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The launch of a space shuttle is an awesome experience.

First, you see it - an incredibly bright light from its engines. Then you hear it - a low-pitched rumble and a deafening crackling.

But the overriding sensation that stays with you is one that you feel - a vibration that goes right through your body.

With launch to the ISS on Friday, we are now really in the end days of this extraordinary vehicle.

There are just before the orbiter is retired and America has to turn to a new concept - a new vision - for human spaceflight.

A led by former Lockheed Martin chairman and chief executive Norm Augustine is in the process of giving President Obama its assessment of the different options for getting future US astronauts into space.

The new White House incumbent must then decide on a way forward, taking into account the advice of his top scientist John Holdren and new US space agency chief Charles Bolden.

The current Nasa roadmap calls for the creation of two replacement rockets known as and . The first would launch a crewship, Orion. The second, much bigger rocket would be used to lift heavy cargo.

This "space architecture", which goes under the name , would aim to get humans beyond low-Earth orbit again, to go back to the Moon by 2020 and then to Mars someday.

The Augustine committee has held a number of its meetings in public and its discussions have given some remarkable insights into the difficulties that now face the roadmap.

For one thing, it is billions of dollars short of the funding it needs for full implementation.

It also contains a strange paradox: it produces a new crew-carrying capability at just about the same time as the US is currently scheduled to abandon the International Space Station (ISS) in 2016 by ditching it in the Pacific Ocean.

In other words, Nasa would be able to launch its astronauts into space but they wouldn't immediately have anywhere to go.

No-one I speak to in the space business seriously believes that will happen. Indeed, most seem to think that if there is one sure-fire outcome of the review process then it will see the US sign up to an extension of ISS operations, in the first instance to 2020 and then perhaps .

The reasoning that is given: what is the point of spending $100bn to build an enormous science lab in sky only to dump it just as it becomes fully capable?

It is thought that the cumulative lab time devoted to microgravity research in orbit prior to the ISS programme is about six months if you take all short-duration flights together.

Even in its assembly phase, the ISS has surpassed that, and in truth its science endeavours haven't really got going yet.

The station has only just gone from a three-person crew to a six-person crew. That doubling actually translates to a four-fold increase in astronaut time available to science activity.

Friday's shuttle launch also marks something of a watershed. Discovery's mission will be fitting out the station with the last of its major research facilities.

Among the final delivery boxes is the Materials Science Research Rack, which incorporates the European-built . This is really the start of materials science on the ISS.

I've about the advantages of studying the melting and solidification of alloys and other metals in the absence of gravity.

The types of fine-scale structures that form when molten samples cool in weightless conditions can look very different to how they would on Earth, and this can fundamentally change the properties of those materials.

The intention is not to mass-manufacture in orbit but to better understand processes and systems such that when the lessons are applied back on Earth in the large-scale industrial setting, huge benefits accrue.

I spoke with Olivier Minister just prior to the launch of Discovery. Olivier coordinates the materials science experiments on the ISS for the European Space Agency, and I asked him to give me an example of the sort of return that could come from the aluminium research that will initiate MSL operations:

"If we can have a full understanding and control of the casting process of an engine block, for example, we could conceptually direct the solidification process such that the properties are what they should be where they should be.
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"In the bulk of the engine block, it doesn't matter too much but in the location of the cylinder lining, you would want to have specific microstructures and properties to limit the wearing out of the engine block.
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"And in terms of a production process: if it takes only 30 seconds instead of 40 seconds to fill the mould of the engine block and solidify it, then at the end of the year on several hundreds of thousands of engine blocks, that's a massive economy."

If the US does indeed extend its commitment to the ISS, it won't of course ease the financial headache it now faces. Money spent on the station is money that cannot be spent on other activities such as developing new rockets.

And if the Augustine committee buys into the ISS, it will narrow somewhat the options the President can pick up.

Mark Uhran, Nasa's associate administrator for the space station, is in no doubt however where American commitment should lie, and he spoke bullishly last weekend about the need to maintain the orbiting platform:

"It is clearly a benefit-cost decision that has to be periodically revisited over the next few years. It's expensive to continue to operate and maintain a spacecraft of this magnitude in orbit, and the benefits have to be worth that cost.
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"We're confident that once we ramp up this R&D programme, we will have ample justification to continue it. How many years it continues remains to be seen in the success and productivity of the research programme."

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It was supposed to be the first great scientific discovery of the 21st Century - or so many researchers thought when they rushed down to the bookmakers to place bets at what were deemed at the time to be ludicrously generous odds.

The physicists believed that they were close to making the first direct detection of , the ripples in space-time generated by supernovas and coalescing .

Their confidence was buoyed by the knowledge that colossal new machines in the and that were finally capable of making the crucial breakthrough were just coming online.

They simply couldn't believe their luck when a sceptical offered to pay out £500 for every pound wagered if someone could bag a gravitational wave before 2010.

That was over five years ago. Today, just a few months shy of the decade's end, many of those same scientists that... er, um, they still haven't detected a gravitational wave.

I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek here because the international team's "non-detection" is actually a lot more remarkable than I make out - and I'll explain why in a moment.

But let me first back up a little and dwell on the significance of gravitational waves.

These elusive phenomena are an inevitable consequence of . If what we understand about Einstein's theory of gravity is correct - and we believe that it is - then they must be out there.

It is just a question of having the necessary sensitivity to detect them, because, unlike electromagnetic waves - the light we see all around us - gravitational waves are predicted to be extremely weak.

If one were to pass through your body, it would alternately stretch your space in one dimension while squashing it in another. Such changes, though, would be fantastically small.

hunting for this disturbance bounce lasers down L-shaped tunnels that are hundreds or thousands of metres long. They aim to find deviations in the experimental set-up that can be equivalent to one one-thousandth of the width of a proton, one of the particles that makes up all atoms.

There are a few of these facilities dotted around the globe - the Ligo network in the US, and the Geo 600 and Virgo establishments in Europe.

Any accelerating mass should send gravitational waves radiating outwards at the speed of light; but only really big events, such as exploding stars and merging black holes, are expected to disturb space-time sufficiently to register at the observatories.

Being able to routinely detect gravitational waves would bring a step change in astronomy.

It would allow scientists to probe those places where technology that is dependent on light - that is, traditional telescopes - cannot go: to the edges of black holes, for example; and back beyond when we think that the first light pushed out across the Universe, to the very first moments after the Big Bang.

The itself ought to have produced copious gravitational waves, and these should still be washing over us even now. And this brings me back to that non-detection.

The fact that the Ligo and Virgo Collaborations haven't yet seen this background signal in their super-sensitive equipment is itself very interesting to scientists. That's because the strength of this cosmic hubbub should be directly related to the way the Universe was in the first minute after the Big Bang and the physics occurring at that time.

Put another way, the non-detection puts new, tighter limits on the models used by cosmologists to describe the earliest events.

The gravitational wave seekers will get there eventually. Their equipment is being upgraded to become even more sensitive. The detection may not come soon enough to wipe the smile off the bookmakers' faces; but it will come.

And I'll leave you with a new picture of (LP). This is a demonstration spacecraft being built in the UK. It's a forerunner to a very big that will attempt to detect the gravitational waves emitted when gargantuan black holes at the centres of galaxies merge.

LP should fly in 2011 to trial the critical technologies needed by the full mission.

The engineering involved is astonishing and I'll blog about it at a future date.

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• - What's this?

There are chunks of Devon coastline in space. I jest not.

On the end of at the International Space Station, there is a small cluster of boxes known as (European Technology Exposure Facility).

And tucked in one of those boxes are tiny cubes of rock taken from a cliff face at not far from Lyme Regis.

They don't do anything. They just sit there, sunning themselves as the ISS circles the Earth at 27,000 km/h.

The cubes have been in orbit now for about a year-and-a-half. They were taken up to the station when Columbus itself was .

But in about a week's time, astronauts from the will go and retrieve them.

It's time for the Beer rock to come home.

The cubes are part of a that investigates how life might survive elsewhere in the Solar System.

When the scientists get the cubes back in the lab, they will try to find out if any of the microbes that normally live in the cliffs of Beer have survived their stay in space.

If they have, there could be something very special about them.

Living in rock is not easy at the best of times, but in space the Beer microbes would have been exposed to extreme ultraviolet light, cosmic rays, and dramatic shifts in temperature.

All the water in the rock would also have boiled away into the vacuum of space.

from the Open University is part of the experimental team. He told me:

"The microbes have got to be able to survive desiccation because it's a vacuum in space; that's the main problem. Radiation you can survive by living inside the rock and some of these microbes live just under the surface.
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"But if you are desiccated, you are inactive. So the issue is: how long can you remain inactive when you've got background levels of radiation damaging the molecules inside the cell? We're trying to find out which microbes might best be able to survive extreme space conditions."

The experiment could say something about how life might exist on Mars today just below its red surface. It could give clues as to how micro-organisms may be transported between the planets in rocks - in meteorites, for example.

And it could also help identify microbes that would be useful to future astronauts who venture beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the rest of the Solar System.

These spacefarers may use life-support systems that rely on microbes to generate oxygen, to provide food and even recycle waste.

is due to blast off for the ISS on Tuesday. The mission's first spacewalk, scheduled currently for Saturday 29 August, will be when the small chunks of Devon are pulled off Columbus and packed up for their trip home.

There are some from the in the next week. The station will appear as a bright star moving swiftly over the early morning sky, from West to East.

When someone asks you in the pub where the highest point is along the world famous "" of southern England, you now know the answer.

You can point up to that bright light in the sky and say, "It's on the space station".

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• - What's this?