• Life: criteria include capability to react to environment, take in nutrients and grow, reproduce, and evolve through successive generations
• Earth: initial organic material possibly seeded from space; slow evolution from single-celled to extremely complex life forms
• Mars: evidence for water ice on surface, maybe subsurface liquid, maybe meteorites show past life. Was warmer and wetter in past
• Europa: probable ocean beneath icy surface could have equivalent of geothermal vents, could have organisms powered by chemical reactions
• Kepler: mission to look for extrasolar planets by detected transit across parent star; goal is to find Earth-like planets
• SETI: use radio telescopes to listen for any signals sent by extraterrestrial intelligent life

• Miller-Urry experiment: recreated chemical environment of early Earth in lab, put in electricity, were able to form "building blocks" of life
• Habitable zone: region around star through which water can remain liquid; dimensions depend on temperature of star
• Drake equation: conceptual exploration of number of communicating intelligent civilizations in Milky Way galaxy

NASA officials plan to wrap up assembly of the International Space Station and retire the space shuttle fleet in 2010, freeing up money to build and fly the new spacecraft. Cost concerns are at the root of the delay, but NASA is also giving itself wiggle room to deal with the unforeseen technical problems that will inevitably crop up, Hanley said.

[...] Sometimes called "Apollo on steroids," Orion is designed to ferry astronauts to and from the space station and eventually back to the moon. Unlike the space shuttles, which land like an airplane, Orion is a capsule that will parachute to a landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.