By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come to an interesting conclusion. “It’s even harder to exhibit rats than drugs,” she says. The Home Office eventually granted her the necessary licences to exhibit a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium, some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian cannabis – “as many drugs as we could get our hands on”. But Health and Safety weren’t having the rats. “We wanted to recreate a 7m-long Rat Park,” Fisher sighs, referring to the classic 1970s Canadian experiment that showed opiate addiction in rodents was determined not by the drugs they took, but the living conditions they took them in.

By Johnny Davis for the Guardian

Fisher is the co-curator of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture at the Wellcome Collection in London, and offers a history of narcotics that feels fresh. After all, we hardly need another account of the Romantic poets getting carried away with hashish, or more woolly recollections from acid house revellers who outwitted the police on the M25 while going to Sunrise.

“I don’t think anything similar has been done before,” says Mike Jay, the exhibition’s co-curator and author of an accompanying book. “There’s always been two different discourses, the ‘drug culture underground’ one and a rather more straight-lens way of looking at it, from a medical or political view. It’s the middle ground that feels interesting.”

High Society strives to cover as much of this middle ground as possible. It spans from pre-2000 BC chillum-style pipes fashioned from puma bones, to mephedrone and other internet-distributed synthetic stimulants of the 21st century. Along the way it takes in kava drinking in the South Pacific, betel chewing in Papua New Guinea and cocaine snorting in Weimar Germany. Tea, coffee and sugar also feature (albeit in supporting roles) and there’s plenty on the rise and fall of tobacco.

As such the exhibition is able to make its central premise: very few people live their lives without resorting to some sort of mind-altering substance. Taking drugs, it suggests, is “a universal impulse”. “Drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species,” writes Jay. Later he quotes American anthropologist Donald Brown’s celebrated work Human Universals, which lists “mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances” as one of the essential components of human culture, along with “music, conflict resolution, language and play”. “The public perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with hippies in the 60s; that they’re a modern disease,” Jay says. “The historicality has been lost.”

The curators are at pains to underline the mutability of culture and society, and how a drug’s definition is determined by non-chemical factors such as intent behind its use, its method of administration and the social class of the user. (Nitrous oxide is a medicine when used by doctors, a drug when used for pleasure.) Even so a pattern soon establishes itself: a new mind-altering substance arrives accompanied by extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, gets enthusiastically taken up by sections of the public (usually the idle rich); then addiction and side-effects make themselves apparent over time.

“It was hard to designate drugs themselves as the problem when they were also being promoted to the public at large as the solution,” writes Jay of the nurses, doctors and military officers who were treating local infections with morphine injections in the 1880s, ushering in the first “morphinomaniacs” in the process. Elsewhere the 18th-century botanist and pioneering drug cataloguer Carl Linnaeus frowned upon coffee – he felt it sapped vitality and brought on early senility – but endorsed tobacco as a means of fighting infection. In a tract published in Leipzig in 1707, we see early adopters of tea being reprimanded for “drinking themselves to death” in the mindless pursuit of fashion. Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom. Only alcohol seems to have maintained a constant reputation, viewed as the boorish vice of the corrupt elite in Roman times, banned across much of the Islamic world and the subject of US prohibition in the 1920s.

Still, High Society remains morally neutral. There won’t be any disclaimers. “We’re not doing, ‘Hey kids, drugs are good’, so ultimately we don’t need to do, ‘Hey kids, drugs are bad,’” reasons Jay. “Since that’s basically the entire popular discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and take the subject on its own merit.”

High Society has commissioned some interactive artworks to help convey the quixotic effects of drugs on mind and body in the sober medium of an exhibition space. Joshua White was the resident artist at New York’s Fillmore East theatre during the late 60s. Using bottles of coloured liquids, hand-painted slides, lightbulbs on the end of sticks and clock faces, he projected his psychedelic “liquid light shows” on to live performances by Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, among others. “Was my work best experienced on drugs? I would say so, yes,” says White, who’ll travel to the UK to install his new show at the Wellcome Collection. “Everybody had a different relationship with drugs back then, just as everybody in my parents’ generation had a different relationship with alcohol. Some people had a nice buzz; some people threw up. We would hire speed freaks for our special projects – get them to stay up all night gluing jewels on to a ball.”

There will also be a recreation of the “dreamachine”, the light-emitting cylinder built by artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville. “You look at it with your eyes shut in a dark room, and it supposedly recreates the hallucinatory experience,” explains Fisher.

Other contemporary artwork includes the video piece Cannabis In the UK, of artist Mark Harris reading Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels and Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles to cannabis plants (“I hope it won’t be taken too seriously,” says Harris. “I just thought, ‘If you’re going to read to plants to make them grow, what better than to read to cannabis plants something about the effects of the drug?’”), and photographer Mark Leffingwell’s “collective intoxication” picture depicting 10,000 people gathered at the University of Colorado for a “smoke-in” to commemorate “420″, an event observed across America every 20 April to promote the legalisation of marijuana.

If none of those do the trick, there are plenty of accounts from the history of self-experimentation. There’s the study on nitrous oxide performed by 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy, who got fed up with testing the gas on rabbits, kittens and fish and took heroic quantities himself, reaching the less than empirical conclusion that “nothing exists but thoughts”. There’s the story of the family who discovered the liberty cap mushroom by accident: cooking some up for a morning broth they developed vertigo, visions and the overwhelming sensation they were dying, only to leave the house for help and forget why they had done so a few hundred metres later. (When a doctor did eventually reach them, the situation was scarcely improved by the family’s eight-year-old, whose symptoms proved unique: bursting into raucous laughter every time his terrified parents opened their mouths.) And there’s French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who suggested that the low prevalence of insanity in the Arab world was down to a preference for cannabis over alcohol: testing his theory he swallowed three grams before dinner and found himself preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit.

From more recent times there’s a photograph of “father of MDMA” and sometime US Drug Enforcement Agency employee Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin’s popularisation of ecstasy eventually gave rise to acid house, the last significant drug-led subculture. High Society largely steers clear of examining the hows and whys of such moments; in fact there’s little on why we might be drawn towards illicit drugs in the first place. “I just think it’s self-evident that people wouldn’t take drugs if they didn’t enjoy them,” Jay shrugs.

The most recent UN figures put the illegal drug trade at $320bn (£200bn) a year – the third biggest international market on the planet, after arms and oil. “2011 is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,” Jay says. “That’s the 50th anniversary of global prohibition; they’ve been trying for 50 years to achieve that. What’s so ironic is that 1961 was precisely the time when the drug counterculture formed; the point where policing started to fall apart with the surge in demand that was coming. Today our culture has become even more experimental: we regard it as a good thing to try something exotic and different, in a way that it just wasn’t 50 years ago. So it’s very hard to say, ‘That’s the way we are in culture. Oh – except for drugs, which have to be hived off.’”

Given that more people take more drugs than at any other time in history, you might wonder if they’ll ever be part of a counterculture again. At a time when Keith Richards is a bestselling author off the back of his national treasure status as a chemical dustbin, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken steps to decriminalise marijuana possession in California and Prince Harry is found inhaling “hippy crack”, it’s difficult to see how drugs could be more mainstream. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, marijuana wasn’t fully legalised all over the US,” says Leffingwell. “Most people don’t see it as any more harmful than having a beer.”

Others suggest that the seeds of a new, drug-led counterculture are all around us. “I think smart drugs, things that boost your IQ such as Modafinil, could lend themselves to certain music,” says Jay. “Very techy electronica.”

To return to High Society’s premise, then: the drugs we consume may change – from over-the-counter laudanum in Victorian times, to over-the-internet mephedrone today – but the human relationship with them remains strangely constant. “Nothing’s changed,” says White. “The form changes, the fickleness changes – but our cravings stay the same.”

High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE from 11 Nov to 27 Feb. wellcomecollection.org

However initial alarm wore off when officers realised the 10 or so bears did not behave aggressively and were in fact docile and tame.

Police believe dog food was used to attract the animals onto the farm in British Columbia.

But they say the bears may have to be put down if they have become accustomed to living around humans.

Two people were arrested in the raid.

The five police who went to the farm near Christina Lake, close to the US border, to dismantle the marijuana plantation were amazed when the bears loped into view.

“They were tame, they just sat around watching. At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Fred Mansveld.

In Canada, feeding bears is illegal as it leads to bears associating food with humans and increases the likelihood of bears coming into towns and cities to look for food.

Conservation officers are deciding the fate of the bears

Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics — testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.

Ice and organic chemicals found on an asteroid back the theory that asteroids provided the Earth with the bare necessities of life

Astronomers have detected a coating of ice and organic chemicals on one of the largest asteroids in the solar system.

From the Guardian

The space rock, called 24 Themis, is roughly the size of Sicily and orbits the sun in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, more than 300 million kilometres from Earth.

Asteroid 24 Themis and two small fragments resulting from an impact more than 1bn years ago. Scientists were surprised to find ice and organic chemicals on the asteroid’s surface. Artist’s impression: Gabriel Pérez/Servicio MultiMedia

The discovery supports the idea that asteroids may have brought plentiful supplies of water and organic material to Earth in the distant past and so set the stage for the emergence of life.

Two independent groups confirmed the composition of the asteroid’s surface after observing the 200km-wide rock using Nasa’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) which sits on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Analysis of infrared light glinting off the surface of the asteroid revealed that some wavelengths were being absorbed by water molecules. Further investigation suggested complex organic molecules were also present. The findings are reported in two papers in the journal Nature.

“The organics we detected appear to be complex, long-chained molecules,” said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist at the University of Tennessee and lead author on one of the studies. “Raining down on a barren Earth in meteorites, these could have given a big kickstart to the development of life.”

The discovery of frozen water on the asteroid has surprised some scientists because the sun warms the surface enough for ice to melt. One possible explanation is that ice in the core of the asteroid is heated into water vapour, which seeps through pores in the rock and freezes temporarily when it reaches the surface.

In the second study, a team led by Humberto Campins at the University of Central Florida timed its observations to take account of the asteroid’s rotation every eight hours and produce a crude map of the surface. It shows that the entire surface of the asteroid is coated with a layer of frost no more than one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick.

In an accompanying article, Henry Hsieh, a planetary scientist at Queens University in Belfast, likened the ice to a “living fossil”: a remnant of the solar system that many considered long gone.

“This is a thin layer of ice. It’s not like going outside on a snowy day,” he told the Guardian. “But we didn’t really think water would survive in the asteroid belt, and certainly not on the surface of an asteroid.”

The discovery is intriguing because it may finally explain how two thirds of the Earth came to be submerged in water, turning a parched rock into a haven for life.

The Earth formed close to the sun as a dry boulder 4.5bn years ago, but asteroids from cooler regions of space would have slammed into the surface for millennia, releasing any water they contained on impact. At the time, asteroids were more numerous and may have carried far more water than has been found on 24 Themis.

Some scientists believe asteroids may have delivered water to every planet in the solar system, but Earth’s rocky surface, size and orbit ensured water condensed and remained on the ground, ultimately forming vast seas and oceans.

“Each asteroid might not have carried a lot of water, but if you strike a planet with a few thousand or million of them, it would gradually build up,” Hsieh said.

The finding of frozen water as far out as the main asteroid belt suggests water might also be spread throughout alien solar systems. “The building blocks of life – water and organics – may be more common near each star’s habitable zone,” said Emery. “The coming years will be truly exciting as astronomers search to discover whether these building blocks of life have worked their magic there as well.”

From the Guardian, by Cian O’Luanaigh

A gene that controls red blood cell production evolved quickly to enable Tibetans to tolerate high altitudes, a study suggests. The finding could lead researchers to new genes controlling oxygen metabolism in the body.

An international team of researchers compared the DNA of 50 Tibetans with that of 40 Han Chinese and found 34 mutations that have become more common in Tibetans in the 2,750 years since the populations split. More than half of these changes are related to oxygen metabolism.

The researchers looked at specific genes responsible for high-altitude adaptation in Tibetans. “By identifying genes with mutations that are very common in Tibetans, but very rare in lowland populations we can identify genes that have been under natural selection in the Tibetan population,” said Professor Nielsen. “We found a list of 20 genes showing evidence for selection in Tibet – but one stood out: EPAS1.”

The gene, which codes for a protein involved in responding to falling oxygen levels and is associated with improved athletic performance in endurance athletes, seems to be the key to Tibetan adaptation to life at high altitude. A mutation in the gene that is thought to affect red blood cell production was present in only 9% of the Han population, but was found in 87% of the Tibetan population.

“It is the fastest change in the frequency of a mutation described in humans,” said Professor Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California Berkeley, who took part in the study.

There is 40% less oxygen in the air on the 4,000m high Tibetan plateau than at sea level. Under these conditions, people accustomed to living below 2,000m – including most Han Chinese – cannot get enough oxygen to their tissues, and experience altitude sickness. They get headaches, tire easily, and have lower birth rates and higher child mortality than high-altitude populations.

Tibetans have none of these problems, despite having lower oxygen saturation in their tissues and a lower red blood cell count than the Han Chinese.

Around the world, populations have adapted to life at high altitude in different ways. One adaptation involves making more red blood cells, which transport oxygen to the body’s tissues. Indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes have higher red blood cell counts than their countrymen living at sea level, for example.

But Tibetans have evolved a different method. “Tibetans have the highest expression levels for EPAS1 in the world,” said co-author Dr Jian Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute in Schenzhen, China, a research facility that collected the data. “For Western people, after two to three weeks at altitude, the red blood cell count starts to increase. But Tibetans and Sherpas keep the same levels,” he said.

“I just summitted Everest a few weeks ago,” added Dr Wang. He said the Sherpas and Tibetans were much stronger than the Westerners or lowland Chinese on the climb. “Their tissue oxygen concentration is almost the same as Westerners and Chinese but they are strong,” he said “and their red blood cell count is not that high compared to people in Peru.”

“The remarkable thing about Tibetans is that they can function well in high altitudes without having to produce so much haemoglobin,” said Prof Nielsen. “The entire mechanism is not well-understood – but is seems that the gene responsible is EPAS1.”

Nielsen said the gene is involved in regulating anaerobic and anaerobic metabolism in the body (cell respiration with and without oxygen). “It may be that the [mutated gene] helps balance anaerobic versus aerobic metabolism in a way that is more optimal for the low-oxygen environment of the Tibetan plateau,” he said.

Writing in Science, where the results are published today, the authors say: “EPAS1 may therefore represent the strongest instance of natural selection documented in a human population, and variation at this gene appears to have had important consequences for human survival and/or reproduction in the Tibetan region.”

Dr Wang said future research will focus on comparing the levels of EPAS1 expression in the placentas of Tibetan and Han Chinese women.

Other rockets of this class, such as Boeing’s Delta IV and the Atlas V, operated jointly by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are children of the military-industrial complex. Though built by private firms, they are the result of taxpayer-financed programmes, often on a “cost-plus” basis, that only superficially resemble anything which a real entrepreneur would recognise as free-market capitalism. By contrast SpaceX, though subsequently buoyed up by a $1.6 billion contract with NASA, America’s space agency, to fly missions to the international space station, had to raise the initial development money itself—much of it from Mr Musk’s back pocket.

The important point about Falcon 9, so called because its lift-off is propelled by nine of SpaceX’s proprietary Merlin rocket motors, is that it is powerful enough to put people into orbit. Other private space companies are either restricted to launching small, unmanned satellites (Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Pegasus, for example), or—in the case of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic—hope to take tourists on suborbital hops of the sort that NASA gave up almost 50 years ago and the Russians never bothered with in the first place. SpaceX has gone for the jugular. Though it will take many more launches and a lot of inspections before the system can be “man-rated”, as the jargon has it, prototypes of manned space capsules are already lying around in SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California.

Just in time, too. For America’s current manned system, the government-owned space-shuttle fleet, is about to be withdrawn from service. The last shuttle flight is pencilled in for November. After that, American astronauts who wish to visit the space station (largely an American-financed project, despite its “international” soubriquet) will be reduced to hitching lifts on Russian rockets. If Falcon 9 does, indeed, manage to get man-rated, they may be spared that indignity. Those astronauts that are there will, in any case, be able to have their groceries delivered by Falcon 9. The question of man-rating does not affect its ability to take supplies to the station.

The vehicle itself is a two-stage affair. The heavy lifting is done by the nine-engine cluster, fuelled by kerosene and liquid oxygen. That burns for three minutes, before being jettisoned. The payload, a capsule known as Dragon, is then carried into orbit by a single-Merlin-engined second stage that burns for a further six minutes. The unmanned version of that capsule is designed to accommodate six tonnes of goodies for the inmates of the space station, or could be replaced by a heavy satellite, if that is what the client wants.

The heavy-satellite-launching market is quite crowded already, though, what with Atlas, Delta, the “European” (in reality, almost exclusively French) Ariane and Russia’s Proton. So Mr Musk’s real bet is on the ultimate man-worthiness of the system. That will not only open up the taxi-to-the-space-station market, but will also allow him to tout for tourist business. At the moment, the Russians have this sewn up (though Space Adventures, the travel agency that actually books flights on those rockets for people who have the requisite $20m or so, is American). Who knows, a little competition might even bring the price down from something that is out of this world, to a level that is merely stratospheric.

From the New York Times by Kenneth Chang

“Every astronaut we have come in here just says, ‘Wow,’ ” said Robert T. Bigelow, the company founder. “They can’t believe the size of this thing.”

Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers — primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch — would arrive a year later.

In 2016, a second, larger station would follow. The two Bigelow stations would then be home to 36 people at a time — six times as many as currently live on the International Space Station.

If this business plan unfolds as it is written — the company has two fully inflated test modules in orbit already — Bigelow will be buying 15 to 20 rocket launchings in 2017 and in each year after, providing ample business for the private companies that the Obama administration would like to finance for the transportation of astronauts into orbit — the so-called commercial crew initiative.

President Obama’s budget proposal for 2011 calls for investing $6 billion over five years for probably two or more companies to develop spacecraft capable of carrying people into space. Then, instead of operating its own systems, like the space shuttles, NASA would buy rides for its astronauts on these commercial space taxis.

“This represents the entrance of the entrepreneurial mind-set into a field that is poised for rapid growth and new jobs,” Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said in February. “And NASA will be driving competition, opening new markets and access to space and catalyzing the potential of American industry.”

Officials have been careful not to say their commercial crew plan relies on a market beyond NASA, but for now, Bigelow appears to be the only non-NASA buyer for commercial crew services.

“Nobody,” Mr. Bigelow said of competition he sees on the horizon.

Thus, the rosier promises of the president’s plan rest on this enigmatic, 100-employee company located on 50 acres of desert not far from the casinos and strip clubs and the ability of Mr. Bigelow, an iconoclast who made his fortune in real estate including the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, to get his dreams off the ground.

He has spent about $180 million of his own money so far and has said he is willing to spend up to $320 million more. An expansion of the factory will double the amount of floor space as the company begins the transition from research and development to production.

Mr. Bigelow only occasionally gives interviews, and except for Michael N. Gold, the director of Bigelow’s Washington office, the employees almost never speak publicly. A company document titled “Some Important Bigelow Aerospace Cultural Values” implores employees, “Keep your work and the work of your co-workers very private from people outside the company.” (Mr. Gold said that the confidentiality stems from federal regulations designed to protect technological information and that the engineers are busy working.)

The Las Vegas site is hemmed by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.

The soundness of the business case is unknown to outsiders. Mr. Bigelow declines to say if he has firm commitments from any countries or companies to rent space on his space stations. In recent years, he has played down the notion that he is building a space hotel for rich tourists, although he says space tourism could provide a part of his business.

Over the past year, Mr. Gold visited countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, England and Sweden to gauge interest. A stay on a Bigelow station, including transportation, is currently priced at just under $25 million a person for 30 days. That is less than half the more than $50 million a seat that NASA is paying for rides alone on Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Doubling the stay to 60 days adds just $3.75 million more.

For a country or company willing to sign up for a four-year commitment, the lease for an entire six-person module would cost just under $395 million a year, and that would include transportation for a dozen people each year. “You see why this is attractive for the sovereign client market,” Mr. Gold said.

The Bigelow prices are good through 2018, and Mr. Bigelow said the prices would drop by then if, as he expects, rocket prices drop.

“We’re very comfortable with our numbers,” he said, although he declined to discuss the details. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, which is the most optimistic in reducing launching costs, estimates that rides to space on its Falcon 9 rockets would be $20 million a seat.

“You have to trust a little bit that we’re making these investments because we think it’s going to make sense economically at the end of the day,” Mr. Bigelow said. “We won’t execute our business plan if those numbers aren’t there.”

His space stations are not his only interest in space. “I’ve been a researcher and student of U.F.O.’s for many, many years,” Mr. Bigelow said. “Anybody that does research, if people bother to do quality research, come away absolutely convinced. You don’t have to have personal encounters.”

He added: “People have been killed. People have been hurt. It’s more than observational kind of data.”

Other views that run counter to mainstream science include a belief in the power of prayer and a disbelief in the Big Bang theory.

The idea of inflatable spacecraft dates back almost to the beginning of the space age, solving a stubborn conundrum with putting stuff in space. Rockets are tall, but not particularly wide. With inflatable spacecraft, the structure can be packed tightly into the payload and then filled with air once in orbit.

NASA’s Echo I and Echo II satellites, launched in 1960 and 1964, were large Mylar balloons. NASA commissioned Goodyear to build prototypes of an inflatable space station, which looked like a big rubber inner tube.

The rubber space stations never flew, in part because of an obvious design weakness — they could pop if hit by meteoroids.

The idea remained dormant until the 1990s, when NASA started exploring how to build living quarters for a human mission to Mars. William C. Schneider, then the senior engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, returned to the inflatable design.

Instead of rubber like the 1960s Goodyear design, Dr. Schneider used an airtight bladder surrounded by Kevlar straps. “It dumps its pressure load into the straps,” Dr. Schneider said. “Those two together make a very efficient design.”

Outside the straps, alternating layers of aluminized fabric and foam absorb and disperse the impacts of micrometeoroids, providing better protection than metal structures, Dr. Schneider said.

Even though he was sure the design was sound, he built two prototypes of the TransHab module and demonstrated their resilience in a swimming pool and a vacuum chamber. “People would think of it as a balloon,” said Dr. Schneider, who now is a visiting professor at Texas A&M University. “In cases, it was six times as good as needed. It’s absolutely verified.”

In the meantime, the Mars plans were shelved as too expensive, and TransHab was reimagined as a crew quarters module for the International Space Station. Then the space station costs grew, and in 2000, Congress prohibited NASA from spending any more money on TransHab.

Mr. Bigelow, 66, said that he was inspired by NASA’s successes of the 1960s, culminating with the Moon landings, and that he always hoped to invest in space someday. He read about TransHab in 1998, and learning of the project’s imminent demise, he established Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 and bought an exclusive license to the NASA patents.

Dr. Schneider joined Bigelow as a consultant. The Bigelow designs are essentially very close to his NASA work, Dr. Schneider said, with some changes like replacing the Kevlar with Vectran, another bullet-resistant fabric. There are also some notable improvements like the addition of small windows, already tested on the Genesis I and II test modules that were successfully launched from Russia using converted ballistic missiles.

“He had great manufacturing capability,” Dr. Schneider said. “They have some real good engineers as well. I’m sure they will be very successful.”

The biggest hole in his plans, Mr. Bigelow said, is the one not entirely in his control: getting to and from the space stations.

For a while, Bigelow and Lockheed Martin were collaborating on a small capsule that would launch on an Atlas V rocket, which currently launches Air Force satellites and other payloads. Lockheed Martin won the NASA contract for building the Orion crew capsule for NASA’s Constellation program and dropped out of the work with Bigelow.

Mimicking the $10 million X Prize that spurred the development of the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, Mr. Bigelow offered $50 million to anyone who could build an orbital spacecraft. No one tried to claim the prize before it expired in January.

Bigelow is collaborating with Boeing using $18 million that NASA has provided for preliminary design of a commercial crew capsule.

Keith Reiley, the program manager at Boeing for the capsule, said he was not very familiar with Bigelow’s space station plans, but was impressed with what Bigelow has contributed to Boeing’s capsule. “They’re a lot more entrepreneurial than we are,” Mr. Reiley said, “and it’s refreshing for us.”

If the Boeing spacecraft is ready by 2014, that is when the dance of Bigelow space station modules will begin.

A habitat called Sundancer, with an inflated volume of about 6,400 cubic feet, would launch first. A separate rocket would then carry two Bigelow astronauts to take up residence in Sundancer as additional pieces — a second Sundancer, a larger habitat of about 11,700 cubic feet, and a central connecting node — are launched. The modules are to dock by themselves with the astronauts present to fix any glitches.

Once the stations are up, Bigelow still needs to demonstrate that it can juggle the logistics of supplying food, water and air, as well as fix the inevitable glitches that will arise. Mr. Bigelow said that he would hire people with the needed experience and skills, and that space stations were not all that different from hotels.

“I’ve had four decades of serving people, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people, all over the southwest part of the United States,” he said. “I have four decades of building all kinds of things. The principles are the same.”

As a private company, Bigelow can operate space stations much more efficiently than NASA and its governmental partners can operate the International Space Station, Mr. Bigelow said. (Another of the company values declares: “Make up your mind quickly. Don’t take forever, people are waiting, the company is waiting, the future is waiting and time costs money.”)

NASA’s interest in inflatables has also been revived once again. Among several large technology demonstration projects proposed in the president’s 2011 budget is an inflatable module for the International Space Station. Bigelow is currently talking to NASA about that.

Mr. Bigelow envisions variations of the inflatable modules being used for a Moon base or a mission to Mars.

“Our hope is that we can serve NASA,” he said. “Because we can do it so much more economically.”

From The Times Online by James Bone

As the manhunt for Christopher “Dudus” Coke entered its third week, police said that Mr Coke, wanted in the United States as the alleged head of the Shower Posse drug gang, monitored the entrances to his bastion at Tivoli Gardens in Kingston with a network of CCTV cameras before slipping away shortly after the army stormed the area.

Soldiers searching the slum that is pockmarked with bullets found a warren of tunnels and sewers leading all the way to Kingston harbour thus providing a possible escape route from the country — although the chief of Jamaican police insisted their “best intelligence” indicated that Mr Coke remained on the island.

The violence has claimed 73 lives so far, but police say that some of the casualties were not what they seemed.

“There were two women among the civilians killed. The rest are all males and some were dressed like females at the time they were killed,” Owen Ellington, the police commissioner, told reporters.

Mr Coke, 42, Jamaica’s most powerful “don”, remained in hiding yesterday while talks were said to be continuing between his lawyers and US officials over terms for a possible surrender.

Police believe that he left Tivoli Gardens as early as 4pm local time last Monday — hours after hundreds of soldiers stormed his barricaded redoubt to arrest him for extradition to the United States.

“We will catch him, we will execute that warrant, and he will face justice,” said Mr Ellington.

The reputed crime boss is believed to have shaved his head and beard to change his appearance.

A former senior police officer urged the security forces to search the homes of politicians and other high-profile people for the fugitive — despite a botched army raid on a home in the high-class neighbourhood of Kirkland Heights in the early hours of Thursday that killed the brother of a former government minister.

Reneto Adamas, the retired senior police superintendent, told a meeting of the Rotary Club on Thursday: “[He may be hiding] at the house of the politicians, the house of certain people in society and there is a particular house that I have great respect for that I will not mention, but a word to the wise is sufficient.”

Police said that after the Government’s decision on May 17 to extradite Mr Coke, he paid to import up to 400 gunmen from outside Tivoli Gardens to defend the area barricaded by his supporters. It was reported that the hired gunmen received up to J$100,000 (£780) a day. According to The Gleaner newspaper, police believe that defences were masterminded by an explosives expert formerly of the Jamaican security services.

Photographs made public by the authorities showed improvised bombs similar to those seen in Afghanistan, with explosives packed next to scrap metal and cooking gas canisters, wired to be detonated by remote control from homes or rooftops.

Police recovered caches of petrol bombs after it was reported that hundreds of gallons of fuel were purchased to bolster the defences.

With snipers defending the barricades, it took soldiers almost 12 hours to break into Tivoli Gardens.

“It took our troops three hours to get from Beckford Street to the MPM [Metropolitan Parks and Markets] building. This is a mere 200 metres, a three-minute walk for the average Jamaican,” said Major Ricardo Blackwood, an army spokesman.

“This speaks to the kind of armed resistance that was faced. The gunfire was consistent and sustained and it was evident that the gunmen used the vantage of high-rise buildings to fire on the security forces; these high-rise buildings were also used as sniper positions.”

When troops seized Mr Coke’s headquarters at Tivoli Gardens they discovered a CCTV system that enabled him to monitor all the entrances. They also found large amounts of local and foreign currency and copies of the extradition documents filed by the US Government, which Mr Coke appeared to have obtained illicitly.

Searches have recovered 28 firearms, including 14 rifles, and almost 9,000 rounds of ammunition, as well as nine grenades, dynamite and eight bulletproof vests.

Police continued to hunt for arms, however, saying that many weapons were concealed in black plastic bags in heaps of rubbish and manholes.

About 980 people were rounded up for questioning, including 67 youths and four women. Many were being held in the National Arena. Police said that at least 400 men were from outside the Tivoli Gardens area. Most have since been released.