Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: SPACE CHEESE GOES MISSING

by Hazed

The UK's space program suffered an unfortunate setback this week. Many of you will no be aware that the UK has a space program. Well, it doesn't have an official one sponsored by the government but there is a thriving community of amateur rocketeers who launch things into space for a hobby - and good for them! But that's where the setback has occurred.

The problem is that of some missing cheese.

The project was to attach a payload of 300g of Somerset farmhouse cheddar to a weather balloon and launch it to ascend to the edge of space. There, the balloon would burst and the cheddar would float to Earth beneath a parachute, recording its trip on a digital camera. It would transmit its position to mission control using GPS. The project was set up by the West Country Cheesemakers and the dairy product was launch from Pewsey, Wiltshire in England, at 4.00am on Tuesday. The project cost £1,000.

But having reached an altitude of 18.6 miles, the cheese just vanished. Dom Lane from the Cheesemakers said, "We've been tracking the trajectory and the current prediction is that it could land anywhere from here in Wiltshire to Hemel Hempstead. The GPS isn't come through on the web so we might need help to find it because we're not sure where it is at the moment."

Maybe it was stolen by aliens in a UFO!

You can see a video of the launch here.

Update

Good news: the space cheese has been found! The lump of Somerset farmhouse cheddar turned up in a garden in Buckinghamshire, 74 miles from its launch point. The unnamed woman who found it turned it in at High Wycombe police station on Wednesday evening, and the mission controller Dom Lane drove there to pick it up.

Sadly, the onboard digital camera failed so there is no record of the cheese's ascent or descent. Shame!

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