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Blogging Mr. Richard Branson announced
yesterday that Virgin Galactic has just signed up its 500th“astronaut customer” to fly into space – none other than studd muffin actor, Ashton Kutcher.

 "I gave Ashton a quick call to congratulate and welcome him. He is as thrilled as we are at the prospect of being among the first to cross the final frontier (and back!) with us and to experience the magic of space for himself," Branson wrote on his blog.

With a flight costing $200,000, with an up-front deposit of $20,000 required, it is a luxury then most mere mortals will not be including on their shopping list this week. However, when your daytime job pays you $700,000 per episode for starring in the hit comedy show Two and a Half Men (reportedly $15.4 million for the season), I guess the price for 6 minutes of weightlessness is irrelevant! 

The date and time of the space flights have not yet been announced.
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Space programs of the largest agencies in the industry are currently suffering the effects of the global economic crisis. NASA recently retired the Space Shuttle program despite not having a working substitute. Yet these financial hiccups are not enough to discourage everybody.

Ugandan Chris Nsamba, founder of the African Space Research Program, has an ambitious dream - to put someone in orbit in just six years. To this end, he has turned his own back garden into a spaceship construction site. Although lacking in the sophisticated tools and machinery generally needed for this type of work, all those involved in the project seem to be happy and proud of what they are trying to do. 

The first step undertaken by Nsamba and his volunteer team, mostly made up of engineering students, is to build an aircraft, giving the group valuable experience to help them with the next task of designing a real spaceship capable of flying around the Earth with a Ugandan onboard.

"The plane is still far from being completed and it has no engine," confessed the future aerospace engineers in a recent interview, and though the aircraft is not much more than a rough prototype, it is sufficiently motivating for the group, who have decorated it with the Ugandan flag on the fuselage.

Nsamba is a restless dreamer who tries to think of everything. He is the one to train the team, helped by his experience as an astronomy student, and it is he who will one day certify the future Ugandan astronaut. He does not allow a lack of local facilities to hamper their progress and has even come up with a plan to simulate microgravity: "I've got a jet engine on order so I'm planning to build a tunnel, put the engine at one end and when I throw a guy in he'll float in a similar way to how he would in space."

Possibly not all Nsamba’s dreams will become reality and probably the launch of a spacecraft from Kampala, Uganda will not take place in the next decade. However, it is good to see that there are still dreamers out there in the world, willing and able to battle against disadvantage, adversity and disbelief. 

So many have so much in this world and yet do so little – by contrast, Chris Nsamba does so much with practically nothing. For him, quite literally, not even the sky is the limit!

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Who needs billions of dollars, breathtaking layers of bureaucracy and an army of scientists and engineers, when a big dose of enthusiasm, some creative imagination, a bit of cash and three friends can do the job just as well?
 
Three British Space fans, Steve Daniels, John Oates and Lester Haines, put their heads together to come up with a cunning plan to send an aircraft into Space, and all for the modest sum of £8000.

The operation, codenamed PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space), involved the construction of a plane with a 3ft (91.4cm) wing span made from paper straws covered in paper, equipped with small camera and GPS navigation system, and launched by means of a large helium balloon.
 
Climbing up to 90,000ft (27,432m) in height before the balloon exploded, the plane then glided back down to earth again, taking photographs as it descended. The launch pad was a remote spot 80km west of Madrid and the plane eventually landed again, almost undamaged, in woodland about 160km away.
 
Three cheers and many congratulations to the ingenuity and passion of the three budding Space explorers.

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Robert Harrison/Ross Parry Agency
A recent story I read brought a smile to my face and reassured me that the spirit of adventure and ingenuity is still alive and strong.

Robert Harrison, from the UK put his imagination into gear and came up with a device costing around £500 that managed to do what NASA had spent millions doing - that is, to take stunning photographs of planet Earth.

The device, comprising of a digital camera and GPS system, all held together with lots of duct tape and suspended under a weather balloon took flight reaching 35km in height and captured a series of impressive photographs of Earth, from the edge of Space.

Once published online, Mr Harrison was soon contacted by someone from NASA wanting to know how he managed to do it without a rocket and large pile of money!
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Robert Harrison/Ross Parry Agency
It just goes to show that sometimes the best solutions to a problem can indeed be the simplest.

Well done Robert Harrison, and to all the budding inventors out there in the world, keep going, keep the imagination active, and don't forget that sometimes sticking to the basics can take you sky high!

To see more pictures you can go to Mr Harrison's flickr site by clicking the link below;
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30721501@N05/collections/72157621244472915/
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