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The . The 100m-tall, super-slim Ares 1-X rocket has completed its demonstration mission.

Time will now tell whether this event was a giant leap on the road to a new astronaut launch system or just a spectacular side-show.

Nasa wants to use the fully developed Ares 1 to propel its next-generation crewship into orbit, and expects the rocket to be flying in 2015.

A has suggested . It doubts Ares can be made to fly before 2017, and has pointed to potentially easier and cheaper options for getting humans into low-Earth orbit.

Wednesday's launch may not have advanced Ares' cause, but it will not have harmed it either.

The flight went ahead after a series of frustrating from weather officers.

Conditions had seemed benign enough except for some persistent high cloud.

The concern was that if the vehicle had climbed through this cloud, a build-up of static might have interfered with radio signals sent to and from the rocket.

If the flight had gone wrong for some reason and the vehicle had begun to veer out of control, this "" could have interfered with a command to destroy the rocket.

The risks associated with a maiden flight are always higher than with a proven vehicle and so nothing could be left to chance.

The 1-X had an explosive charge running the full length of the booster and officials at the spaceport would not have hesitated in using it if required to do so.

As we now know, the weather finally obliged towards the end of the launch window and the Ares 1-X was given a "go" for 1530 GMT.

The 1-X uses the same booster technology (with modifications) that helps lift the space shuttle off the launch pad. The higher thrust-to-weight ratio of the slender 1-X meant of course that its departure from terra firma had a little more zip about it.

Everything appeared to go pretty much to plan: a two-minute powered flight to more than 130,000ft (45km), with the vehicle moving at almost five times the speed of sound.

Separation of the booster from the upper part of the rocket occurred right on cue.

The booster was flipped by thrusters to slow it, and it fell towards the ocean, deploying a new parachute system during the descent.

The team sent to recover the booster from the water also tried out a method of retrieval not previously used to salvage the shuttle's discarded motors.

One point of note was the way the upper part of the 1-X - a physical simulation of what the top of an Ares 1 should look like - appeared to start its tumble motion earlier than expected.

All of the immediate goals do seem to have been achieved. But it will take months for engineers to assess the data returned by the more-than-700 sensors on the 1-X.

The demonstrator was intended to help verify design assumptions so that when the Ares 1 proper is built, everyone can be confident it will fly as expected.

Which brings us back to the "big question": will the Ares 1 actually be developed?

This is one only President Barack Obama can answer. He also has to find a budget to support whatever solution he proposes to get US astronauts into space once the shuttle is retired.

His expert panel has told him that by Nasa to do anything "meaningful" in the realm of human spaceflight.

The weeks ahead in Washington are sure to be fascinating. The lobbying will be intense, and Congress is sure to want to have a say.

I know science reporters like myself are usually given the "space beat" in the mainstream media, but I'm very aware that the decision which has to be taken is not a scientific one. It's a political one; and given the size of the US space sector, it has major economic considerations.

Many thousands of jobs will hang on President Obama's Ares deliberations.

Watch this space.

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The Augustine committee set up by President Barack Obama to review US human spaceflight plans was adamant that .

Its published on Thursday contains no "recommendations", only "options".

But a careful reading of the document leaves you in little doubt where the panel-members believe the future of American astronauts should lie.

And certainly, the press conference given by committee chairman Norm Augustine and MIT Professor Ed Crawley to present the report sounded very much like the announcement of a preferred route-map to me.

So where is the US headed; what catches the eye in reading the document?

Well, first and foremost, there is now recognition by all that . Nasa cannot do what it is being asked to do on the budget it has.

There are a number of ways you could develop a meaningful human exploration programme, but it is going to take at least an additional $3bn a year to make it happen.

I'm going to start with the space station because it is the element in the equation that probably has the greatest consequence for us here in Europe.

The panel is of the view that the life of the space station really should be extended from 2015 to at least 2020 because, if it isn't, the US will severely damage its international relationships.

Also, it seems a nonsense to have gone to the expense and effort over 25 years to plan and build the station to only then use it for five years (which is the situation we're currently headed towards).

But here's the uncomfortable bit for Nasa. The panel believes the and are too expensive and over-engineered to be used for taxi services to and from low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Ares 1 and Orion also arrive too late to be much use in serving the space station - even one with its life extended.

A cheaper, faster solution might be to ask the commercial sector to provide taxi services instead.

Nasa would oversee a competition in which at least two suppliers were brought to market.

The agency would also "seed" the development of the privateers, carrying some of the capital risk so investors could see a return on their investment.

These space taxis would be simple, Gemini-style capsules launched on perhaps an existing, upgraded rocket.

Nasa would set the technical requirements and ensure quality/safety targets were met.

This process would cost the taxpayer the same or slightly less than developing Ares 1 ($5bn), but the ongoing costs would be much cheaper. For example, the lower mass of the private capsules would mean they could put down on land, negating the need for the expensive sea operations required for splash-downs.

In the panel's view an Ares 1/Orion launch to LEO would cost about $1bn per mission. It believes the private sector could do it at a much lower price to Nasa.

The Augustine committee says it has had contact with several companies which are keen to pick up this option. I guess the front-runner right now is the and being developed by in California.

However, the committee recognises there are major risks in following this option. The competition may not deliver - the suppliers could fail, or pull out. This would leave Nasa in a terrible bind and so it would have to have a Plan B up its sleeve.

Augustine suggests the Plan B take the form of accelerating the development of the heavy-lift rocket which America must have eventually anyway if it is going to go beyond LEO.

So if the privateers did go belly up, the heavy rocket could enter into service not far behind.

In Nasa's current plans, of course, the is set to be the heavy-lift rocket, but in its present guise it is not being designed to launch the Orion capsule, only the equipment needed to take the Orion capsule away from Earth.

If Obama does decide commercial is the right course for LEO, then Ares 5 as currently envisioned is also ruled out...

...but what is ruled in, perhaps, is the Ares 5 Lite - a slightly less capable Ares 5 but with the capacity to launch the Orion capsule.

Augustine seems more neutral on heavy-lifters than it does on the LEO solution, but the Ares 5 Lite came out well in the assessments.

And just to be clear, you have to continue with the development of the Orion capsule or you can't go beyond LEO (because the private capsules won't have that capability).

Where the panel really do seem most sure and confident is on where astronauts should go and the route they should take.

Augustine and Crawley championed in the their press conference what they termed the "flexible path" - this idea of moving out to progressively more challenging and exciting targets... to asteroids, loops around Mars, even landing on the Martian moon Phobos.

The report makes this interesting observation:

"It actually requires less energy to fly by Mars than to land on and return from the surface of the Moon. Next in terms of energy requirements is the lunar surface, followed by Mars orbit. The surface of Mars requires the most energy to reach."

All this is for President Obama to ponder. The report is a good read; it's not overly technical. I recommend it. Also, if you haven't seen it yet, read former Nasa Administrator .

Dr Griffin has deep reservations about a commercial solution to LEO operations.
He was also annoyed that the committee hadn't seemed to consider what he believed the simplest solution to Nasa's problems - which was to restore the funding Ares had lost and that had knocked it off course.

Watch this space.

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Just another grand talking shop or the kernel from which something really quite interesting could grow?

Ministers from 29 European Space Agency (Esa) and European Union (EU) member states will tip up at just outside Prague in the Czech Republic on Friday.

The attendees - which will also include industrialists and academics - are going to discuss Europe's current role in the human exploration of space and how it might change in the future.

Europe is feeling rather good about itself on this issue right now, and with good reason.

Its astronaut is the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS); it has a sophisticated science lab () in orbit; and an impressive robotic which will play a leading role in keeping the ISS fully supplied and functional in the years ahead.

But Europe is : the independent means to send its own astronauts into orbit.

And that means most of what Europe does in the realm of human space exploration, it does so at the invitation of the Americans or the Russians.

Europe has looked at developing its own crew transport system in the past - notably the - but it has shied away from carrying through sometimes extensive research into an operational system.

Money is an issue, of course. Crew transport systems are not cheap to develop. Just ask the US space agency, which is spending something like $300m a month on developing the various elements of its new .

And looking at Esa's budget line, it's difficult to see where one would find the extra sums needed to produce a manned launch system. Enter, perhaps, the EU.

For those not familiar with how Europe organises itself, it is necessary to realise that Esa and the EU are separate entities; their memberships, although similar, are by no means facsimiles of each other. Esa includes member states that are not in the EU and vice versa.

Nonetheless, in recent years, the two organisations have forged a closer working relationship. They have combined on two multi-billion-euro space projects: one to develop a GPS-like sat-nav system called ; and the other to develop an Earth-monitoring programme called .

The EU saw a political imperative to initiate these two space projects, and called in "the experts" at Esa to try to make them happen.

If you've been following the debate about the , you'll know also that space is to be regarded as a shared responsibility for the EU and its member states.

So could we now see Brussels extend its interests from sat-nav and Earth observation into human space exploration as well?

Don't expect grand announcements from Stirin Castle. This is the start of something, not an end point. Stephan Nonneman is head of the European Commission's Space Policy and Coordination Unit. He told me:

"The intention is to launch the debate on a political level. We will start a process. We will probably have a second conference in a year's time. In the meantime, Commission services together with Esa and the member states are going to explore scenarios, evaluate socio-economic impacts, and study the problematics.
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We will then have the second conference where the results of this one will be put on the table for further discussion."

to work out how its ISS freighter could be upgraded, first to have the capability to bring cargo safely back to Earth but also - perhaps - to act as a manned spaceship.

Such a vehicle would be launched on the Ariane 5, just as Hermes was designed to do. It might cost five billion euros to make it happen. The assessment will give us a clearer figure.

But if the European Union sees a political imperative in human space exploration then the experts at Esa could conceivably have some extra money behind them to deliver an independent astronaut transport system.

It's all good speculation. Watch this space.

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The UK forged the industrial revolution. It was a nation of engineers; or at least that was what my grandfather told me.

It certainly resonated with this particular boy, who was brought up in the city of (Bristol) and who went to a school at the end of the runway where used to take off on test flights.

This misty-eyed reflection has been prompted by something I've just read in an industry submission to the government consultation on whether or not there should be a dedicated UK space agency (see my previous post).

Certain sectors of industry are desperate to see the establishment of a space agency because they dislike intensely the way policy in the UK is currently developed and executed.

They feel the devolution of decision-making and budgets to government departments and research councils has effectively castrated UK space strategy.

They complain bitterly about the way in which these groups (and their wallets) must first be corralled into moving in one direction before Britain can make any sort of commitment to a major European project.

The submission in front of me reads:

"Almost by definition, the current approach ensures that the UK never initiates a European programme but simply finds itself in the position of follower having to take a view on the merits and then, if positively disposed, trying to fight for an appropriate role for its industry and to ensure the system requirements meet UK needs."

This corner of industry believes the present arrangements force it to live off scraps. In particular, to live off the crumbs that fall from the tables of France and Germany. These are the two industrial power-houses in European space activity.

These nations consistently put large sums of money into European space programmes to guarantee their companies get the choice contracts.

Who builds Europe's mighty ? Not the UK. Who builds Europe's biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft, the ? Not the UK.

Who is building the Sentinel spacecraft that will spearhead Europe's far-reaching environmental monitoring programme, ? Not the UK (not yet anyway).

Who will build the for Europe? Not the UK.

Who leads the production of Europe's which will obtain remarkable new scientific datasets on the state of the planet? The UK has just of the first seven.

Now, for sure, British industry provides important - and often critical - instruments, sub-systems and components. But I'm left asking myself: when was the last time this particular reporter went to a British factory to witness the grand unveiling of a major European spacecraft prior to launch?

I'm hoping it will happen soon with the satellite, which will test the technology needed to detect the ripples in space-time generated by colliding super-massive black holes. Or perhaps , a satellite to measure the Earth's winds.

British industry is acting as the prime contractor on these missions. To find the last major European spacecraft on which UK PLC had the same role, you have to go back to the likes of at the beginning of this decade, and even into the 1980s and the comet-chasing Giotto probe.

But does that really matter? Does it really matter to the UK Met Office who builds the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) spacecraft so long as it gets the data from them to make its weather forecasts?

Does it matter to British land hydrologists and oceanographers that Europe's , due to launch in a couple of weeks, was built in France and Spain, just as long as they too have access to the data?

If you are just a "user" of space, the answer might seem to be "no, it doesn't matter". And this explains a lot about current British space policy. It's driven by "user need", for the reasons I've previously posted on.

But go back to that quote: "... and to ensure the system requirements meet UK needs." That is an interesting segment.

It reminds me very much of some comments I received last year from Professor Alan O'Neill, the director of the UK's National Centre for Earth Observation. He was concerned at the time that the "user wallets" would not find sufficient unidirectional momentum to give Britain a plum role on one of the forthcoming GMES Sentinels. He said:

"If we are a downstream recipient of data, a third-party user, we will not be involved in influencing the agenda and the prioritisation for the instruments. Our industry will not be competing to build those instruments.
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"And by not having close proximity to the actual data, we will lose first-mover advantage, not just in science but in downstream applications. So we're either in the vanguard and mixing it, or gradually over time we will become third division."

In other words, it matters even to the users of data that the UK actually gets to lead the production of major European spacecraft from time to time.

The point he was making - and industry has now made to the space agency consultation - is that it is by building things that you gain influence.

Incidentally, picking up the previous post, if you want to read the STFC submission, it is now .

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Did you make your submission?

Today saw the closure of the

Should Britain set up such a body to manage its civil space activities or should it continue with the present arrangement - the so-called "partnership" facilitated by the British National Space Centre (BNSC)?

For those coming late to this debate, let me just recap what I think are the core issues.

Whereas other European nations like Germany, France and Italy have national space agencies that speak with single voices backed up by single budgets, the UK's approach is to devolve space policy decisions to a club of "users".

These users are the government departments and research councils that have interests in space science or space-borne services.

They each have a slice of the civil space budget (about £270m) and spend it as they see fit - where they will get maximum return for their interests.

The arrangement is supposed to ensure that limited space funding chases "need" and not "vanity". In other words, the UK is not in space to wave flags; it is there to get a real, identifiable payback on its investment.

And making the BNSC partners think hard about where they want their little pot to be spent is meant to guarantee that each pound is stretched as far as it will go.

It is this approach that explains why Britain - for example - tends to put its money into programmes that develop the next generation of telecoms satellites and not into human spaceflight (astronauts).

Things like the space station do not have straightforward, easy-to-understand benefits, whereas everyone makes telephone calls and watches TV pictures beamed from the other side of the globe.

No-one has an argument with efficiency or with making budgets work hard. The question is whether the partnership is now the best architecture for achieving those ends.

Critics of the present arrangement argue that the club has failed the UK on some "big decisions" of late. It has difficultly, so the argument goes, in adopting coherent positions on complex programmes.

The classic example cited is the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme, Europe's flagship programme to build a co-ordinated system for Earth observation and monitoring.

It will combine all the data obtained by environmental satellites, air and ground stations to provide a comprehensive picture of the planet.

It plays to many scientific and policy strengths in the UK but when the European Space Agency (Esa) asked who was interested in taking part, the UK club of partners had immense difficulty in pulling together a budget to participate at a level commensurate with those perceived strengths.

As a consequence, other European nations are now leading much of GMES when the UK might have considered this to be its home turf.

And let's face it, space programmes don't get smaller over time; they get ever bigger and even more complex.

And, as with all scientific endeavours, the boundaries between disciplines become blurred. Innovations in one area are picked up and used in another.

We'll see a beautiful example of this in the next few weeks when Europe launches its Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (Smos) Earth-observation spacecraft.

The mission concept is essentially an astronomical radio telescope turned upside. It uses techniques developed to look at the stars to map key parameters on the Earth's surface.

I spoke with Keith Mason the other night. Professor Mason is chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It looks after the funding of physics and astronomy in the UK.

It is the biggest shareholder in the BNSC partnership and is responsible for what is known as the mandatory subscription to Esa, that is, the basic membership fee Britain must pay to be part of Esa.

The STFC council has given a cautious but positive welcome to the idea of a dedicated British space agency. Professor Mason's view is that the idea is a good one, provided it improves on the current situation:

"The main trick here, I guess, is to have a vehicle that is able to lead as opposed to co-ordinate. BNSC is a co-ordinating body. It is there to bring together partners that may or may not want to work together. It can facilitate; it can't dictate.
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"What we have to do is get more value out of the investment. We need to realise the synergies much more effectively. We need to translate the technical inputs into much broader areas. We need to be much more joined up in the way we exploit space.

I've heard it said that the space agency consultation is a waste of time because the fundamental problem is a lack of government support for space. If you're not going to fund the policy properly, it makes no difference how you make that policy. That's what some are saying.

But others would argue that that argument is back to front. If funding is limited, surely it becomes even more important that the organisational structures are correct?

We await the outcome of the consultation.

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I have to share a picture with you. It features the UK planetary scientist .

Colin, you will remember, was behind the gallant effort to put a lander on the surface of the Red Planet late in 2003.

was carried to Earth's neighbour by Europe's . It was ejected from the satellite and sent towards the atmosphere, but that was the last we saw of it.

Some believe that Beagle got down but for whatever reason couldn't contact home; (and this seems to be the official line) it encountered a thinner atmosphere than expected and simply opened its chute too late. In other words, it went smack into the ground.

For a while, Colin was the most famous scientist in Britain. In the build-up to the landing, his face - and those famous whiskers - were hardly off the TV.

I caught up with Colin the other evening at a new photographic exhibition, , which is being displayed at the Royal Albert Hall.

It features many of the UK's leading astronomers and planetary scientists - all in poses and settings that say something about them and the disciplines they follow.

The pictures are a celebration of the , and are the work of , a professional photographer and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

He's got some smashing images with some great stories behind them, and we'll have a special feature with Max talking about a selection of them in the coming days.

But it was the picture of Colin that caught my eye because it was taken just around the corner from where I used to live.

It's Sandy quarry in Bedfordshire. It's an analogue - as they say - for the Martian surface: the are tested there (as was Beagle).

It's the perfect location if you have a bit of kit that needs to be able to cope with rocks and dirt with a red tinge.

Yep: Mars is closer than you think.

Max let me in on a secret, though: he had to touch up the picture to paint out the little bits of greenery that had sprouted up between the rocks.

Those familiar with the area will know that the dominating feature on the landscape is the ; if you look very closely at Colin's visor, you can see the mighty mast in reflection.

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It wasn't Hollywood; it wasn't Bruce Willis. But I don't really think anyone truly expected that it would be.

to see if it could kick up sufficient debris that it might be able to detect the presence of water.

It has long been suspected that some of the craters in the Moon's polar regions might hide ice in their permanently shadowed regions - ice that was delivered billions of years ago by comets or water-rich asteroids.

We all looked intently at the images fed back to Earth by a closely trailing spacecraft, LCROSS (the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite).

We were told to look for a sort of shimmering in the pictures.

Our armchair view of events switched between a visible camera and an infrared one.

I didn't see anything in the images; those around me didn't see anything either.

We weren't the only ones. One Twitter feed I checked belonged to colleague Dr Chris Lintott, the co-presenter of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's long-running astronomy programme, The Sky At Night.

Chris was following everything in California at the Palomar Observatory, which has a 200-inch telescope. : "No plume visible from Palomar".

The good news, according to Nasa, is that LCROSS did manage to detect the impact, and the spectrometers onboard have returned important data.

The impact was set up to make the biggest debris field possible. The 2.2-tonne rocket upper-stage went into the Moon at 2.5km/s at an angle of 80 degrees.

The target - the Cabeus Crater - was chosen because lighting conditions would be ideal to illuminate the ejected dirt and rock, some of which was expected to lift 10km above the crater floor (Cabeus is 100km wide and 3-4km deep).

There is a huge mountain that sits on the rim of Cabeus, but light streaming down a valley towards the crater should have made for excellent observing conditions.

Nasa will take its time to update us on the results. Don't expect immediate and definitive statements about success or failure. So many telescopes - both professional and amateur - were trained on this event that it will take some time to produce a full assessment.

All Nasa will say for now is that is has the data it needs to do the analysis.

But what if it gets a minimal or zero signal for water in any ejected plume? What does that mean?

If the signal is very low, it has "resource implications". Remember, this mission was part of the robotic preparation to return astronauts to the Moon.

A series of unmanned probes will map the lunar surface in the coming years, to find the best landing sites for humans.

If water-ice exists at the poles in shadowed craters, it could be useful - to drink and to make rocket fuel. It could help sustain a long-term base of the kind envisaged by President George Bush when he set Nasa on a new course of exploration in 2004.

And with every kilo of payload costing something in excess of $20,000 to launch to the Moon, any item which can be "purchased" locally would be a huge advantage.

But if there really is little in the way of water, it may put a big question mark against the idea of bases. We've seen already from the Augustine committee set up by President Obama to review the Bush plans that thinking in the US may already be shifting to the idea of a few, shorter visits, and not extended stays.

It could be, of course, that the rocket just hits a dry hole; it could be that plenty of water-ice is buried on the Moon but that it's not very evenly distributed. However, this would seem unlikely.

Another reason Cabeus was chosen was because it was shown by a previous mission to be an excellent candidate.

The Lunar Prospector spacecraft which finished its mission in 1999 found a strong signal for hydrogen at the crater. Hydrogen by itself is not proof of the presence of water, but most think of it as a reasonable proxy.

Over to you, Nasa.

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