Space buffs set sights on topping the moon landing

The achievement remains spectacular, of course. But that's partly because no one has bested it since Apollo 17 returned to earth 37 years ago. Silicon Valley is not immune. Local newspapers have been recalling the contributions of our own NASA Ames Research Center to the US space programme.

Most importantly, Ames researchers came up with the "blunt-body" design for the re-entry craft, without which the Apollo astronauts would have been vaporised long before they reached home.

Since then, Ames has become a hub for life science research, helped define the field of fluid dynamics and sent robot explorers to the Moon and Mars. But the Valley is the land of can-do and some of our most successful progeny (such as Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of PayPal, and Will Wright, creator of The Sims) are avid space buffs and vocal in their disappointment at NASA's failure to top its triumph of 40 years past.

It's perhaps no surprise, then, that said Valley habitués have ideas about what to do, and for the most part these are entrepreneurially based. Their most successful effort so far has been the X Prize Foundation, on the board of which sit Page, Musk, Wright and other tech luminaries.

The original X Prize offered $10 million to the first non-government organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was won in 2004 by a team financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. A new prize of $20 million for a privately funded robotic lunar explorer, sponsored by Google, was announced in 2007.

Dot-com millionaires frittering fortunes on trips to the International Space Station are a media staple. But far more money is being spent quietly by hi-tech folk on projects that may yet get us back where the US government is no longer willing, or financially able, to go.

* While most of us were absorbing this week's news of Apple's stellar Q3 performance, Pete Kafka of All Things Digital was focused on something else: the stunning number of fart-related applications now available for the iPhone (that number being 30, by my count). There is a serious point here. Popular but trashy novelty apps are in danger of damaging Apple's carefully nurtured iPhone brand.

* How much is the US media's obsession with Twitter worth to the company? Right now it comes in at a cool $48 million a month, according to news-monitoring service VMS.