Arianespace Ready for Liftoff

stuckinarut writes to tell us Arianespace is reporting that their newest Ariane dual-satellite ECA mission rolled out of the assembly building and is set for a launch today (Nov 12) at 2345 GMT. This flight is set to demonstrate the massive lift capacity of nearly 10,000 kg and is currently the "only commercial vehicle that can launch two mainstream telecommunications satellite payloads on the same mission."

Comments

Re:I try to remmember (offtopic)

[psicic]

(O/T) As a native English speaker, I was delighted to see you use the term milliard simply because I was always taught by school teachers and 'educated' people that a billion should be defined as 10^12(1,000,000,000,000) but that, as a sop to the overwhelming influence of the American economy and cultural might, billion should be regarded as 10^9(1,000,000,000).

So, for instance, in Business Studies class, we strictly meant 10^9 if we used the word billion, but in English class, the meaning was much more ambiguous.

Since the mid-seventies, officially a billion has meant 10^9 in government documents in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere, but its old meaning as 10^12 has remained colloquially. (I left secondary school in 1999, which is fairly recent and it was still possible to use the 10^12 form then).

My point? Long-scale convention for naming numbers is just as valid as short-scale(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales ) but if you want the vast majority of people to understand, use the word 'Billion'