Really TRUE odd factoids

[Alex321]

Wasn't it 1903 ?

Yes. 17th December 1903

Which was 121 years ago yesterday, rather than 101 as Classic said

 

[Conrad_K]

And some 73 years between that flight and the Space Shuttle. Busy little bees, aren’t we?

It was 51 years between the first flight of the Wright Flyer and the first flight of the English Electric Lightning.
61 years to the B-70 Valkyrie.
Then aviation progress basically stalled.


1942: The V-2's first flight
1957: Sputnik
1961: Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth
1962: first Venus flyby (Mariner 2)
1962: first communications satellite (Telstar 1)
1964: first Mars flyby (Mariner 4)
1969: first manned Moon landing (Apollo 11)
1970: first Venus lander (Venera 7)
1971: first space station (Salyut 1)
1976: first Mars landing (Viking 1)
1977: Voyager 1 starts Grand Tour (and it's still sending data, 47+ years later)

But everything after 1969 was just inertia; mostly projects that had already been funded. The Soviets dropped out of the Space Race after Apollo 11, and Congress pulled the plug on the cost-plus spendthrift funding NASA had been created with. NASA's appropriations mostly went into supporting its vast bloated bureaucracy, and they didn't have much left over for that "space" stuff any more. We never got the Wheel, or Moonbase, or the manned Mars missions. Occasionally they'd send up an unmanned probe to somewhere, just to keep the appropriations coming, and they paid for a time-share on the Russian-built space station. Not quite the space program we were promised.

Now there are a handful of corporate space companies, but they had to start from scratch, recapitulating everything from the 1950s onward, because Rocketdyne, who built the Apollo rocket engines... threw all the blueprints and research data away when they decided the Fed wasn't going to point the money hose at them any more. Elon Musks's SpaceX company has extended rocket technology substantially past what NASA accomplished, so things are moving forward again after half a century.

And Musk's 2010 Tesla Roadster still in solar orbit, moving at a bit over 73,000 miles per hour, which is almost as fast as the speed of rumor.

 

[Chris S]

There are 13 Santa Clauses in Iceland. They've also got a Christmas Cat who will eat you if you don't get any clothes for presents.

 

[Chris S]

Dr Richard Lacey, who helped design the breathalyzer, has been banned for drink driving.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/32409204/scientist-designed-breathalysers-caught-drink-driving/

 

[PeteXXX]

The 1961 film 'West Side Story' was a morern New York version of Romeo and Juliet.

 

[Andy in Germany]

More than eight million currywurst sausages are eaten every year in Germany.

This means people actually eat one, and voluntarily repeat the experience.

 

[Punkawallah]

More than eight million currywurst sausages are eaten every year in Germany.

This means people actually eat one, and voluntarily repeat the experience.

Population Germany about 84 million. It could be that some 10% of the population ate one during the year, or 1% ate ten each over the year, or some combination thereof.
So the best you could say is ‘it could be that some voluntarily repeat the experience’.
:-)

 

[Chris S]

More than eight million currywurst sausages are eaten every year in Germany.

Currywurst were invented by British servicemen mixing curry powder into ketchup.

 

[Andy in Germany]

Currywurst were invented by British servicemen mixing curry powder into ketchup.

I could use that next time someone here talks about how bad British food is, but it would prove their point...