NASA goes for Star Trek Science this week on planetary radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the Final

Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

Beam us up one last time, Scotty, so we can check in with Bob

Casanova, Director of NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. Anti-matter propulsion?

A food replicator,

Nyak has just funded 12 more revolutionary projects,

and we'll talk about a few of them.

Later, Bruce Bats will drop by with some concepts of his own for our new space trivia contest.

And Emily is just around the corner right after we rip and read some interplanatory headlines. Beginning with the Cosmos 1 solar sale update, the Failure Review Board, convened

by the Machaev Rocket Design Bureau, manufacturer of the Volna launch vehicle, has determined that the first stage of the rocket shut down

17 seconds early due to a faulty turbo pump.

The upper stages never separated and an automatic self-destruct system aborted the flight seconds later.

Oddly, some of the tracking data still looks like it could have come from the spacecraft.

You can get the full details in an article by the project's director Lou Friedman.

It's on the web at planetary.org.

As we go to broadcast, the countdown clock for Space Shuttle Discovery's return to Flight has been reset, with NASA hoping for lift-off on Tuesday,

July 26 at about 10.30 in the morning, Florida time.

Also good to go for launch in mid-August is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,

ready to deploy the highest resolution cameras yet

as our exploration of the red planet continues.

There's a nice article about MRO status at planetary.org.

...