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A Grand Day Out For British Rocketman
Instine writes "Salford University, in the UK, is showing an article suggesting that Britain's biggest ever rocket has been unveiled, by an academic planning a space tourism offering by 2013. 'Nova 2 qualifies as the biggest rocket ever created and flown from the UK mainland,' says Steve Bennett, Head of Salford's Space Technology Laboratory
The current offering is said to amount to 20 minutes 'flight' and 3-4 mins floating. I'm not sure how much, but I'd pay for that."
It might the biggest but it's not the best, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwIhEDq6tdY
I suspect that the average tourist is fatter than the average astronaut
.
How many kids does it take to reach escape velocity??
The FUSE Grommet, you forgot to light the fuse!!!
Not necessarily. You can launch from anywhere, it just costs you more to accelerate (slightly less starting speed than at the equator) and possibly more to get into the orbit you want.
Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is further north than most of the UK and they certainly launch lots of stuff from there - though they prefer Baikonur, its politically more difficult....
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Bennett went on to say that he is not the man they think he is at home, and that he will be burning up his fuse up there alone.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Quoth TFA: "Steve Bennett who heads up the University's Space Technology Laboratory, will be presenting his 58ft Nova 2 rocket at the University and will discuss how his company, Starchaser Industries plans to launch it in September 2009 with the help of school pupils from across the UK."
There is something so British about that statement. I almost expected the guy to say, "well, I knocked it up in my garden shed at weekends with a friend of mine who is a keen amateur astronomer. We thought of getting some of the local schoolchildren to help out which would be good for their Scout's badges."
I miss the old country sometimes even if we are often portrayed as a nation of lovable middle-class eccentrics.
bang goes my karma... again...
At the risk of being overly pedantic the tube train usually refers to the London underground rail system. Salford is up-north (next to Manchester) and not on the underground. Apart from driving (M60) you could use the Manchester tram system, British Rail, the Manchester Ship canal, or various buses.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Nova 2 qualifies as the biggest rocket ever created and flown from the UK mainland
It's because Britain used to have a rocket program in the 50s and 60s. All the launches of the large rockets were done from Woomera in the Australian outback. The biggest of these was Blue Streak developed as an ICBM. There are some pictures here
As nice as this is to see, it is shocking how far behind we are. I'm at Leicester University, and the pinnacle of British commercial rocket techology (A Skylark, a small payload sounding rocket) sits in the middle of our foyer. Meanwhile, the French with a similar sized population and a similar sized economy (and coming from a similar state of total-fucked-upness after the war) have a commercially successful 20t launcher flying regularly.
Tory fanboys perpetually bleat that what Thatcher did to our heavy industry was a necessary evil - but it wasn't necessary for the frogs and they were in as bad a state as we were in the 1970s. We voluntarily gave up our capacity to engage in any project on a larger scale than a new shopping mall.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
You could use British Rail, but it'll cost you as much to get to Manchester as it does to get you into space.
Well, air travel used to be restricted to the very well-off, too. Remember the phrase "jet set"? For that matter, there was a time when cars were basically toys for rich eccentrics. If rich people are willing to pay a bunch of money for a few minutes of thrill ride, that's great; they're essentially funding the R&D that will eventually bring the cost down to where the rest of us can afford it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
A little known, slightly less ambitious project (more reasonable, really),
whose announcement was plagiarized by John F. Kennedy:
It is our goal... goal... goal... (echo)
Before the decade is out... out... out...
To send a carrier pigeon to West Staines and return him safely to Slough.