Pete Worden has been the director of NASA Ames for two days, but he’s already making a big noise. Over at the International Space Development Conference, he’s been plugging not just private sector involvement in lunar missions, but also ‘robots that build robots’ for constructing habitats on the Moon. A von Neumann fan in a position of power – that’s music to my ears.

Who cares what scaremongering professors have to say – I want my nanotech augmentations, and I want them now. Researchers have engineered blood-compatible nanostructures by coating them in the anticoagulant heparin, so that they can exist in the human bloodstream without causing problems. Hopefully I’ll not have to wait too long for my own army of nanomeds to remove the carcinogens and burger fat from my capillaries.

Devotees of panspermia have claimed that the basics of life on Earth may have been delivered by meteorites impacting the planet long in the past. But they may have delivered something older, too – scientists have found traces of carbon in meteorites that may have formed at the same time as the solar system itself, the same sort of stuff found in interplanetary dust particles.

At the International Space Development Conference, the staff of Virgin Galactic are talking about how they see their project coming together. No hard and fast dates for flight (their ‘reactive’ schedule won’t allow for that, apparently), but they say that SpaceshipTwo will feature big windows, zero-G floating room and a notable lack of stewardesses.

Resources are always short on extra-planetary missions – anything that can be sourced locally means a lighter payload, with room for more non-consumables like science kit. Which is why NASA are planning to get astronauts on future Lunar missions to extract oxygen from the soil of the Moon itself. Moondust is mostly oxides which could be heated in a special way to liberate that precious oxygen.