I'm back at Holloman, almost half past eight in the morning. In theory, Armadillo should have headed out to the pad for another attempt about half an hour ago, and will try again at nine or so. I'm heading out there now to see if that's the case, and if so, I'll get some pictures.

[Update at 10 AM]

Scrubbed again. The first flight was successful, except it had another hard start. On the return attempt, it lit, lifted off for a few seconds, then aborted and sat back down. They performed some analysis for a few minutes, then announced that they weren't going to attempt to fly again until they returned the vehicle and did some work on it. The current word is that they had another hard start and some anomalous pops, and decided to abort. Alan Boyle has more.

I just talked to Ken Davidian, who is in charge of NASA's Centennial Challenges (where the prize money comes from), and he told me that it looked as though they were going to give Armadillo two more attempt windows today, one this afternoon (like yesterday) and one after the show ends at five or so.

I have to drive up to Albuquerque tonight for a flight back to Florida early in the morning, and was hoping to do it in daylight (because I've never done the route from Alamagordo), so I hope that they can nail it this afternoon.

Rand, what's your sense of why the other 7 1/2 teams dropped out?

What's your sense of what's going on at the various suborbital companies besides Virgin and Rocketplane which have gotten heavy coverage in the last year?

Any news on the orbital firms besides Kistler and SpaceX and their prospects for the next COTS money and their progress on other measures? Anything further about high frequency Atlas flights at a lower price point?

What's the reaction there to Bigelow's formalizing of his standing offer to give a contract to a company who can deliver people to his space stations who are not the Russians?

Anything further about Aldrin's Share Space Stakes? How are the teachers in space people saying they are doing with progress toward getting legislation? Is that deferred to after the 2008 election?

Near exclusive focus on Carmack and RpK seems odd given 1) that Carmack's series of failures dilutes any PR value of claiming the Lunar Lander prize, perhaps showing the public how far this is from safe and reliable instead of how close, and 2) Rocketplane not announcing anything that indicates they are closer to being fully funded than they were prior to provisionally losing the K-1 COTS award.

What about the sentiment there regarding Greason's claim that a personal spaceflight revolution is inevitable vs. Diamandis's claim that this is a critical phase and progress may cease without redoubled effort?

Is 2010 going to be the year it all gets started? Is the 8 year no-reg limit going to end up being a hindrance instead of a help because the looming regs toward the end of the 8-year phase will diminish return on investment? Maybe should have been 8 years of no regs after first commercial passenger flight.

As far as space is concerned, this decade is turning out to be the 90's all over again. Except of course, our aims are less ambitious than last decade. :(