements center around increasing reliability, optimizing performance, and decreasing cost and time for manufacturing the engines.

Image credit: The Walt Disney Company

Remember that inflatable extension to the International Space Station that NASA announced earlier in the week? Well, the space agency has finally revealed some photos as well as a demonstration of how it will connect to the space station itself.

The extension, officially called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (or BEAM), will test expandable space habitat technology. The BEAM is scheduled to launch aboard the eighth SpaceX cargo resupply mission to the station contracted by NASA, which is currently planned for 2015. Astronauts will use the station’s robotic arm to install the inflatable BEAM module and then begin a two-year test of the technology, according to NASA.

While the photo above may just look like a super huge spacey baked potato, the BEAM will actually provide much needed room in what’s otherwise cramped quarters.

Check out the simulation video of the BEAM connecting to the station embedded below.

Photo via NASA/Flickr

When the word “inflatable” comes to mind, I doubt I’m alone in immediately thinking about toys and devices that allow you to float while in water. NASA’s latest contract with Bigelow Aerospace has me rethinking that assessment.

The government space agency has awarded Bigelow Aerospace a $17.8 million contract to build an inflatable extension to the International Space Station. The contract is just one of many that NASA has made over the last few years, and these are helping create a vibrant commercial space industry.

Bigelow has dozens of space-faring inflatable prototypes already orbiting the planet, and it has previously signed contracts with SpaceX to transport its gear beyond the atmosphere.

“This partnership agreement for the use of expandable habitats represents a step forward in cutting-edge technology that can allow humans to thrive in space safely and affordably, and heralds important progress in U.S. commercial space innovation,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver in a statement.

NASA is planning to release more details about the inflatable space station expansion at a press conference Wednesday. Until then, check out Bigelow’s BA330 below to get an idea of what an inflatable space habitat looks like.

Via Forbes

SpaceX joined NASA today to talk about what it’s doing in 2013 to get humans in space with commercial space launches.

At a joint press conference with NASA and other commercial crew development (CCDev) participants today, current SpaceX employee and former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman said, “We feel a sense of urgency to get Americans back into space on safe and reliable transportation on American-made rockets.”

NASA said it would be turning more and more low Earth orbit activities over to commercial entities. While the U.S. agency will continue to focus on deep-space exploration, NASA reps said the organization is increasingly comfortable about letting the private sector take responsibility for tasks that lie closer to home, such as International Space Station (ISS) deliveries of cargo and astronauts.

SpaceX, as you may recall, completed the first-ever commercial delivery of cargo to the ISS back in October. As Reisman said, “We already had a rocket-traveling back and forth to the space station. We took the approach, ‘What do we have to do to modify this to carry people?’”

Well, that vehicle design already had windows; that was one step down, about a million to go. In addition to providing ample proof of the company’s financial stability, SpaceX had to design a new launch abort system, life support systems, a new launch tower, ergonomic space suits, and a lot more to get ready for putting people in space. The startup even conducted crew trials on the new designs with NASA astronauts.

All that was 2012. In 2013, SpaceX aims to complete the design, test the hardware, ensure crew safety, and get ready for NASA certification. Here’s an abbreviated timeline and some interior and exterior images of the human-ready spacecraft:

• March: Pad abort test review
• May: Human certification test review
• July: On-orbit and entry preliminary design review
• September: In-flight abort test review
• October: Safety review
• November: Safety review

By December, SpaceX should be ready for its first actual tests of the new systems, starting with the launch pad abort test. “This is not a simulation … we’re going to take a Dragon as flight-like as possible from our pad over at CCAS and demonstrate our capability to get away from the Falcon 9 on the pad from 0 altitude and 0 air speed if we were having a bad day on the pad.”

By 2014, Reisman said, SpaceX will be doing preliminary structure qualifications for the Dragon spacecraft, conducting an integrated critical design review, and finally — the main event — its in-flight abort test in April 2014.

Image credit: jurvetson/Flickr

NASA is warming up more and more to partnerships with commercial space flight companies. In a press conference today, the agency announced that while it’s still focusing its own efforts on deep-space exploration, it’s ready to work with commercial entities — companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and oldster Boeing — especially on low-Earth orbit missions.

“The commercial crew program is just one part of NASA’s overall strategy,” said a NASA rep at the conference. While the agency “obviously [has] a deep space exploration strategy,” the rep continued that NASA is more comfortable than ever with “letting the private sector take a little more responsibility for low-earth orbit.”

“These are very complimentary strategies, we couldn’t do one without the other,” the spokesperson concluded.

In subsequent presentations, a roster of commercial space flight companies showed off their highlights from 2012 — what they’ve been doing with the millions of dollars they’ve received from NASA to develop viable, efficient spacecraft and launches since NASA began working with commercial entities in earnest just a couple years ago.

NASA itself began more fully supporting commercial launches with its commercial crew development program, CCDev, back in 2010. The agency chose a new roster of funded projects for CCDev 2 in April 2011; commercial crew contracts were finalized with SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Blue Origin for the development of spacecraft that could transport human beings. SpaceX wasted no time in taking advantage of the contract; the startup’s first cargo delivery to the International Space Station was completed in October 2012 with deliveries of astronauts coming soon.

Also of note, Congress recently passed an important bill for private-sector space flight. The bill proposed an extension of indemnification for commercial launches, acting as an insurance policy between U.S. corporations in space flight and third parties. This insurance is critical in changing space from a government-controlled zone into a more public resource.

Today, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada gave specific updates on their CCDev activities in the press conference; stay tuned for a breakout post on their individual news items.

Why Space Made a Comeback in 2012

Image credit: NASA

If you didn’t make the cut for NASA space flight but are in good health and desperately determined to go where no human has gone before, you should check out Mars One.

We’ve been keeping close watch over the commercial space trend. As NASA and missions like the ISS inspire the world to look spaceward, entrepreneurs and investors are looking spaceward, as well — and some of their ideas are absolutely killer.

The Mars One mission is independent of any government; it’s a non-profit/for-profit hybrid plan to put people on Mars in a permanent colony by 2023. And today it announced its specs for potential astronauts.

Interestingly, you don’t need to have physics or aeronautics credentials. What’s more important, aside from your general physical health, is your commitment to the cause.

From an email sent to VentureBeat:

Applicants need to be at least 18 years of age, have a deep sense of purpose, willingness to build and maintain healthy relationships, the capacity for self-reflection and ability to trust. They must be resilient, adaptable, curious, creative and resourceful.

Mars One is not seeking specific skill sets such as medical doctors, pilots or geologists. Rather, candidates will receive a minimum of eight years extensive training while employed by Mars One. While any formal education or real-world experience can be an asset, all skills required on Mars will be learned while in training.

The mission’s chief medical director is Norbert Kraft, who previously worked as a senior research associate at NASA. He noted in a statement that while NASA requires careful selection and physical training for astronauts who needed to spend long periods in orbit and/or space flight, he thinks space travel in the modern era is less about military-caliber bravery or Air Force-caliber in-flight experience and more about collaboration and the mental ability to leave Earth behind.

“Now, we are more concerned with how well each astronaut works and lives with the others, in the long journey from Earth to Mars and for a lifetime of challenges ahead,” Kraft said. “Psychological stability, the ability to be at your best when things are at their worst is what Mars One is looking for. If you are the kind of person that everyone chooses to have on their island, then we want you to apply too.”

Minimally, candidates need to be 18 years old at the time of application. Training will take eight years; astronauts are expected to reach Mars by the time they are 28 years old. No upper age range has yet been established. So far, the mission has received more than 1,000 emails of application. The mission’s candidates will be announced in “a global, televised program which ultimately selects which set of four astronauts from those assembled will be the first to go to Mars,” mission reps stated via email.