Bruce Sterling is talking about how the Chinese are gearing up how to manage the fall out from massive natural disasters. Not unexpectedly, their tactics call for big, centrally planned, multi-year approaches.

According to Personal SpaceFlight blog, several Russian space tourist candidates are getting their applications vetted by Roskosmos, and that Space Adventures (the group that handles these private space travelers) has two seats set aside on Soyuz flights in fall ’08 and spring of ’09. The names for who’s flying should be coming soon.

I always find it ironic that it’s the Russian space program that’s taking willing, paying passengers, while the US is not. Who would have believed that 20 years ago?

This is wild, but apparently there is a would healant made out of shrimp shells that’s about to get space tested. Apparently they’re curious to see how chitosan, the biopolymer that makes up these space-age bandaids, acts in outer space. According to the New Scientist:

Chitosan is a water-soluble form of chitin, an abundant long-chain natural biopolymer that is a key component of the semi-transparent exoskeletons of arthropods from insects to lobsters, and in the cell walls of fungi.

Some researchers believe natural chitin helps protect arthropods from bacterial infection, important because they lack a conventional immune system. The soluble chitosan carries a positive charge that attracts the negatively charged membranes of bacteria, stopping them from multiplying and in some cases killing them. The charge also initiates clotting of red blood cells.

It would suck to get the ability and technology to get to space, but be trapped by an orbiting cloud of space debris that stops us from launching in the near future…

I thought this was a pretty nifty site NASA made that allows you to find out all sorts of things about the space station. Propaganda, to be sure, but still nifty.

To be honest, the station has been creeping slowly together that I hadn’t realized how big it had gotten when I used the 3-D walkthrough. Also cool was the shuttle fly around of the station.