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Hello! We're a little late posting these show notes, because Regie is an idiot and forgot to click a button. Seriously. He had one job...
Anyway, this week's show is still available on Harrogate Community Radio and on our Podcast feed - click the image of the Awesome Wally Funk to go to the podcast download page, or search "Geeking with Destination Venus" wherever the very finest pods are cast. Why not subscribe and have us slide into your ears every week?
BY WAY OF APOLOGY...
We started with an apology because Regie still hadn't sorted the interview/discussion he's been promising for about three weeks now. OK, so he had two jobs. Point is, he didn't do either of them...
Expect better next week.
WALLY FUNK GOES TO SPACE!
Regie then went back to his ponderings about the battle of the billionaires in space from a couple of weeks ago. As predicted, Richard Branson has declared his intention to climb aboard one of his Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two craft and beat Jeff Bezos into space. This is in now way surprising - there are egos and bragging rights at stake.
Much more important is that the identity of the third passenger who will accompany Bezos and his brother on their sub-orbital hop has been revealed, and it is the unutterably awesome Mary Wallace "Wally" Funk.
If you're not a space geek you might not know the name, but Wally Funk has been a key figure in aviation and at N.A.S.A. since the sixties. Regie is still cynical about the point of Bezos's little joyride, but is prepared to forgive all of it because Wally Funk has deserved this ride for fifty years.
Read about this remarkable woman HERE.
SPACESHIP ONE/WHITE KNIGHT
The rocket that will take Funk to space is pretty conventional (although as discussed a couple of weeks ago, it is ridiculously phallic - even by rocket standards...) But Branson will ride to space aboard a new breed of space plane developed from Burt Rutan's design for Spaceship One - the craft that won the Ansari X-Prize and became the first privately developed craft to take a human into space twice.
Spaceship One was carried to altitude by the White Knight carrier plane, as seen below:
As you can see below, the Spaceship Two/White Knight Two combination is pretty similar:
THE MOON'S TAIL
In actual science (rockets are cool but they're more engineering these days) comes the news that the Moon has a tail of Sodium. Read more on that HERE.
AND FINALLY...
Hugh Jackman has dropped hints that he might return as Wolverine in an MCU movie. Read more HERE.
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