I’m in the Dallas area this weekend to (hopefully) see Armadillo Aerospace compete in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the Level 2 category. The “hopefully” is less associated with any technical issues–they’ve flown their “Super Mod” vehicle a number of times on the pads they’ve built at the Caddo Mills Municipal Airport northeast of Dallas–than the weather. The forecast this weekend calls for rain, rain, and more rain, with some heavy storms mixed in. It was raining when I arrived in Dallas late last night and is raining again, lightly, this morning. However, the weather radar hints that there may be enough holes in the rain later today to make a flight attempt–maybe.

For some background, MSNBC and New Scientist published articles on the flight attempts by Armadillo (and Masten Space and Unreasonable Rocket, two other NGLLC teams planning Level 1 and Level 2 flight attempts). The setup at the airport is likely to be barebones, but I will be posting updates via Twitter as time and technology permit, as will @NGLLC09, the official Twitter account of the competition.

Armadillo managed to beat the weather and any technical gremlins on Saturday with a pair of successful Level 2 flights, ensuring that they at least qualify for the prize. (Because of the nature of the competition, they won’t know until the end of October, when the competition season closes, if in fact they have won first prize in Level 2 of the Lunar Lander Challenge.) Below is a collection of photos with highlights of the day, from the long wait in Armadillo’s hangar for the rain to clear to the flights and the celebration afterwards.

Here’s a video I shot of Armadillo’s first leg of the Level 2 flight on Saturday. This was shot from a distance of about 1,500 feet from the pads, the designated safety boundary. This is considerably closer than the distance the public and media witnessed similar LLC flights in past years.

In today’s issue of The Space Review I have a summary article about Saturday’s Level 2 flights by Armadillo, including video of both flights. While that was going on, though, other teams have been making progress on their flights. On Sunday, Masten Space Systems announced via Twitter that they made two 90+second test flightsdespite gusting winds in Mojave. They are scheduled to make a Level 1 flight attempt this week, on September 15-16. The third team registered to compete this year, Unreasonable Rocket, also used Twitter to announce a 106-second tethered flight this weekend. Unreasonable is scheduled to try for both Level 1 and Level 2 at the end of October.

I was in Mojave this morning to see Masten Space Systems make their first attempt to claim second prize of Level One of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. (I didn’t make a special trip to California to see it; I was already in the area to attend the AIAA Space 2009 conference in Pasadena and spent this morning in Mojave instead of some conference sessions, although it meant leaving the hotel before 4 am in order to be in Mojave in time for a 5:30 am safety briefing.) The good news is that they flew a successful first leg of Level 1 with their XA-0.1B “Xombie” vehicle. The vehicle spent 93 seconds in the air, 3 more than the minimum, and landed very prcisely, with an accuracy later reported to be just under 20 cm.

The bad news was that there was a problem with the engine: a glitch in the cooling system caused some damage to the engine chamber and, instead of risking further damaging the engine and perhaps losing the vehicle, they elected not to make the return flight. They do have two more flight opportunities in October, and believe they’ll have new engine chambers ready to go by then to make another attempt.

You’d think the team might be a little down because they couldn’t make a complete Level 1 flight, but instead they seemed quite satisfied with the effort. Note that this was only the second free flight for Xombie, and the first was just late Tuesday afternoon. This flight was also much higher and longer than yesterday’s, and other than the engine problem everything went well.

I took some photos of the flight and will get some up this evening (I’m back at the conference for the remainder of the day), along with any additional notes. I suspect soon Masten and/or X PRIZE will also have some photos and videos of the flight posted online.

Better late than never:

Tomorrow morning a Soyuz rocket is scheduled to launch to the ISS a NASA astronaut, Roskosmos cosmonaut, and a space tourist, Guy Laliberté. Or rather, a clown, Guy Laliberté. That’s based on some of the recent media coverage, where Laliberté is almost exclusively referred to, in the headline or early in the story, as a clown. Examples range from Russia Today and RIA Novosti to SPACE.com and the BBC.

But is that a fair—or useful—description? Yes, he has a predilection for red clown noses and has promised to tickle fellow ISS crew members as they sleep, but calling him a clown makes it all seem a bit too silly. After all, he isn’t a clown full-time: he owns and operates a major entertainment company, Cirque du Soleil, that has made him a billionaire. The BBC, at least, calls him a “circus entrepreneur”—after calling him a “space clown” in the headline—which seems a more accurate description of him.

Also, he’s stated that he’s not going into space for clowning around or entertainment alone: he plans to, in effect, MC a global concert called the “Poetic Social Mission” to raise awareness about the needs for clean water. Just today Cirque du Soleil announced additions to the roster of participants, from actor Matthew McConaughey to singer Joss Stone. IT would seem that, in organizing this event, Laliberté isn’t clowning around.

The little-known Spanish company Galactic Suite, which has previously made bold pronouncements about developing a “space hotel” as soon as 2012, tells Reuters they’re on schedule to accept their first guests in 2012. For the bargain rate of $4.5 million, guests will be able to spend three nights in their “pod” in low Earth orbit (if that price includes transportation there and back, it would be a great bargain compared to the estimated $35 million for a week or so on the ISS.) How they’ll get there isn’t clear, other than that they’ll use “Russian rockets”. Given the demands on Soyuz for ISS missions, that would seem to be ruled out; the only potential alternative would be to partner with Excalibur Almaz (whose web site is currently down, hence the Wikipedia link), which is planning crewed flights starting in around 2013.

However, there’s precious little evidence that the company is actually on track in any realistic way for a 2012 launch. The company has a flashy web site (figuratively and literally), but it’s tough to find updated information: the news section is largely in Spanish, and appears to focus as much as plans to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize as for its hotel. (They have a blog as well, but, curiously, it requires a login.) When I’ve tried contacting them in the past I’ve never gotten a response. So if they really are three years from flying space tourists to their orbital station, they need to do a better job of demonstrating that they have the funding, technology, and various other arrangements needed for that to happen.