Tourists take pictures of a NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 14, 2010.

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - PASADENA | Fri Aug 3, 2012 8:04pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - PASADENA Calif. Aug 3 (Reuters) - NASA will pay more than $1 billion over the next 21 months to three companies to develop commercial spaceships capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station, the agency said Friday.

The lion's share of the $1.1 billion allotted for the next phase of NASA's so-called ?"Commercial Crew" program will be split between Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, a privately held firm run by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Boeing will receive $460 million to continue developing its CST-100 capsule, which is intended to fly aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. ULA is a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, was awarded $440 million to upgrade its Dragon cargo capsule, which flies on the firm's Falcon 9 rocket, to carry people.

In May, a Dragon capsule became the first privately owned spacecraft to reach the station, a $100 billion outpost that flies 240 miles above Earth. The test flight was part of a related NASA program to hire commercial companies to fly cargo to the station.

Privately held Sierra Nevada Corp received a partial award of $212.5 million for work on its Dream Chaser, a winged vehicle that resembles a miniature space shuttle which also launches on an Atlas 5 rocket.

All three firms are prior recipients of NASA space taxi development work. The new awards will more than triple NASA's investments in commercial crew programs, which so far total $365 million.

Unlike previous NASA development programs, costs are shared between the government and its selected partners.

"?The companies also are bringing money to the table. This is a way of allowing the United States to lead in the development of new space systems that are human-capability and then taking those systems for commercial purposes, as well as for NASA purposes in the future," program manager Ed Mango said.

Since the space shuttles were retired last year, NASA is dependent on partners Russia, Europe and Japan to reach the station. Russia will remain the sole entity capable of flying crew until U.S. companies develop systems, which NASA hopes will be within five years.

Shut out of the competition was Alliant Techsystems which hoped to parlay an ongoing unfunded NASA partnership agreement into a paying contract.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos's startup Blue Origin, which won $25.7 million during two predecessor programs, did not bid for the integrated design contracts awarded Friday.

Three other firms - Space Operations, American Aerospace and Space Design - submitted proposals but were eliminated for not meeting requirements, NASA's associate administrator for space operations Bill Gerstenmaier said during a conference call with reporters.

(Irene.Klotz@thomsonreuters.com)

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

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Germany's Katrin Holtwick takes part in a practice session with kinesio tape on her stomach at the Olympic beach bolleyball main court at the Horse Guards Parade in London July 26, 2012.

LONDON | Wed Aug 1, 2012 2:38pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - German beach volleyball player Ilka Semmler wears it on her buttocks - in pink. Swedish handball player Johanna Wiberg prefers it in blue from her knee to her groin. British sprinter Dwain Chambers has even worn it with a Union Jack design.

Athletic tape made in every color under the sun seems to be the latest must-have sports injury treatment at London 2012, where athletes may have been influenced by other big name tape fans such as Serena Williams and David Beckham.

Called Kinesio tape and developed by a Japanese doctor more than 30 years ago, the adhesive strapping is designed to provide muscle and joint support without restricting movement.

According to Kinesio's product website, it is also designed to be used with a particular taping technique - a skill practitioners need to learn on a special training course.

More than 4,000 people in Britain are now trained in the art of Kinesio taping, it says, and many of them look after some of the country's top sportsmen and women.

But does it really work?

Compared with the abundance of its use, rigorous scientific research on Kinesio tape is scant. But a handful of research papers suggest its ability to relieve pain or improve muscle strength is limited.

"Kinesio tape may be of some assistance to clinicians in improving pain-free active range of movement immediately after tape application for patients with shoulder pain," wrote scientists in one study published in the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physiotherapy.

But the researchers added their findings did not support the use of Kinesio tape for decreasing pain intensity or disability in patients with shoulder problems.

SCIENTIFICALLY SUPPORTED?

In a review of all the scientific research so far, published in the Sports Medicine journal in February, researchers found "little quality evidence to support the use of Kinesio tape over other types of elastic taping in the management or prevention of sports injuries".

Kevin Anderson, managing director of Kinesio UK, which supplies the tape in Britain and trains people in how to apply it, says the scientific research has yet to catch up with what athletes and physiotherapists say about the tape's benefits.

"There's a lot more needed on the research side to confirm the positive results we're seeing so far," he told Reuters.

"There's nothing magical in the tape, it certainly can't improve your performance or make you into Superman, but the way people use the tape is to lift the skin, reduce the pressure and that helps relieve pain and swelling."

Whatever the science, German beach volleyball player Sara Goller sported two long pink strips of the tape on her left leg during matches on Tuesday, while her partner Laura Ludwig had two vertical blue strips on her stomach.

"I don't really mind the color, it's more about what it does. It can release or put tension on a muscle, it depends on what you want. Our physio is really good at doing it," Goller told Reuters.

FADS, FASHIONS AND PLACEBOS

John Brewer, a professor of sports science at Britain's University of Bedfordshire, remains doubtful.

"As a scientist, I'm still not convinced about the underlying mechanisms," he told Reuters, voicing skepticism about the supposed 'lifting' effect and the ability of tape applied to the skin to enhance the performance of muscles deep inside the body.

Steve Harridge, a professor of human and applied physiology at King's College London, said many athletes appeared to be wearing tape even when they had no injury, possible hoping for some preventative or enhancing effect.

"It may be a fashion accessory, and it may be just one of those fads that come along from time to time, but to my knowledge there's no firm scientific evidence to suggest it will enhance muscle performance," he told Reuters.

Both scientists agreed, however, that there may be a benefit, in the form of the placebo effect.

"The fact that athletes think it's going to do them some good can help in a psychological way," said Harridge.

An effective placebo, Brewer said, "could make all the difference between success and failure".

(Additional reporting by Ross Chainey, Thomas Pilcher and Nigel Hunt, editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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1 of 18. Michael Meyer (L), lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, and John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist, California Institute of Technology look on during a news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calfiornia August 2, 2012. A graphic of the MSL Curiousity rover and the cameras on board is seen in the background. The rover is set to land in the late evening of August 5, 2012.

PASADENA, California | Thu Aug 2, 2012 7:51pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was about a week away from wrapping up an 11-month journey to the Red Planet in 1999 when engineers noticed a problem - the spacecraft, designed to study Mars' environment, was not where it was supposed to be.

The gap grew alarmingly over the next few days. On September 23, Climate Orbiter began the brake to enter Mars' orbit as planned, but disappeared behind the planet 49 seconds early, severing radio contact with Earth. It was never heard from again.

Launching probes to Mars is not for the faint of heart. Out of the 40 spacecraft dispatched to the Red Planet, only 14 lived to fulfill their missions.

Against those grim odds, NASA is poised for its most unorthodox and risky landing yet. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory is scheduled to touch down at 1:31 a.m. EDT Monday (0431 GMT) next to a mountain that may harbor life-friendly environments.

"This is the hardest NASA robotic mission ever attempted," NASA's associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld told reporters during a pre-landing news conference last month.

To deliver the one-ton robotic geologist near the mountain's base, engineers designed a contraption that would make cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg beam. The rover, about the size of a Mini Cooper car, is too heavy to bounce to the planet's surface in airbags or fly itself with rocket thrusters, systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers.

Instead, Mars Science Lab will be lowered to the ground on a tether spooled out by a flying platform that works like an aerial crane. NASA is the first to admit the idea sounds crazy, but managers are convinced it will work.

"We've done everything we could. We've tested everything we could test. We built everything to the best of our ability," said Doug McCuistion, who oversees NASA's Mars exploration programs. "Once you understand it, it's not a crazy concept."

History is not on NASA's side, though the United States has fared far better than Russia when it comes to Mars exploration. Out of 19 attempted missions, Russia and the former Soviet Union have had only a few partial successes.

Launch failures claimed nearly half of Russia's probes, including the ambitious Phobos-Grunt sample return mission last year. Other spacecraft sailed blindly past Mars or burned up in the planet's atmosphere during landing attempts.

Newcomers Japan and China have fared no better. Only Europe, which operates the Mars Express orbiter, has had beginner's luck on Mars.

"We learn from these things even if they aren't successful," McCuistion said.

Investigators have attributed the failed 1999 Climate Orbiter mission to human error: The flight software used metric units while the ground system that wrote the code used Imperial measures.

Two months later, a companion lander bit the dust - literally - when its rocket engines apparently shut down too early, causing the probe to crash to the ground.

And even when the engineering is perfect, Mars itself can throw mean curve balls. NASA's Mariner 9 and two Soviet orbiters arrived in May 1971 to find a global-wide dust storm in progress.

"We don't have the capability to predict these things," McCuistion said. "That is why Mars wins an awful lot of the time."

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Jackie Frank)

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SINGAPORE | Sun Jul 29, 2012 1:07pm EDT

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - From giant whirlpools to currents 1,000 km wide, scientists said on Monday they have uncovered how vast amounts of carbon are locked away in the depths of the Southern Ocean, boosting researchers ability to detect the impact of climate change.

Oceans curb the pace of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. The Southern Ocean is the largest of these ocean carbon sinks, soaking up about 40 percent of mankind's CO2 absorbed by the seas.

But until now, researchers were unsure what mechanisms were involved because of the remoteness and sheer size of the Southern Ocean.

"By identifying the mechanisms responsible for taking carbon out of the surface layer in the ocean, we're in a much better situation to talk about how climate change might impact that process," said oceanographer Richard Matear, one of the authors of the Southern Ocean study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The team of British and Australian scientists found that currents that take carbon from the surface to the depths occur at specific locations, not uniformly across the ocean as previously thought.

They found that a combination of winds, currents and whirlpools create conditions for carbon to be drawn down into the deep ocean to be locked away for decades to centuries. Some of the plunging currents were up to 1,000 km (600 miles) wide.

In other areas, currents return carbon to the atmosphere as part of a natural cycle.

But overall, the Southern Ocean is large net carbon sink, the authors say, calculating the area between 35 and 65 degrees south takes up the equivalent of 1.5 billion metric tons (1.65 billion tons) of CO2 a year, or more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Japan.

Scientists worry that a warming planet could disrupt this natural pattern by changing wind patterns and ocean currents.

Matear said by figuring how the Southern Ocean worked and using a new monitoring network of robotic ocean-going devices researchers will get a much better handle on how the seas between Australia and Antarctica are changing.

"Climate change will definitely interact with this process and modulate it," Matear, of Australia's state-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, told Reuters.

(Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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This artist's concept depicts the rover Curiosity, of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, as it uses its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface.

PASADENA, California | Sun Aug 5, 2012 4:28pm EDT

PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA plans to follow up a decade-long search for Mars' lost water with a mission to learn whether the Red Planet once harbored other ingredients necessary for life.

The astrobiological hunt begins once the $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab rover Curiosity lands itself beside a towering mountain that rises from the floor of a vast, ancient impact basin called Gale Crater.

Touchdown, monitored from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is scheduled for 10:31 p.m. Sunday Pacific time (1:31 a.m. EDT on Monday).

"It's a big science goal. We're not just looking for water anymore," said California Institute of Technology geologist John Grotzinger, the lead mission scientist.

"The expectations go up. The scientific challenge is much greater. It's just going to be harder to address this question of habitability," he told Reuters.

Scientists considered hundreds of landing sites before choosing Gale Crater, which probably formed when an asteroid or comet crashed into the planet some 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago.

From high-resolution images taken by orbiting satellites, Gale Crater's central mound, known as Mount Sharp, appears to consist of layers of sediment rising like a stack of cards 3 miles into the sky, taller than the crater's rim.

The most likely origin of the mountain is that it formed from the remains of whatever material filled up the basin long ago. How it was left standing in the middle of Gale Crater, a 96-mile-(154-km)wide bowl located near the planet's equator, is a mystery, one of many scientists hope to answer during Curiosity's two-year science mission.

Regardless of how it formed, scientists consider Mount Sharp a gift of time.

Nothing like it exists on Earth, where plate tectonics, erosion and other natural phenomena constantly reshape the planet's surface.

"We have the opportunity to start in the past, rove up the surface of Mount Sharp and come through time to see how the environments have changed," said Michael Meyer, NASA's Mars exploration program scientist.

WARMER, WETTER MARTIAN PAST

A succession of previous rovers, landers and orbiting spacecraft have gathered compelling evidence that Mars, which is about half the size of Earth and 50 percent farther away from the sun, was not always the dry, acidic, cold desert that appears today.

NASA's strategy since resuming Mars exploration following the 1970s-era Viking missions there has been to look for the chemical and physical fingerprints of water, which is necessary for life - at least as it has evolved on Earth.

The second ingredient in the recipe for life is carbon, which provides organic structure. Carbon will be far more difficult to detect on Mars, if it exists, because the same processes that produce rock tend to destroy organics.

The planet's harsh radiation environment doesn't help either.

"We have a radiation-rich environment on Mars that can destroy organics, so even if it was there, it may be hard to find a place where it's been preserved," Meyer said.

On Earth, the oldest evidence for life dates back about 3.5 billion years. Fossilized remains of single-celled microorganisms were found in 1958 inside a type of rock known as chert. This glass-like rock may exist on Mars as well, and it is not the only material that can preserve organics like a time capsule.

"The challenge for Mars exploration is to first try to identify environments that might have been habitable and then ask, 'Is this the kind of place where organic carbon could have been preserved?'" Grotzinger said.

"With Curiosity, we don't have the ability to look for life, or even fossil life, but we do have the ability to look for organic carbon, so we try to find those environments conducive for preservation. That's the hard part," he said.

The oldest sections of Mount Sharp may overlap the window when life emerged on Earth, a time when Mars is believed to have been warm and wet.

Curiosity's landing site inside Gale Crater is one of the lowest regions on Mars, stacking the odds that water, if it existed there, flowed down to the basin's floor. Mount Sharp may be the remains of this ancient lake bed and perhaps a place that life once called home.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Steve Gorman and Jackie Frank)

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n">Aug 2 (Reuters) - Westlake Chemical Corp's quarterly net profit rose 42 percent on lower feedstock and energy costs.

The company, which makes basic chemicals, vinyls, polymers and fabricated building products, said net income rose to $115.5 million, or $1.72 per share, from $81 million, or $1.21 per share.

Revenue dipped 1 percent to $914 million.

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MOSCOW | Sun Jul 29, 2012 8:41am EDT

MOSCOW (Reuters) - An upgraded Russian unmanned spacecraft successfully linked up with the International Space Station on Sunday on its second attempt to test a new docking system, Russia's space agency said.

The docking set aside doubts over the new Kurs-NA rendezvous system that will deliver astronauts and future cargoes to the orbital station after a botched first test when the equipment malfunctioned due to low temperatures earlier this week.

The operating system functioned properly after it was allowed to warm up, according to a statement from the U.S. space agency NASA.

Kurs-NA is an upgrade of the Kurs docking gear used for years on Russia's manned Soyuz and robotic Progress spacecrafts.

The system consolidates five antennas into one, has updated electronics and is designed to improve safety and use less power, according to NASA.

The Progress ship re-docked with the Pirs module at 0100 GMT (9 p.m. EDT on Saturday), the Russian space agency Roscomos said in a statement, for a brief final stay before the single-use craft, laden with space station trash, is due to burn up on re-entry over the Pacific Ocean on July 30.

Since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttles last year, the United States has been dependent on Russia and is paying $60 million per person to fly astronauts to the ISS, a $100 billion research complex orbiting 240 miles above Earth.

Moscow is struggling to restore the prestige of its once-pioneering space program after a string of launch mishaps last year, including the failure of a mission to return samples from the Martian moon Phobos.

Six astronauts are currently aboard the orbital outpost: American Sunita Williams, Japan's Akihiko Hoshide and Russian Yury Malenchenko joined cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin and US astronaut Joseph Acaba earlier this month.

(Reporting By Alissa de Carbonnel, editing by Tim Pearce)

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Malaysian soldiers prepare their protective gear prior to the slaughter of pigs at a farm in Sungai Nipah, 60 miles southwest of Kuala Lumpur, after an outbreak of the virus that later came to be known as Nipah virus. March 20, 1999.

HONG KONG | Fri Aug 3, 2012 5:47pm EDT

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A virus that is very similar to the deadly Nipah and Hendra viruses has been discovered in fruit bats in Australia and researchers are hoping it can help them find ways to fight those highly dangerous cousins.

The Nipah virus kills 40-75 percent of the people it infects while the Hendra virus, which normally affects horses, kills more than 50 percent of the people it infects.

But the newly discovered Cedar virus, with 90 percent of its genes identical to those of Hendra and Nipah, failed to cause any disease when researchers injected it into rats, guinea pigs and ferrets, they wrote in a paper published on Friday in the journal PLoS Pathogens (Public Library of Science).

They are now comparing the DNA of all three viruses to tease out genes that are responsible for the deadliness of the Nipah and Hendra, said lead author Gary Crameri, at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's Australian Animal Health Laboratory.

"We have already done genetic analyses and identified those things that are different between Hendra/Nipah and the Cedar," Crameri said in a telephone interview.

"Our plan now is to genetically engineer these viruses so we can take some parts of the Hendra genome that don't appear in Cedar but play some role in how deadly they are, put them into Cedar and then do infection trials with the new hybrid virus and see if it is as deadly."

Researchers hope to home in on the rogue genes to find cures for Nipah and Hendra, which are also found in bats.

"There is no secret that the pathogenicity of the Hendra and Nipah lie in their genes and this will help us narrow down some of the options. From there, we can start to think about therapeutic approaches, new drugs that we can use to target these viruses so that when people get infected, we can treat them, something we don't have now," Crameri said.

Bats are a natural reservoir for many viruses, including highly pathogenic ones like rabies, Ebola, SARS, Hendra and Nipah. Although Cedar appears not to cause any disease in the few animal species that researchers tested the virus on, it is not known if it causes disease in people.

A Nipah outbreak in 1998 killed at least 105 pig farmers in Malaysia and one abattoir worker in Singapore. There have been numerous outbreaks since in Bangladesh and India.

While the cases in Malaysia and Singapore were due to contact with infected pigs, the South Asian outbreaks were mostly due to consumption of raw date palm juice that had been contaminated with urine or droppings from infected fruit bats.

The Hendra virus kills 75 percent of the horses it infects. While it rarely jumps from horse to people, four of the 7 human cases recorded since 1994 in Australia have resulted in death.

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

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The Virgin Galactic SpaceShip2 (VSS Enterprise) glides toward Earth on its first test flight after being released from its WhiteKnight2 (VMS Eve) mothership over Mojave, California October 10, 2010.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Aug 1, 2012 8:20pm EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Commercial suborbital spaceflights should bring in between $600 million and $1.6 billion in revenue in their first decade of operations, according to a study commissioned by the U.S. and Florida governments and released on Wednesday.

Tourism drives about 80 percent of the demand for suborbital flights, which reach about 63 miles above the planet's surface before plunging back through the atmosphere.

The thrill ride gives fliers a few minutes to float in microgravity and a view of the Earth set against the blackness of space.

Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Richard Branson's London-based Virgin Group, is one of six firms developing reusable suborbital spaceships, an analysis by The Tauri Group of Alexandria, Virginia, found.

Prices currently range from $200,000 for a ride on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger, two-pilot vehicle currently undergoing testing, to $95,000 for a flight on privately held XCOR Aerospace's planned two-seater Lynx vehicle.

Virgin Galactic, which is aiming to begin commercial service around 2014, already has $70 million in deposits from 536 people, Chief Executive George Whitesides said at a related congressional hearing on Wednesday.

The Tauri Group believes there are about another 7,500 wealthy people waiting in the wings.

"?Our analysis indicates that about 8,000 high-net-worth individuals from across the globe are sufficiently interested and have spending patterns likely to result in the purchase of a suborbital flight - one-third from the United States," the report said.

"?We estimate that about 40 percent of the interested, high-net-worth population, or 3,600 individuals, will fly within the 10-year forecast," it added.

The study, which included surveys of 200 people with a net worth of least $5 million, valued the fledgling industry at $600 million in its first decade, based on current market conditions and interest.

The market could be worth nearly three times that if marketing and consumer interest grows in the wake of successful flights, the study said.

"?Further potential could be realized through price reductions and unpredictable achievements such as major research discoveries, the identification of new commercial applications, the emergence of global brand value, and new government (especially military) uses for suborbital reusable vehicles," the study said.

After tourists, the next biggest group of potential users are in the research community. Other potential markets include technology flight demonstrations, media and public relations, education, satellite launching, remote sensing and suborbital travel from one destination to another, a technology that is likely beyond the study's 10-year time frame.

The $277,000 study, titled ?"Suborbital Reusable Vehicles: A Ten-Year Forecast of Market Demand," was paid for by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial spaceflight, and the state of Florida, which is home to NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Cynthia Osterman)

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