links for 2010-12-11
-
If you were launching a spacecraft on a historic voyage, what would you choose as your secret payload? For SpaceX of Hawthorne California, it was this wheel of Le Brouere cheese. The firm launched its Dragon Capsule into low earth orbit on Wednesday and landed it safely – a first for a commercial company – bringing the cheese back to Earth in one piece.
The cheese was stashed in a payload secretly bolted to the spacecraft's floor. You may well ask why, and it turns out to be a tribute to a Monty Python sketch – presumably the one in which John Cleese attempts to buy cheese from a cheese shop that, it transpires, has no cheese.