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Here's the challenge: Build a rocket engine. Don't worry, you don't need much.

At the SXSW festival in Austin on Saturday, startup companies DIYRockets and Sunglass are launching a competition to create 3-D-printed rocket engines with open source (read: free) technology.

Sunglass co-founder Nitin Rao says they want to make space travel "less expensive, more global, more transparent."

DIYRockets is packing the space chops: The group wants to find ways to lower costs and expand the knowledge base of the space industry. Sunglass has the tools to help. It allows people around the world collaborate on 3-D design projects, without the need for expensive software. The work can be shared through a Web browser.

The designs will be judged by a panel of scientists and inventors from NASA, MIT, TED and others. Sunglass is giving out $10,000 in prizes, and 3-D printing company Shapeways.com will provide $500 to help create the top two designs.

The goal of all of this is not to actually build a rocket and send it to space — yet.

"We hope to showcase what people can do on the platform," says DIYRockets co-founder Darlene Damm.

As far as applying the relatively new tools to the space industry, Rao says, "There's enormous inspiration value." If people are literally building rockets, how hard could designing a chair be?

That's in the short term.

"Over the long term, we want to help people become involved in the [space] industry," Damm says. The talent is out there, she says: "There's so much untapped potential around the world."

As NASA hands the reins of space travel over to the private sector, the space industry is evolving. Retired astronaut John Grunsfeld told NPR in February that the change was natural: Private companies are building off knowledge that NASA has spent decades cultivating.

All Tech Considered

As 3-D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise

There was bombshell news from the world of honey two weeks ago, and somehow we missed it. Two big honey packers, including one of the largest in the country — Groeb Farms of Onsted, Mich. — admitted buying millions of dollars worth of honey that was falsely labeled.

The goal of this mislabeling, which has been long suspected in the honey industry, was to acquire cheap honey from China. Chinese honey is subject to steep "anti-dumping" duties that the U.S. imposed back in 2008, after U.S. honey producers complained that Chinese exporters were selling their honey at artificially low prices.

Chinese exporters, however, began sending their honey to middlemen in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, who then re-labeled it as local product and sent it on to the U.S.

In another tactic, Chinese exporters labeled containers of honey as something else, such as rice syrup.

Both companies face criminal charges, but they've struck a deal to avoid immediate prosecution. The companies are promising to play by the rules and to set up programs to ensure that all the honey they buy in the future comes from legitimate sources. Groeb Farms also replaced its senior management last summer.

"This is a huge deal for the industry. This is the first admission by a U.S. packer, the actual user," that they were knowingly importing mislabeled honey, says Eric Wenger, chairman of True Source Honey, an industry consortium that has set up an auditing and testing system to guarantee the true origin of honey.

True Source Honey was formed in 2010. According to Wenger, True Source-certified honey now accounts for at least a quarter of U.S. honey consumption.

Jill Clark, vice president for sales and marketing at Dutch Gold Honey in Lancaster, Pa., which helped set up the program, wrote in an email to NPR that the recent indictments are "just another reason why we felt it was necessary to verify ethical sourcing of honey."

Times were different in 1996 when he signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, former President Bill Clinton writes in today's Washington Post.

"In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction," Clinton says. Supporters of the act that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, thought its passage would head off a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

But now, Clinton says, he believes DOMA is "incompatible with our Constitution." As the Supreme Court prepares to take up the act's constitutionality, he is making the case that it discriminates against "same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia [but] are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples."

As NPR's Nina Totenberg has reported:

"The test case that the Supreme Court said it will review involves a New York couple, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, who had been together for 42 years prior to their marriage in 2007. When Spyer died, however, the federal government, acting under DOMA, required Windsor to pay $363,000 in estate taxes that she would not have owed if her spouse had been of the opposite sex. ...

"Windsor won in the lower courts. Indeed, in the past couple of years, 10 courts, with judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, have ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional."

About Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter is a professor of astrophysics UC Berkeley Physics Department in 2004. He is also an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which first announced the results indicating that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. In 1996, he received the American Astronomical Society's Henri Chretien Award. Perlmutter has also written popular articles for Sky and Telescope magazine and has appeared in recent Public Broadcasting System and BBC documentaries on astronomy and cosmology. Professor Perlmutter, who led one of two teams that simultaneously discovered the accelerating expansion of the universe, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shares with two members of the rival team.