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NASA's Flying Wing Breaks 2 Records
ELBnet writes "CNN reports in this story that NASA's Helios flying wing broke the altitude records for both a propeller and jet aircraft with an altitude of 85,100 feet... and they were still climbing shooting for 100,000."
this being the first time i have ever had a first post, i would like to thank a few people.
first off.. thank you slashdot. if it weren't for you, there would be no glamour in first posts.
i would like to thank my parents, my girlfriend, all the linux nerds in the world, my friends, the rest of my family, my hamster, my co-workers, the people who ride the bus with me, the people at subway, the guy at the liquor store, the lady at 7-11, the scary pizza guy... yeah. thats about it.
above all, i thank god. god gave me the power to click faster than the rest of you suckers.
AND YES... i used my +1 bonus on the FP, and i am using it again for this speech. there is nothing about FP to be ashamed of!
-gerbik
So now you're thinking of packing up a *240* foot aircraft and taking it to Mars in order to explore Mars rather than taking a big empty plastic bag and a bottle of compressed Helium?
Any way you look at it, Helios is a stupid project, wasting time and money trying to push conventional technologies to absurd degrees.
Classic NASA though.
Deleted
Thats all well and good. But these measurements mean nothing to me since they are in imperial. Most of the world uses metric, most science projects use metric. Why not this?
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
They only thought they broke a record.
:)
They just now realized that they miscalculated, due to an error converting between metric and fscked-up units.