Thursday, December 6, 2012

Biggest Fears of the Single Woman

ThinkstockFrom appearing desperate to being single forever, singles share their fears on being alone
By SC Chua for Yahoo! Southeast Asia
From appearing desperate to being single forever (gasp!), it seems that not having a plus one can be quite a daunting thing… or is it? Here, single women share their fears with us about being alone (it's goes beyond spending Saturday nights by your lonesome). There is even an official term for the fear of being single: Anuptaphobia!
Losing touch of the dating sceneLet's face it, going on a date is already daunting, but to go on a date when you've been out of touch of it for so long? Talk about nightmare for the singles.
"I just got out of a relationship and have decided I should go on dates again," says Kelly*. "It's been a while since my last date—I've been with my ex-boyfriend for five years. I am afraid that what used to work then wouldn't work now. I am a little bit rusty when it comes to flirting, and not to mention shy too... Worst still—what if nobody wants to date me?"
Face the fear: Fret not, says flirting expert and author of Flirt Fearlessly Rachel Dealto in an interview with Prevention. "Everybody can flirt; it's just about exercising that muscle. It's all about opening yourself up to something new. And when it comes to flirting, practice makes perfect," she says. What to do? Go on dates with different guys. And try some contact, as Dealto suggests. "Use a little bit of touch to reinforce a flirty comment. If they say something funny and you're laughing, touch them on the shoulder or hand. Just don't do it too much, or it gets weird."
Also read: The do's and don'ts of dating again
My friends are all slowly signing up for married lifeYou know what it's like—as you grow older, more and more of your friends start settling down… except you, the single one, who is still on the lookout for The One. Before you know it, you're attending more baby showers than you are Friday Night Tequilas.
Michelle* can relate to the single-to-married phenomenon amongst her friends. "First, there were four… and now there's me, the only single one out of the group of my closest friends. The three of them get together and talk baby. I can't relate so I always excuse myself from their outings. Before I know it, there's nobody to hang out with on a Friday or Saturday night because all my friends have family commitments. Being single is no longer fun; it's just a sad situation to be in, especially when you are alone."
Face the fear: Single and sick of it? Don't be. While it can feel lonely when everyone else seems to be in a relationship, what you need to do is focus on yourself. Writes Molly Ford, founder of the popular Smart, Pretty and Awkward blog, in The Daily Muse, "Remember that comparing yourself and what you have or don't have to others is never a recipe for happiness. Ever. For that matter, marriage isn't always a recipe for happiness, either! Another important thing to remember is that there is no time frame for a great relationship. Loving, meaningful romantic relationships are not a limited-edition item. Remind yourself that there is not just one good relationship out there and whoever finds it first is the only one that gets it."
Also read: Feeling a bit (or Extremely) Lonely
What if I never meet the oneAh… the million dollar question (and top nightmare) for many single women: That they will never meet "him". Writes Dr. Amy Johnson, social psychologist and author of Modern Enlightenment: Psychological, Spiritual and Practical Ideas for a Better Life, "As a relationship coach, I talk to a lot of single women. It's pretty rare to find one who wants to be in a relationship, isn't in one and is perfectly relaxed about it. There is usually some fear lurking under the surface. Many are afraid that their ship has sailed, they let 'the one' get away or that the older and more established they get, it will only become harder to find someone who fits into their life."
Lisa* knows the feeling. "While I do enjoy being single, there is a nagging voice at the back of mind telling me that my clock is ticking and I shouldn't wait too long to settle down," says the 30-year-old. "I have friends who are older and single, and I see how difficult it is for them to find a man. Whether it is because they are picky or that they just aren't meeting the right men, the complaint is all the same: Where is my Prince Charming? I don't want to be 50 and wondering if maybe the guy I rejected was my happily ever after."
Face the fear: Here's what you need to know—there is no such thing as a soul mate and the faster you get that notion into your head, the easier it will be for you to find the relationship you want, says Jean Cirillo, author of The Soul Mate Myth: A 3-Step Program to Finding Real Love in an interview with iVillage. "If we remain stuck in the idea that every potential mate must meet an idealistic standard, we miss out on real opportunities to meet real people. When women speak of the ideal Mr. Right, they often mean a fantasy image of the perfect man." Cirillo's advice? "Have fun! You show yourself in the best light when you are having a good time. And try dating outside your 'type'. You may be pleasantly surprised."
Also read: How to find out if he's a keeper
And then there is the pressure to settle…
Your parents ask you about it. Your aunts bug you with the same question whenever there is a family gathering. Your friends—married of course—look at you sympathetically and say the same thing: "Isn't it time for you to find a nice man and settle down?"
Says single gal Karen*, "When I tell people I just meet that I am single, the first thing they ask is 'Why, what's wrong with you?' After that is done, they proceed to tell me that a girl like me shouldn't wait for too long and that the longer I wait, the harder it will be for me to settle down. On a good day, I brush it off with a laugh; but on days when I am feeling down, especially after a hard day at work, I do wish I have someone I can cuddle up with… Even the single and fabulous girls of Sex and the City got married. How's that for pressure?"
Face the fear: Unfortunately, there comes a time when people around us will hit the repeat button on the "when are you settling down?" question. What you need to do is to hit the mute button! Enjoy your singlehood and make the best out of it. Focusing too much on the fact that you're single will only bring you down. Also, the next time someone bugs you with the marriage question, here's what to say to them: Marriage may be overrated and it's proven. A study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family and cited in The Daily Mail showed that there is "no evidence that marriage and cohabitation provide benefits over being single in the realm of social ties."
Also read: Get instant confidence boost!
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China prepares to grow vegetables on Mars

AFP News – Tue, Dec 4, 2012
Chinese astronauts are preparing to grow fresh vegetables on Mars and the moon after researchers successfully completed a preliminary test in Beijing, state media reported.
Four kinds of vegetables were grown in an "ecological life support system", a 300 cubic metre cabin which will allow astronauts to develop their own stocks of air, water and food while on space missions, Xinhua news agency said Monday.
The system, which relies on plants and algae, is "expected to be used in extra-terrestrial bases on the moon or Mars", the report said.
Participants in the experiment could "harvest fresh vegetables for meals", Xinhua quoted Deng Yibing, a researcher at Beijing's Chinese Astronaut Research and Training Centre, as saying.
"Chinese astronauts may get fresh vegetables and oxygen supplies by gardening in extra-terrestrial bases in the future," the report said, adding that the experiment was the first of its kind in China.
China has said it will land an exploratory craft on the moon for the first time next year, as part of an ambitious space programme that includes a long-term plan for a manned moon landing.
The Asian superpower has been ramping up its manned space activities as the United States, long the leader in the field, has scaled back some of its programmes, such as retiring its iconic space shuttle fleet.
In its last white paper on space, China said it was working towards landing a man on the moon -- a feat so far only achieved by the United States, most recently in 1972 -- although it did not give a time frame.
China's first astronaut Yang Liwei said last month that Chinese astronauts may start a branch of China's ruling Communist Party in space, state media reported.
"If we establish a party branch in space, it would also be the 'highest' of its kind in the world," Xinhua quoted Yang as saying.
The astronaut was launched into space and orbited the earth aboard the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft in 2003.
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The World's Most Powerful People

By David M. Ewalt | Forbes – 16 hours ago
What do the president of the United States, the Pope and the founder of Facebook all have in common? They’re all featured on Forbes’ 2012 ranking of the World’s Most Powerful People—an annual look at the heads of state, financiers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs who truly run the world.

To compile the list, we considered hundreds of candidates from various walks of life all around the globe, and measured their power along four dimensions. First, we asked whether the candidate has power over lots of people. Pope Benedict XVI, ranked #5 on our list, is the spiritual leader of more than a billion Catholics, or about 1/6th of the world’s population. Michael Duke (#17), CEO of Wal-Mart Stores, employs two million people.

Next we assessed the financial resources controlled by each person. Are they relatively large compared to their peers? For heads of state we used GDP, while for CEOs, we looked at measures like their company’s assets and revenues. When candidates have a high personal net worth –like the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu (#11)– we also took that into consideration. In certain instances, like Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, we considered other valuable resources at the candidate’s disposal –like 20% of the world’s known oil reserves.

Then we determined if the candidate is powerful in multiple spheres. There are only 71 slots on our list – one for every 100 million people on the planet – so being powerful in just one area is often not enough. Our picks project their influence in myriad ways: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (#16) has power because he’s a politician, because he’s a billionaire, because he’s a media magnate, and because he’s a major philanthropist.

Lastly, we made sure that the candidates actively used their power. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin (#3) scored points because he so frequently shows his strength — like when he jails protestors.

To calculate the final rankings, ten senior Forbes editors ranked all of our candidates in each of these four dimensions of power, and those individual rankings were averaged into a composite score.

Any ranking of the world’s most powerful people is going to be subjective, so we don’t pretend ours is definitive. It’s meant to be the beginning of a conversation, not the final word. So tell us what you think: Is ex-president Bill Clinton (#50) really more powerful than the current Prime Minister of Russia (#61)? Does someone like the chief of the Internal Federation of Association Football (#69) belong on the list at all? Who did we miss? What did we get wrong? Join the conversation by commenting below.

Top 10

1. Barack Obama

(REUTERS/Larry Downing)President, United States of America
Age: 51

The decisive winner of the 2012 U.S. presidential election on all counts: Obama took the popular vote, the electoral college and 7 out of 7 toss-up states. Now he gets 4 more years to push his agenda past weakened congressional Republicans. Still, he faces major challenges, including an unresolved budget crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and renewed unrest in the Middle East. But Obama remains the commander in chief of the world’s greatest military and head of the sole economic and cultural superpower—literally the leader of the free world.


2. Angela Merkel

(RAINER JENSEN/AFP/Getty Images)Chancellor, Germany
Age: 58

The world’s most powerful woman is the backbone of the 27-member European Union and carries the fate of the euro on her shoulders. Merkel’s hard-line austerity prescription for easing the European debt crisis has been challenged by both hard-hit southern countries and the more affluent north, but it—and she—are still standing. Merkel has served as -chancellor since 2005, but one of her biggest challenges still lies ahead: bolstering her government’s sagging popularity before the 2013 German general election.


3. Vladimir Putin

(AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Presidential Press Service)President, Russia
Age: 60

Reelected for a third 6-year term as president in March after a few years swapping posts with Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, Putin officially regains the power that no one believes he truly gave up. This October the ex-KGB strongman—who controls a nuclear-tipped army, a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves—turned 60. That’s Russia’s retirement age, but who’s got the nerve to tell him to quit?


4. Bill Gates

(RAVEENDRAN/AFP/GettyImages)Cochair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Age: 57

The world’s second-richest man is worth $65 billion—and that’s after giving away more than $28 billion. Gates’s post-Microsoft mission includes eliminating many infectious and deadly diseases: By his own estimates, that could translate into 8 million lives saved by 2020. But the quintessential activist billionaire doesn’t stop there: Gates continues to persuade his peers to sign the “Giving Pledge,” promising to give away half their wealth or more.

5. Pope Benedict XVI

(REUTERS/Max Rossi)Pope, Roman Catholic Church   
Age: 85

How’s this for a job description? According to the doctrine of Papal Supremacy, the Pope enjoys “supreme, full, immediate, and universal power” over the souls of 1.2 billion Catholics around the world. They turn to the Vicar of Christ for the final word on life’s most personal decisions, including birth control, abortion, marriage and euthanasia. As the leader of Vatican City, he’s also a head of state. Of course, the pope faces dissent anyway—recently from “radical feminist” American nuns.


6. Ben Bernanke

(KAREN BLEIER/AFP/GettyImages)Chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve
Age: 59

Big Ben has been on a buying spree: In a third round of quantitative easing, the Fed is now snapping up $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities and $45 billion of Treasurys. Result: modest economic recovery and a near-record $2.9 trillion on the Fed’s balance sheet. The American economy’s “adult in the room” recently warned that there is only so much the Fed can do; politicians are the ones with the power to keep us from going over that fiscal cliff.


7. Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud

(AP Photo)King, Saudi Arabia
Age: 88

The absolute monarch of the desert kingdom controls 20% of the world’s known oil reserves and guards Islam’s holiest cities. The Arab Spring didn’t shake the ruling family’s control of the kingdom, but out-of-control youth unemployment remains a threat. Aging Abdullah lost his second heir apparent in 2 years when his brother, Crown Prince Nayef, died in June; he’s been replaced by another brother, 76-year-old Crown Prince Salman, the former governor of Riyadh.


8. Mario Draghi

(Sean Gallup/Getty Images)President, European Central Bank
Age: 65

With the euro lurching constantly from crisis to crisis, the European Central Bank is more important than ever. As chief banker of the world’s largest -currency area—the euro zone’s collective GDP is now more than $17.4 trillion—Draghi faces the Herculean task of trying to maintain financial unity across 17 countries. But if anyone can wrangle the interests of nations as diverse as Germany and Greece, it might be the man who navigated the minefield of Italian politics so deftly, he earned himself a nickname: “Super Mario.”


9. Xi Jinping

(Feng Li/Getty Images)General Secretary, Communist Party of China
Age: 59

The man who will lead China for the next decade was recently promoted to the Communist Party’s top position; Xi also took over as chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission, putting him in control of the world’s largest army. His rise to power will be complete in March, when he takes over for Hu Jintao as president and head of state. Xi’s only half of a Chinese power couple: His wife, Peng Liyuan, is a superstar folk singer.


10. David Cameron

(Oli Scarff/Getty Images)Prime Minister, United Kingdom
Age: 46

Two years into office, the Tory PM has gone from being the called the second coming of Margaret Thatcher to standing in the shadow of Europe’s new Iron Lady, Angela Merkel. Cameron has rejected the German Chancellor’s call to increase the EU budget and threatened to veto anything but a spending freeze. At home he faces a sustained economic downturn, a disillusioned electorate and rumblings from his own party over Britain’s future.


See more of The World’s Most Powerful People.

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Sunday, December 2, 2012

Lone Chinese home destroyed; farmer accepts deal

By By GILLIAN WONG | Associated Press – Sat, Dec 1, 2012
BEIJING (AP) — Authorities have demolished a five-story home that stood incongruously in the middle of a new main road and had become the latest symbol of resistance by Chinese homeowners against officials accused of offering unfair compensation.
Xiayangzhang village chief Chen Xuecai told The Associated Press the house was bulldozed Saturday after its owners, duck farmer Luo Baogen and his wife, agreed to accept compensation of 260,000 yuan ($41,000).
There was no immediate confirmation from Luo, whose cellphone was turned off Saturday.
The couple had been the lone holdouts from a neighborhood that was demolished to make way for the main thoroughfare heading to a newly built railway station on the outskirts of the city of Wenling in Zhejiang province.
The razing comes a week after images of the house circulated widely online in China, triggering a flurry of domestic and foreign media reports about the latest "nail house," as buildings that remain standing as their owners resist development are called.
Luo, 67, had just completed his house at a cost of about 600,000 yuan ($95,000) when the government approached him with their standard offer of 220,000 ($35,000) to move out — which he refused, Chen has previously said. The offer then went up to 260,000 yuan ($41,000) last week.
It was not immediately clear why Luo accepted the compensation in a meeting with officials Friday afternoon when the amount of money offered was the same as a week ago.
Village chief Chen said Luo was tired of all the media attention and voluntarily consented to the deal. "Luo Baogen received dozens of people from the media every day and his house stands in the center of the road. So he decided to demolish the house," Chen said.
Authorities commonly pressure residents to agree to make way for development with sometimes extreme measures, such as cutting off utilities or moving in to demolish when residents are out for the day. In Luo's case, however, he had told local reporters last week his electricity and water were still flowing.
Real estate is one of the big drivers of China's runaway growth in recent decades. But the rapid development has run into objections from many of the hundreds of thousands of residents who have been forced out to make way for new housing, factories and other business ventures, creating a major source of unrest.
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Friday, November 30, 2012

Ericsson sues Samsung for patent infringement

By Anna Ringstrom | Reuters – Tue, Nov 27, 2012
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Ericsson, the world's biggest telecom network equipment maker, said it was suing Samsung Electronics Co for patent infringement after two years of talks failed to yield a license agreement.
Sweden's Ericsson, which reckons more than 40 percent of the world's mobile traffic passes through its networks, filed a lawsuit in the United States saying Samsung had refused to sign a license to use technology on terms it referred to as fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND).
"Ericsson has tried long and hard to amicably come to an agreement with Samsung and sign a license agreement on FRAND terms. We have turned to litigation as a last resort," Kasim Alfalahi, chief intellectual property officer at Ericsson said in a statement on Tuesday.
Alfalahi noted Ericsson has over 30,000 patents and more than 100 license agreements with major players in the industry.
A surge in smartphone and tablet computer sales has driven a switch in traffic on telecoms networks from mainly voice calls to video and music, which take up more capacity.
But although data traffic is surging - smartphone subscriptions alone are expected to rise to 3.3 billion by 2018 according to Ericsson's own figures - operators are finding it hard to get customers to pay much extra, squeezing their profits.
With Ericsson suffering a big drop in sales at its network unit - down 17 percent in the third quarter - it is increasingly turning to the courts to maintain its patent income, part of a wider trend where big technology names are fiercely protecting their intellectual property as global sales of tablets and smartphones boom.
One lawsuit by Apple relating to patents resulted in a $1.05 billion jury verdict against Samsung, the world's largest cell phone and television maker, in August.
An Ericsson spokesman declined to comment on the size of its lawsuit.
Samsung said it will "take all necessary legal measures to protect against Ericsson's excessive claims."
"Samsung has faithfully committed itself to conducting fair and reasonable negotiations with Ericsson over the past two years, but Ericsson has demanded prohibitively higher royalty rates to renew the same patent portfolio," the South Korean company said.
FRAND
Samsung is also embroiled in a legal war with Apple in more than 20 disputes in 10 countries, with Apple alleging various Samsung smartphone and tablet products infringed its patents.
"Ericsson now has plenty of material from Samsung's litigations with Apple to quote in support of high FRAND royalty rates and sales bans," said Florian Mueller, blogger and patent expert who has advised Microsoft and Oracle in the past.
The Ericsson dispute concerns patented technology the Swedish firm says is essential to several telecommunications and networking standards used by Samsung's products as well as other patented inventions that are frequently implemented in wireless and consumer electronics products, the company said.
FRAND licensing terms are used for patents and technologies that have become essential, often as an industry standard. Ericsson says its FRAND licensing aims to give companies the incentive to contribute technology to open standards and still maintain royalty rates at a reasonable level. But the growth of patent suits has added complication to FRAND licensing and some tech companies have complained of inflated prices being proposed by patent owners.
According to Ericsson's statement, the company spent $5 billion in 2011 on research and development that resulted "in hundreds of patented inventions that are essential to the standards that drive global communications," such as GSM, GPRS and EDGE.
Ericsson's intellectual property right net revenues amounted to 6.2 billion Swedish crowns ($938 million) in 2011.
The complaint is filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the district where Ericsson's U.S. headquarters is located.
(Additional reporting by Tarmo Virki in Helsinki and Miyoung Kim in Seoul; Writing by Sophie Walker; Editing by Erica Billingham)
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China leaning tower 'stable at present': report

AFP News – Thu, Nov 29, 2012
An ancient Chinese tower tilting at a perilous angle has earned comparisons with Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa and worried a school in its shadow, state media reported.
The Wanshou Temple Tower in the central city of Xi'an, which dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), began to lean dramatically after a heavy rainstorm in May 2011, state-run China Radio National said.
Local authorities erected a steel frame to support the tower, which looms over the school athletics field. The report said school administrators were concerned because "strong winds or heavy rains could exacerbate the problem".
School officials have asked authorities for assistance, the report said, although a local government official said the tower was stable at present and did not show any sign of further tilting.
"Everyone's heard of the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. But who knew that China had its very own Leaning Tower?" the report said.
A member of staff at Xi'an's cultural relics bureau, who asked not to be named, told AFP her office was working on a plan to reinforce the tower, but that "we have a lot to do... and need to cooperate with other departments".
The building faces stiff competition for the title of China's leaning tower. A slanting structure in Sichuan province and a 900-year-old pagoda in Shanghai, which leans at a steeper angle than the Tower of Pisa, also claim the honour.
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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk

By Rob Coppinger, SPACE.com Contributor | SPACE.com – Mon, Nov 26, 2012
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.
In Musk's vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.
"At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big," Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Friday (Nov. 16). Musk was there to talk about his business plans, and to receive the Society’s gold medal for his contribution to the commercialization of space.

Mars pioneers
Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet's subsurface water ice.
The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars’ atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment. [Future Visions of Human Spaceflight]
Musk’s architecture for this human Mars exploration effort does not employ cyclers, reusable spacecraft that would travel back and forth constantly between the Red Planet and Earth — at least not at first
"Probably not a Mars cycler; the thing with the cyclers is, you need a lot of them," Musk told SPACE.com. "You have to have propellant to keep things aligned as [Mars and Earth’s] orbits aren’t [always] in the same plane. In the beginning you won’t have cyclers."
Musk also ruled out SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by SPACE.com what vehicle would be used, he said, "I think you just land the entire thing."
Asked if the "entire thing" is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, "Maybe."
Musk has been thinking about what his colonist-carrying spacecraft would need, whatever it ends up being. He reckons the oxygen concentration inside should be 30 to 40 percent, and he envisions using the spacecraft’s liquid water store as a barrier between the Mars pioneers and the sun.

A $500,000 ticket
Musk’s $500,000 ticket price for a Mars trip was derived from what he thinks is affordable.
"The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip," he said, comparing the purchase to buying a house in California. [Photos: The First Space Tourists]
He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.
Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable.
The United States' GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.
"Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It’s about getting the basic fundamentals in place," Musk said. "That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case."

The big reusable rocket
The fully reusable rocket that Musk wants to take colonists to Mars is an evolution of SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, which launches Dragon.
"It’s going to be much bigger [than Falcon 9], but I don’t think we’re quite ready to state the payload. We’ll speak about that next year," Musk said, emphasizing that only fully reusable rockets and spacecraft would keep the ticket price for Mars migration as low as $500,000.
SpaceX is already testing what Musk calls a next-generation, reusable Falcon 9 rocket that can take off vertically and land vertically. The prototype, called Grasshopper, is a Falcon 9 first stage with landing legs.
Grasshoper has made two short flights. The first was on Sept. 21 and reached a height of 6 feet (2 meters); the second test, on Nov. 1, was to a height of 17.7 feet (5.4 m). A planned milestone for the Grasshopper project is to reach an altitude of 100 feet (30 m). [Grasshopper Rocket's 2-Story Test Flight (Video)]
"Over the next few months, we’ll gradually increase the altitude and speed," Musk said. "I do think there probably will be some craters along the way; we’ll be very lucky if there are no craters. Vertical landing is an extremely important breakthrough — extreme, rapid reusability. It’s as close to aircraft-like dispatch capability as one can achieve."
Musk wants to have a reusable Falcon 9 first stage, which uses Grasshopper technology, come back from orbit in "the next year or two." He then wants to use this vertical-landing technology for Falcon 9’s upper stage.
Musk hopes to have a fully reusable version of Falcon 9 in five or six years, but he acknowledged that those could be "famous last words."

A rocket stepping stone
Another stepping stone toward the planned reusable Mars rocket is SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launcher. With a first flight planned for next year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the Heavy is a Falcon 9 that has two Falcon 9 first stages bolted on either side.
Musk expects the Falcon Heavy to launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral eventually. This triple-first-stage rocket will be able to put 116,600 pounds (53,000 kilograms) into a 124-mile (200 kilometers) low-Earth orbit. But the Falcon Heavy is still much smaller than Musk’s fully reusable Mars rocket, which will also employ a new engine.
While Musk declines to state what the Mars rocket’s payload capability will be, he does say it will use a new staged combustion cycle engine called Raptor. The cycle involves two steps. Propellant — the fuel and oxidizer — is ignited in pre-burners to produce hot high-pressure gases that help pump propellant into the engine’s combustion chamber. The hot gases are then directed into the same chamber to aid in the combustion of the propellants.
Because Raptor is a staged combustion engine — like the main engines of NASA's now-retired space shuttle fleet — it is expected to be far more efficient than the open-cycle Merlin engines used by the Falcon 9.
While the Falcon 9’s engines use liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene, Raptor will use LOX and methane. Musk explained that "the energy cost of methane is the lowest, and it has a slight ISP [specific impulse] advantage over kerosene and doesn’t have any of the bad aspects of hydrogen." (Hydrogen is difficult to store at cryogenic temperatures, makes metal brittle and is very flammable.)
Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 
Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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