The country that invented the Walkman may be back on track to burnish its image as a technological pioneer. Right now, more than 4.7 million miles from Earth, is a revolutionary spacecraft that could be the future of interstellar travel. Japan‘s space program, JAXA, confirmed last week they had successfully unfurled the world’s first solar sail – a spacecraft that uses the velocity of sunlight to propel it. Then, just three days later, Japan announced what could be an even more impressive accomplishment: a spacecraft that left Earth seven years ago had returned home. Before brilliantly burning up over Australia, the ship ejected a soccer-ball-sized pod – a modest container that may contain the first fragments of an asteroid ever brought to earth and provide clues about the origins of our planet. Not bad for a spacecraft running three years behind schedule and without three of its four engines.

These space exploits couldn’t have come at a better time for Japan’s space agency. With a stagnant economy and massive public debt, the new Prime Minister Naoto Kan has promised to make cuts to Japan’s sprawling bureaucracy, and JAXA will surely come under scrutiny. During the previous administration, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government revitalization unit recommended in April the space agency start raising more money from the private sector. Before that, JAXA requested almost $19 million to develop a follow-up asteroid project, but the Hatoyama administration only allocated a meager $330,000. These were not encouraging signs for the future of the agency, and this from the Prime Minister whose wife once claimed aliens took her soul to Venus in a triangular spacecraft. (See Japanese design’s greatest hits.)

The solar sail may look low-tech, resembling a silver tarpaulin with a hole in the middle, but its successful mission could help future trips to the outer reaches of our solar system. JAXA’s Interplanetary Kite-Craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun, better known as IKAROS, will be the first spaceship powered without any rocket fuel. Unlike its mythological namesake, in which the Greek god Icarus flew too close to the sun and melted his wings, Japan’s IKAROS will use the force of the sun’s photons against its sail to propel it closer and closer to the sun. IKAROS’ first stop is Venus, and then hopefully the unmanned spacecraft will push past the planet to the far side of the sun. Ships like IKAROS powered by solar sails may not be the fastest spacecrafts, but they’re much cheaper than rocket-fuelled ones. Makoto Miwada, a JAXA spokesman, says the IKAROS test will be half the price of a typical large satellite launch. “This satellite is rather cheap,” he says.

If all this sounds like science fiction that’s probably because until last week, it was. Solar sails have been featured in science fiction since the early 1960s and even made an appearance in James Cameron’s Avatar. The goal of the IKAROS project is to test the feasibility of using sunlight to maneuver a spaceship, and a lot could still go wrong. With the sail’s membrane as thin as 0.0075 mm – less than one-sixth of the thickness of a newspaper page – it’s extremely fragile, and nothing like this has been done before. Already though, the Japanese succeeded in unfurling the sail in space, something that American groups have failed at doing in two previous attempts, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. In this case, JAXA weighted the corners of the sail. The slow spin of the spacecraft caused centrifugal force to open the sail to full extension. (See pictures of animals in space.)

Japan’s second space feat this week points more toward the past than the future, back some 4.6 billion years to the formation of our solar system. JAXA launched the Hayabusa in 2003. The space probe took more than two years to reach its target, the Itokawa asteroid, considered a “near-Earth” asteroid. It was only about 185 million miles away when the Hayabusa arrived. Since then things haven’t exactly gone smoothly. There was a fuel leak, a tool for collecting rock samples that failed to deploy and a 50-day communications blackout, and by the end of the mission three of craft’s four ion engines had broken. It even missed its initial window home and had to return to Earth three years late. With all the delays, the Hayabusa broke the record for the longest voyage in space.

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SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – Authorities on Sunday identified the two people killed when a man walked into a Southern California fast food restaurant with two handguns and opened fire on his stepdaughter‘s family.

Alex Trujillo, 33, and his son Adrian, 6, were killed when Jimmy Schlager entered a Del Taco in San Bernardino and opened fire Saturday afternoon, the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner Department said in a statement.

Trujillo’s wife, 29, and the couple’s other child, a 5-year-old boy, were also injured in the shooting. They were being treated at Loma Linda University Medical Center. Hospital spokesman Herbert Atienza described the woman’s condition as fair and the child’s condition as serious.

The 56-year-old Schlager shot himself at the restaurant and died at an area hospital.

Authorities have said Alex Trujillo’s wife was Schlager’s stepdaughter. Investigators have been looking into their relationship to determine a motive for the shooting.

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ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – Fly by helicopter above the patchy wetlands along the Mississippi River Delta and past the floating boom and skimmers that have failed to protect the Gulf Coast from the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Keep following the finger-like oil slicks speckled orange and brown that threaten it still.

About 40 miles from the coast a fleet of ships appears. They look like toys packed in a two-mile-square patch of dull water. It’s easy to see the approaching drill rig with its 200-foot derrick, offering what is likely the best chance for permanently stopping the nation’s worst environmental disaster.

The Sikorsky chopper reaches it and settles on its landing pad. The thwack of the rotors quiets down, and a rig worker steps into the helicopter cabin.

“OK, welcome to the DDII,” he says.

Transocean Ltd.’s Development Driller II is one of two rigs slowly grinding their drill bits 13,000 feet below the seafloor until they intersect the well damaged April 20 when another Transocean rig exploded, killing 11 workers and triggering the massive oil leak. A group of reporters that included The Associated Press had a rare chance to tour the rig Saturday.

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Bogota, Colombia –
Juan Manuel Santos won Colombia’s presidential elections Sunday in a landslide election marked by high abstention and incidents of violence.

Mr. Santos, a former Colombian defense minister who promised continuity of hard-line security policies, won with 69 percent of the vote against 28 percent for Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogota who ran on the Green Party ticket. The official results are based on 99 percent of districts reporting.

Santos will succeed President Alvaro Uribe, whose successful security policies he has vowed to continue while focusing on fighting the country’s high unemployment rate.

Mr. Mockus congratulated Santos and his supporters. “I wish him success as a leader for the good of our country,” he said in his concession speech saying his Green Party would act independently.

“We will support the good things and we will oppose the bad things.”

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SYDNEY (Reuters) –
Australia and China signed commercial agreements on Monday worth more than A$10 billion ($8.73 billion), mostly covering mining and energy-related projects and including funding for projects already announced.

The formal signings were witnessed by visiting Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping, regarded as heir apparent to China’s President Hu Jintao. Xi is on a four day visit to Australia with a large delegation of business executives and officials.

(Reporting by Mark Bendeich; Editing by Ed Davies)

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