He is the man of the moment - Elon Musk, the chief designer and CEO of SpaceX.

The guy can be forgiven for feeling a little stressed right now.

He admitted as much to the BBC when we went to see him at his Hawthorne, California facility last week. SpaceX is getting very close to the maiden flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, and Musk knows that the eyes of the world will be watching:

"On launch day, there is serious pucker factor."

For those who haven't been following this quite so closely, the Falcon 9 is probably the leading candidate right now to lead the commercialisation of low-Earth orbit.

Fitted with its Dragon capsule, the Falcon is being touted by many as the cheaper, faster, but no-less-safe alternative to Nasa's Ares 1 rocket.

The Augustine committee [7Mb PDF], commissioned by President Barack Obama to review US human spaceflight options, said private operators should be incentivised to provide the means of getting cargo and crew into space.

Augustine calculated that Nasa's Ares 1 and Orion capsule would launch for about a billion dollars a time. Elon Musk thinks his big Falcon - the Falcon 9 Heavy - will have a brochure price of just $100m, and possibly substantially less. That's quite a difference.

Of course, until it flies, Falcon 9 remains, as the popular phrase puts it right now, "a paper rocket". A successful first demonstration, though, would make everyone sit up.

You can hear Elon Musk's thoughts on where he thinks his company is right now on this Friday's Science In Action programme on the BBC World Service.

Musk takes us on a guided tour of his 50,000-sq-m factory at One Rocket Road. We hear how the two-stage rocket is put together and the milestones he's hoping to reach:

"I think launch is in the February or March timeframe, so although all the pieces [of Falcon 9] will be [at Cape Canaveral] this month, there's still activity to be done in terms of de-bugging the interaction between the rocket and the launch pad.
 
"We're going through final check-out; we're being very paranoid about everything - double- and triple-checking all the systems in the vehicle, and going through the final regulatory approvals."

Falcon 9 is a two-stage vehicle powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The "9" refers to the cluster of nine Merlin engines at the base of the first stage.

These should offer a high degree of redundancy. Musk says the rocket will be able to cope with the failure of two of these engines in flight and still complete its mission.

The schedule ahead is a tight one.

The first flight will demonstrate that the Falcon is the real deal. The second flight will be mostly about the Dragon capsule and its competence - its manoeuvrability and its ability to return safely to Earth.

The third flight is expected to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

Everything, though, has been designed with the intention one day of carrying astronauts. How soon that might happen will depend to a large degree on President Obama and the view he takes of the Augustine report.

But Nasa itself will have a big say. Even before Augustine, it was seeding the future through its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (Cots) programme.

As Elon Musk says:

"We're very close partners and I'd like to say that we really wouldn't have come this far or this fast without both the financial help of Nasa and some of their guidance."

That first Falcon 9 flight is going to be quite a show. Watch this space.

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The first time I saw the Herschel space telescope was in a clean room in Friedrichshafen, Germany, in 2007.

At the time, it didn't really look like a telescope at all.

Its 3.5m-diameter mirror was not attached. Neither was the large sunshield that would eventually shroud the observatory.

What was on show was the cryostat - the bulbous container that would eventually hold more than 2,000 litres of super-fluid helium to cool the telescope's instruments and detectors, to allow them to see the Universe in far-infrared light.

To be honest, at that stage, Herschel looked more like a coffee flask for a giant commuter than a billion-euro astronomical satellite.

In the latter part of 2008, I pressed the European Space Agency to give me the opportunity to see the finished article; and in January this year I got an invitation to view Herschel in Noordwijk, near Amsterdam, just prior to its launch from French Guiana in May.

Clockwise from bottom-left: A 1998 sketch of SPIRE's optics; an artist's impression of SPIRE; the Herschel instrument bay; SPIRE's first images

Spectacular. Simply amazing. I remember being dazzled by the way the clean room lamps and TV lighting bounced off all the silver foil. And that mirror. It was so perfect, you couldn't quite work out where the surface was.

It's the curved lines and pipes that give Herschel its distinctive look. I don't know what you think but there is something wonderfully "industrial" about it.

I joked the other day with Professor Bruce Swinyard that if someone told you that Herschel ran on steam, you wouldn't argue with them. And quick as a flash, he came back:

"In fact it does run on 'steam', if you think about it - because it's the steam from the helium that cools the system down. The helium is boiling, and as it boils, the steam - in inverted commas - runs around some pipes and cools everything down. So, we're a heat engine, but we're cooling things rather than heating them."

A billion-euro steam engine that operates just fractions of a degree above absolute zero (0K; -273C).

Bruce led the design of one of Herschel's three instruments, SPIRE (the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver). You can hear him and his SPIRE colleagues in two documentaries we've made about the Herschel space telescope for BBC Radio 4.

The first part goes out on Wednesday at 11:00; the second is broadcast the following Wednesday at the same time.

BBC producer Gareth Nelson-Davies was the man tasked with following the scientists and engineers around with a microphone and digital recorder for months on end.

He's pulled the recordings together into a fascinating montage of science and drama. We hear about the development of the telescope, about the stresses of going through a launch, and about the new knowledge the working observatory is likely to deliver.

It's very much a people story - a tale about the struggle to make something remarkable happen.

It's amazing to think that the first time scientists got together to discuss in detail a Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope (FIRST, as it was originally called) was at a workshop in Holland in 1984.

Wind forward and it would be another 10 years or so before instrument development got under way in earnest; and another 10 years after that before a built telescope was ready to go into orbit.

We've only had tasters so far of the image capability of Herschel. In December, we will be presented with its first scientific results. I can't wait.

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Most people have had a pop at Europe's proposed sat-nav system, Galileo, down the years. Let's face it, it's been an easy target.

"How not to implement a large-scale infrastructure project" is the criticism you often hear. "The Common Agricultural Policy in the sky" also became a popular jibe for a while.

Galileo will be at least five years late on its original timescale and hugely over budget.

It should have been fully operational by now and have cost the European taxpayer no more than 1.8bn euros.

As it is, only a partial Galileo system will be up and running by the end of 2013 (the current target date) and the projected total cost to the taxpayer is looking north of 5.5bn euros [PDF].

But things are at least now moving. The ground segment is coming along - see the picture on this page of the shiny control centre in Oberpfaffenhofen in Germany.

And you'll have seen this past week my report on the In-Orbit Validation (IOV) models, the four satellites that will prove the system.

The payloads are nearing completion in Portsmouth, UK, and will soon be despatched to Rome, Italy, for integration with the rest of their spacecraft elements.

The first IOV pair is booked for launch on a Soyuz rocket in November 2010; the second pair in early 2011.

Friday was the deadline day for the satellite consortia to submit their Best and Final Offers (BAFOs) - the final prices at which they are prepared to build the remaining spacecraft needed to operate Galileo.

The satellite segment is just one of six so called "work packages" (WP) that divide up the job of implementing Galileo.

We're expecting very soon - before the year's end - contract announcements on three of these packages:

On System Support, to bring all the elements of the project together; on the Space Segment, to build the satellites themselves; and on Launch Services, to provide the rockets that will loft the spacecraft.

In 2007 when the whole programme was re-shaped, Galileo was given the target of being "fully operational" by 2013; and by that, one would normally mean 27 satellites in orbit. That's not going to happen.

The spacecraft cannot be made fast enough (a Galileo satellite will take two-and-a-half to three years to build) and the launchers are unlikely to be available even if they could.

The primary rocket for the job, a Soyuz, will launch only two Galileo satellites at once; an Ariane 5 will probably be used to loft a few batches of four.

Sixteen satellites plus the four IOVs is the figure now being talked about. Whilst not a full constellation, it is a number that would make a significant difference to anyone using GPS-and-Galileo-enabled receiving equipment.

Nonetheless, Europe had better keep up the momentum if it wants a slice of what could be an exciting future.

GPS has been an immense wealth creator. Anyone who has any doubt about that should go and have a look at the Forbes Top 400 wealthiest people in the USA. Check out the billionaires Gary Burrell and Min Kao.

If you're not sure who these men are, join the first three letters of their names - "Gar" and "Min" - and you'll understand what I'm talking about.

The next generation of sat-nav has the potential for even bigger returns, for the simple reason that location functionality is now becoming ubiquitous in mobile phones.

The improved availability and accuracy of fixes, allied to databases that can be rapidly passed over the cellular networks, means that sat-nav will increasingly be used to do many more interesting things than just finding your way down a motorway.

There is money to be made in the coming years. There are plenty of sharp entrepreneurs out there who realise this and are preparing for it now.

If Europe doesn't grab the chance to exploit the opportunities that are coming, others most certainly will.

Watch this space.

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