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SpaceShipTwo Rolls Out
Commercial space tourism reached another milestone this week as Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and Ansari X Prize winner Burt Rutan unveiled SpaceShipTwo, a commercial rocket plane designed to carry two pilots and six amateur astronauts into space for five minutes of freefall. The spacecraft, inevitably named Enterprise, will start flight and safety tests next year, and could start carrying paying passengers as early as 2011, if it meets all the requirements set by the US government.
At $200,000 a pop, one wouldn't expect a huge market, but more than 300 people have already paid either the full price for a ticket or put down a deposit. Future fliers include California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, in whose state the first commercial spaceport will be built. Both were on hand for the unveiling, with Schwarzenegger calling his attendance at the event “one of the coolest things I've ever done.”
Branson plans to build five or six rocket planes, spending $400 million to do so.. Rutan is even more ambitious; long-term, he believes that “to satisfy this market, there will need to be between 40 and 50 spaceships. Assuming we have enough spaceports and assuming we work the cost numbers appropriately we can attract that large number of people.” Both Branson and Rutan are focused on safety; Rutan in particular noted that “the goal of meeting the safety of government manned spaceflight is not anywhere near acceptable, where 4 percent of the people who have left the atmosphere have died. I believe we need to set our sights more on the goal of the safety of the early airliners, and that's an extremely difficult goal.” That's what they're shooting for, however, and perhaps in another decade or two, going into space may become safe and affordable for the average middle-class person, just as flying on an ordinary airplane is today.
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Does This Cheat Sound Familiar?
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a...that magic little cheat opens the way to some major power-ups in certain video games, and surprising Easter eggs on some web sites. It's called the Konami code, and while it won't make it into any best-selling books or blockbuster movies, you can find it doing things on Facebook, Google, and other web sites. Why?
The Japanese company Konami created a number of classic video games, such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series, several other games for Nintendo, and some well-loved arcade games. One of the programmers working on the arcade game Gradius in 1985 found it to be too difficult, and added a key sequence – the one mentioned above – that, when entered, gave the player a bunch of power-ups. Word of the shortcut spread, and other programmers put the same cheat into their games. It now works for almost 100 video games, including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution.
It also works on certain web sites. Konami Code Sites has a list, which you access by using the Konami code (of course). Google Reader will turn the left side of the screen blue and put the word “ninja!” into the search box. Facebook even got in on the act. Try it when you're logged in. Just have the page active, type in the code, and start clicking on the page. You'll get lens flares – circles that appear when you point a camera into the sun – with every click. Logout and log back in again, and they're gone.
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