ColinW

What you mean is "real" rockets never go straight up. I think you'll find this one does. Real rockets have a purpose, delivering a payload to another place on the planet or into orbit. This one will do neither. (Having said that I've still to read how they plan to steer a solid fuelled rocket.) If they manage this feat, it will shoot up into the sky and then fall back down, like the glorified firework that it is. Why would it not travel vertically? It will land as a glider and presumably the closer it comes back down to the spaceport the better. I don't understand your obsession with stopping the ISS. Of course it would no longer be "in space" according to my definition, or any other, if you stopped it. So what? For an object to be "in space", as far as I am concerned, it has to be in a position where it will not fall into the gravitational well caused by the earth's mass. That can be due to movement at sufficient speed to maintain orbit (in a trajectory that won't cause it to crash into the planet), or by achieving escape velocity, or by being in a position where the object will fall into the "well" caused by another celestial body or the freak case of being at a Lagrange point. By my definition altitude is irrelevant. You could be 1000 or 10,000 miles up, but if you are not at or above the orbital velocity appropriate to that altitude you are not in space!

Renrag, Yep, I forgot that when the rocket fizzles out this contraption will be travelling straight up at 2500mph! (I also got a bigger number but I assume that's just Branson getting the acceleration wrong). If you assume their speed estimate is correct it will take about two minutes to come to a halt decelerating at 1g, I think it actually goes further after the rocket goes out than it does under power! It would therefore get past the silly 100km artificial definition of "space" but it won't get anywhere near my definition, which is that something is put into space when it doesn't come back simply because of gravity!

The other question is where does this 360,000 ft altitude figure actually come from? I've seen Richard Branson himself say that the spaceship part of his craft will be released at 50,000 ft (15,400m) and then accelerate at 5g for 40 seconds. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to remember from schooldays an equation s=ut+1/2at^2, where u is the speed before the rocket fires up, say 150m/s, t is 40s, a is 5x9.8m/s^2 so if you bang in the numbers that gets them a distance, s, of 45200m (and that is with me generously ignoring the effect of gravity!!) Assuming this motion is vertical they will then be at an altitude of 60,600m. Even in Cory's schooldays 60,600m definitely wasn't 360,000 ft. It's about forty miles isn't it? That certainly doesn't suggest the sub-orbital flights to Australia that Branson likes to talk about coming any day soon! Edited. I got halfway home and realized what a daft mistake I made here. I'll leave it for Cory's amusement :D

I think it's you that needs to do some research. If you did you'd find that the company operating the "Vomit Comet" will give people 15 thirty second reduced g cycles, ten at "zero g". I think you'll find that ten zero-g cycles of thirty seconds each equates to approximately five minutes, the same as Branson's "spacemen". The fact that Branson's toy will give them this experience at a higher altitude is irrelevant.

It's always been a source of great amusement that, with the exception of "The Sky at Night" BBC Science coverage never seems to exceed a primary school level of understanding. I watched a piece on Breakfast TV this morning, largely copied here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12909071 which nicely sums up BBC science coverage. Somehow (proving that wealth and education are not related) Richard Branson has managed to fool hundreds of people into booking tickets costing £150,000 each for a ride on his "spaceship". I'm sure this will be an exciting little ride to the thinnest atmosphere civilians are ever likely to get to, but is it a ride into "space"? They might well get within a few hundred miles of the International Space Station. However, as they are only travelling at 2,500 mph and the ISS is travelling at over 17,000 mph, they aren't likely to pop in for a chat. Why can't these rich fools see that those extra 15,000 mph are what differentiates real space travel and a glorified plane ride? According to the article they will experience five minutes of weightlessness. They could do this for $4950 + tax on the ex-NASA "Vomit Comet" that is now running as a commercial enterprise! The only reason Branson's spacemen will experience "zero-g" is because it will be allowed to freefall for five minutes. They will also witness the sky magically changing from blue to black, much as it does in my back garden every night! The best bit of "BBC Science" is this passage Ahh, it's because of height they need heat shields? Those Apollo craft must have taken some stopping!

It seems that the decision by the vast majority of universities (including the former polytechnics) to charge the maximum £9000 fees is not going down well with the Condems! They have suddenly realized (is that not a sign of incompetence?) that their assumption that the average fee would be £7500 was ridiculously low and that they will have a billion pound hole in their finances when they dish out all the loans. So they are now threatening to cap student numbers in universities that charge the full fee. Isn't that the complete opposite of how the Tory "free market in education" was supposed to operate? If I borrow money from the bank to buy a car, they don't tell me where to buy it. Since I have to pay them back they are supposed mind their own damned business! I suppose that is the big difference, borrow a loan from the bank and you will almost certainly repay it. The government knows full well that vast numbers of students will never pay back their student loans. The more useless the degrees are the less chance there is that the money will ever be paid and those are precisely the degrees universities will choose to teach. Why pay for expensive science labs and computer facilities when you can teach "Football Studies" for the price of a daily paper? So what is the best solution the intellectually challenged David Willetts wants to bring in to patch up his ill thought plans? Abandon the whole stupid idea? Not a chance! Almost incredibly, he wants to make it possible for ANYONE to award degrees! As Willetts puts it himself "BTEC degrees are on their way." Is that what this country really wants? Should we be putting a degree certificate in the supermarket trolley just because Asda's degrees are cheaper than the local FE college? Ridiculous idea? It was ridiculous to think of them selling TV's, clothes, insurance and banking a few years ago. The Condems are trying to turn this country into another India, where billionaires pay no tax and the plebs are left to starve covered in their own excrement.

Beware if you get a message claiming to be giving you a UPS shipping number. I opened the message because I was expecting a delivery from Korea. Luckily the systems at work detected malware inside the zip file contained in the message. I suppose later in the day I might have asked myself why a tracking number needed to be in a zip file

It sounds like a great set of kit, there are some expensive extras there! I was looking at buying one but in the end I went for one of the Chinese mini-lathes because the only room I can use as a "workshop" is in my loft. The thought of lugging 100kg+ lumps of iron up two flights of stairs was too much! My 7x14 mini lathe only ways 40kg and is quite "portable" once the chuck and tailstock are off. One thing occurs, you don't say whether it has a single phase motor. We had one of those "little" Myfords at a place I used to work and I'm sure ours had a three phase motor fitted.

Of course it has Barry. The biggest shame that Labour should have after their period in office is that they didn't have the guts to act like a real Labour government and put right some of their predecessors' more idiotic, political dogma inspired, ideas. Public transport in this country is an absolute disgrace. You only have to use public transport in countries like Holland, Germany and even Spain to realize what a complete shambles our system is in. To put that incompetent fool Prescott in charge of it was verging on criminal. I think when Labour came to power after such a long time out of government they just didn't have the confidence to do anything other than minor tinkering. This is probably what has inspired Cameron to adopt such a reckless program of change, knowing that even if it costs him his job an incoming Labour administration will leave things pretty much as he leaves them.

I've never read the Daily Mirror once in my life. In what way does it benefit a man's grandkids to put him out of work? A guy near me is a builder and he hasn't worked for the last four months. Before long he'll have to sell his house in the nice area we live in and move into scally land with all the other unemployed. Do you really think it will benefit his grandkids to be brought up in an area where drugs, teenage pregnancy and long term unemployment are the norm? Of course it won't. So let's set the record straight Barry. You, like most tories, don't really give a flying f..k for my neighbour's grandkids, or my grandkids, let alone any financial burden they might be left. What you blue boys DO care about is the misguided possibility that Cameron might just give you lower taxes by sacking half the public sector. The strange thing is that, despite Thatcher privatising all the so-called inefficient industries that used to supply us, I don't ever remember the low tax utopia that she promised us. My gas, electric and water bills are higher than they ever were, public transport is a sad joke, I have to wheel my own bin around because the private "refuse technicians" won't walk five yards down an entry....the list of examples of inferior service by private suppliers of services, with none of the promised cost benefits, is endless. You might argue that Brown and co. were happy to leave everything in the private sector. Well of course they were, they were tories with red ties. We can only be grateful that they didn't worsen the situation in the way the ConDem alliance now plan to. It's almost as if Cameron has been told that he should assume that he's a single parliament Prime Minister and given instructions to destroy everything he can before he gets booted out. So he's going to wreck our higher education system, dismantle the National Health Service and scrap half our armed forces. I will never forget the sight of Cameron's cronies destroying brand new aircraft with a mechanical digger, to ensure that no future government could re-commission them. That is pure Thatcher, remember how she flooded the deep mines so that they could never be re-opened? The irony is that the "new tory" Labour party would probably never have re-opened a coal mine anyway. The quickest way to increase public sector borrowing is to put another million people on the dole. Personally, I'd sooner pay them to work than pay them to sit around the house getting bored. The devil finds work for idle hands. I've never had a crime committed against me by someone with a job, however useless and subsidized that job might be. I for one would sooner pay higher taxes than come home and find my house has been broken into. Even Cameron, a man who definitely seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing, can't put a price on that violation.

1. If your original problem ever comes back (starting OK and then just dieing and refusing to restart) try pulling the fuel pump relay out and then plugging it back in again. If it then starts it's a duff electrolytic capacitor in the "relay" (they aren't really relays). I had that problem on my escort, which has the same engine etc. 2. I bought one of those cheap OBD2 connectors. They work well, but unfortunately my car (Volvo) will only give me the information the makers are forced to give by U.S. emission legislation. (Reading the data is part of their equivalent to the MOT test.) This means that, although it's nice to be able to see that the engine is working fine, they aren't a big help in fault diagnosis! They also don't help you find the fault that actually causes a bad reading on any particular sensor. It's still fun to sit in the street with your laptop plugged into the car, impresses the local kids no end!

This "generosity" of Osbourne is a complete sham. A few months ago unleaded at my local garage cost £1.17 a litre, so at 17.5% VAT the chancellor was taking about 17p as VAT (ignoring the obscene duty!) The same fuel today is £1.31 a litre, that works out as £1.09 + 20% VAT. In other words the VAT has gone up to 22p a litre. So he is taking 5p more off us as VAT and giving us 1p fuel duty back. Big whup, as my 12 year old is fond of saying! The idea that he's somehow doing us a big favour by not adding 5p is a complete nonsense. That 5p increase was part of Labour's daft strategy to get us to use our cars less by making petrol expensive. When petrol is £1.31 a litre (an almost INCREDIBLE £5.96 a gallon) we don't really need any more adding for us to find it expensive, do we? If I say I'm going to punch you in the face and then don't do it I'm not giving you anything! I read an interview where a government minister, asked whether the oil companies would pass on their extra £2 billion tax to the consumer, replied "I wouldn't expect them to." Just what planet are they living on? OF COURSE they will pass that expense on to us, and they'll probably add a bit more for administration as well. It was a typical Tory budget. A budget for mass unemployment. How can the tories be so stupid that they can't see that having people sitting idle at home is not the way to repay debts? I can understand that they and their CBI chums want millions on the dole to reduce their own personal wage bills, but what good is that if no-one can afford to buy their products and services?

No, it's so he can sell you a turd and when you complain say "OK, here's your 99p back." He can also have a mate buy it and boost his feedback.

The Police know that there is no rush. The only reason for them attending at all is so that you can get a number for your insurance claim. They have no intention of investigating the crime. It's a miracle anyone turned up to dust for fingerprints even. A lad local to me got stopped in a stolen car and was fingerprinted. They then matched his prints to forty break-ins in the neighborhood. Now I can see how they might regard someone who commits one crime as not worth their effort but when they KNOW that one person has committed forty break-ins and STILL can't be bothered investigating you do wonder just what they are getting paid for. If they'd made some effort and caught that scumbag after his first offence, instead of just waiting for him to get caught out through his own stupidity, then thirty-nine other people wouldn't have had go through the stress and sleepless nights that follows a burglary. Taken a step further, what if it had been my house he broke into on his fortieth job and I'd caught and killed him? I'd now be banged up, because one thing the Police REALLY hate is someone doing their job for them, like Tony Martin did.

If the water doesn't move then what was that washing all those houses away? It wasn't there before the tsunami hit. When something isn't there one minute and then is there the next, then as far as I recall my 'O' level Physics, it has indeed moved. The fact that it moves back does not mean it didn't move in the first place. Because I return home in the evening does not mean I never went to work.

Idiots. They should have awarded her £4000 but said that since she'd been told not to do it there was 100% contributory negligence on her part, gave her nothing and made her scrounging parasite mother pay all the costs.

Why should he be free to say what he likes? I (a member of the anglo saxon white male tax paying minority) am not allowed to say that this benefit scrounging muslim scumbag should be kicked out of the country, because it might offend benefit scrounging muslim scumbags, so why should he be free to offend me? There is a place for muslim extremists. It's called the middle east. If he loves that lifestyle so much then let him go there and live it. When in Rome, do as the Romans. How long would I last shouting anti Gaddafi chants in Tripoli? How long would I last quietly standing at a bus stop in Tripoli for that matter? Why do we always bend over backwards to accommodate people who would cheerfully stone us to death in their own countries?

The decision by the laughably named European Court of Justice that insurance companies must charge girls the same for their insurance as lads is nothing but a rapists' charter. The pervs will be licking their lips at the thought of all those teenage girls that will now be walking home on dark nights because they have to give up their cars. It's also shown the insurance companies, once again, for the crooks that they are. Womens' insurance premiums will go up but mens' won't come down and men's pension payments will fall but womens' won't rise (according to the ABI). I thought the ConDem alliance weren't going be dictated to by Europe? It made me laugh this morning to see a Tory euro MP blaming Labour for this, because Labour didn't give us a referendum. Does that mean we can have one now?

I have to say I've never tried it, but I wonder if you could mix red food colouring into Araldite and repair it with that?

I don't see that Gordon Brown oversaw a great deal of fiscal mismanagement. His time in office had the lowest inflation rate since the war and yet he did that with "full employment". Well, full in as much as anyone who wanted a job could get one. Almost all the debt the tories "inherited" was money spent bailing out the tories own incompetent (and crooked) banking chums. Brown's "loony" public spending was more than covered by the tax revenue he was getting by having a policy of maintaining full employment, something which is anathema to the tories as they hate having a workforce that aren't scared of the sack. No member of my family was ever out of work for a single day from the time Tony Blair stepped into number ten (and we are talking about Merseyside here!) How long will that last now the tories are back in? I'm not even sure MY job is safe now, never mind my daughter's. The result of this is that I haven't bought a single big item since Cameron and his poodle got in, and looking at all the shops closing down it seems everyone else is doing the same. So for the ConDem alliance to get inflation up to 4% at a time when no-one is actually spending any money is economic incompetence on a scale I can't remember ever seeing before. At least it would be incompetence if we didn't know that this is exactly what the tories want, high unemployment, high inflation and high interest rates, just like the good old days of Thatcher! Better still, stop all those working class scum going to university, so we can compete on costs with India.

£1.8 billion is from retail banking and to say that Barclays did not benefit from the government subsidizing RBS etc is just plain nonsense. The whole industry would have collapsed if we hadn't bailed them out. The banks' profiteering is nothing short of obscene. How can they justify paying 0.1% interest on deposits when the ConDem alliance has got inflation back up to 4%? Simple, they are all involved in the equivalent of "price fixing" to make sure that we have nowhere to move our money to.

The ConDem Alliance has dug itself down to a new low by telling a warrant officer with 22 years service, currently serving in Afghanistan, that he is losing his job - by email. 37 other long serving soldiers were also informed of their impending redundancy in the same callous manner. Is there nothing that these chinless wonders are not capable of? It is especially galling that real men are losing their jobs, in the worst ever dismantling of our defence capabilities, at a time when Cameron's buddies on the board of Barclays have just announced that this year their profits topped £6 BILLION! Someone remind me again, how much did we subsidize the UK banking sector by?

I'm not sure why anyone would want to put a fridge freezer in the garage anyway. Surely the point of having your freezer in the garage is so that you can have a big, high efficiency, chest freezer that you wouldn't want in the kitchen? Front opening freezers are a pain in the neck, they seem to hold nothing. You can barely get a few pizzas in let alone loaves of bread.

Is a Pylon a make of twin axled caravan?

"Some"? You mean there are actually people who don't see it that way? Although the carp situation is bad enough, I think the controversy really started in the 80's and 90's when trout fisheries started stocking with fish above record size, which generally lasted about a week before being caught. The records people probably didn't think it was their job to promote Dever Springs or wherever.