Posted: . At: 8:09 AM. This was 13 years ago. Post ID: 679
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Web Blog going very well. And Balsa stratospheric plane.


The Blog is going very well thanks to the visitors that have been commenting and bookmarking my website, and if you want to include bit’s of my posts in your own web blogs, then that is fine. The theme I am using is one I created myself with the P2 theme is the basis, I used some code from the P2 theme to enable the threaded comments functionality that my users enjoy. The success of this web blog is due to you the users and I am grateful to you all for your patronage and hope to see you all back next update. I have enabled the RSS feed, but it is a Atom feed, but it works in Firefox as a live bookmark.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/13/0042200

“Brits Steve Daniels, John Oates and Lester Haines just became the envy of geeks the world over. The trio ‘built a one-wing glider from paper, lofted it to the edge of space at 90,000 feet with a helium balloon, and posted sound and video recordings from the plane as it glided safely back to the ground,’ writes blogger Kevin Fogarty. The Register newspaper sponsored the stunt and reported each step of the process. And British defense-contractor Qinetiq supplied the cameras and testing chambers, says Fogarty.”

A couple of British experimenters have released a paper plane from 90.000 feet from a Helium balloon and recorded video and video from the craft as it glided safely back to Earth. This is the ultimate paper plane stunt, like the people that have sent up Helium balloons to great altitudes and record photographs of the Earth from that great height. Even though this was actually using some balsa wood to be able to be strong enough to hold the equipment attached to it and to glide from that height, it proves that a quite fragile craft can glide down from a huge altitude and survive. And this is supremely cool indeed. You could make a craft quite cheaply that could do the same thing, it is only difficult getting it up there in the first place. It seems easy in Star Trek to get into space, but it is overcoming the gravity of Earth that is the hard part indeed, and I would love to get into space myself with a small shuttle-craft, but that probably will not happen in my lifetime. I saw advertisements on television in the 80’s or early 90’s that showed a businessman returning to Earth from an appointment on a space station and talking to Earth control, negotiating a good approach route to return to his launch area. We all thought that we would have Star Trek styled cities and flying cars in 2000 after watching Beyond 2000, but it did not come to pass.


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