[ExI] Launching Satellites from Airplanes DARPA

[spike]

>> A ton to LEO can go a long way.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SMART-1

>Don't you mean a tonne to LEO?

>(Just to tickle Spike's units funnybone).    ;)  BillK

Harrrr.   {8-]

I forget which is which.  Commonly today, even in the US, a ton is a 1000
kg.  If they mean the other, it is called a short ton, which is about 900kg
or 2000 pounds mass as measured in a 1 g field.

Since we are on the subject of funnybones, something involving England
happened yesterday.  The European Team chess championships are taking place
currently in Greece.  The British team is surprisingly anemic.  They came in
at tenth seed with a strong young team, but were trounced by a bunch of
small countries that no one has ever heard of, such as "Romania" and
"Georgia."  Retract, I think we had a US president from "Georgia."  But that
"Romania" thing must be one of those fictitious places like Narnia or Tannu
Tuva.  

Yesterday, one of the chatterers made an offhanded comment "Has anyone seen
the British chess team?" as a snarky way of saying: we usually see better
performance by them, perhaps someone kidnapped them and put these guys in
their place.  Someone else got the gag and commented "Their team captain is
frantically searching for them."   Both of those posters were on the scene
in Greece.  Then the transmission unexpectedly went dead: nothing coming
from that server.  A wild rumor circulated from those two comments that the
British chess team was unaccounted for, setting off a flurry of inquiry,
since the server trouble had blocked transmission of all four of their
games.  Perhaps they had been apprehended by a group of local Presbyterian
militants?  People were trying to contact anyone at the scene to verify the
Brits were OK.  I didn't partake in it: I figure if some security breach had
resulted in any of the teams being actually missing in action or unaccounted
for, they would not have continued the tournament.

The Brits were found alive and well when the server came back up, playing
chess right there in the hall.

spike