SpaceX is Paypal founder Elon Musk’s private space program. Spacefellowship has a round up of the growth the company is experiencing, the hint that NASA is moving towards a 1930’s postal service styled support of private space (ie: paying a small company to provide cargo service to the space station and maybe then manned service instead of paying for all the tech and research themselves, almost a prize oriented approach), and is already getting some big contracts.

For all that we dog on NASA, NASA’s looking toward SpaceX in this matter is nothing short of revolutionary, and SpaceX’s leads into creating a private space program are pretty amazing.

China’s amazing first manned mission did not go off as perfectly as it seemed. They almost lost the craft on the way down.

Forget the $100 laptop, here’s the $100 desktop, and it uses four times fewer chemicals and fossil fuels during manufacturing. It stores everything on a flash card, and uses networking to keep permanent files. Worldchanging has the scoop.

I was not surprised to see that kids are as computer savvy as this report shows them to be, but judging by the media and politicians wringing their hands constantly over the poor kids at risk the moment they step online, one hopes that this kind of awareness propagates out a little more.

Sadly, probably not, as the people who need to read that study and stop hyperventilating are not snagging it in their RSS feeds, huh?

2010 is going to be a big year for manned spaceflight. Bigelow Aerospace is planning the first private space habitat, and India is planning the first launch of their reusable spacecraft by 2010.

India has been testing a space capsule that was recovered, laying the groundwork for manned missions. The space agency also says it plans a Mars mission ‘as early as 2012.’

Certainly bold. And India is moving the time table up. Their last mission prediction for an Indian astronaut was by 2014, and the idea was only first broached in 2006, as India seemed to regard unmanned missions as having the same benefits until late in the year.

[For a rough overview of the story so far, Jeff Foust, as usual, has a great summary article here]