Flying saucers, flying billionaires, and Martha’s space picnic?

According to a report from the U.K.’s Daily Mail, a 68-year-old amateur inventor has recently won a contract from the U.S. government for his hovercraft/helicopter/flying saucer, called Geoff’s Flying Saucer. Geoff Hatton’s invention has an illustrious history: the first model was built in 1964, funding for the project was won in 2001, a patent filed in March 2005, and the first flights launched later that year. The small flying saucer uses a battery-powered top propeller to push air down and over its surfaces, pushing the device upward like a helicopter. The American government-unlike the British Ministry of Defense who rejected Hatton’s flying saucer-has expressed interest in the device because of its potential: it can recover from bumps into walls, and it may aid surveillance and possibly undertake search-and-rescue missions.

In other airborne news, the world’s fifth space tourist took off Saturday from Kazakhstan, digging a $25 million (U.S.) hole into the pockets of American billionaire Charles Simonyi, who helped create Microsoft Word and Excel. Grinning and waving upon takeoff to a supportive entourage, including diva ex-con Martha Stewart, Simonyi didn’t seem fazed that a the huge pile of cash has zipped away for this 13-day trip. While Simonyi was blasting off, Stewart also partook of the luxuries of modern travel-if a camel can be construed as such. Stewart spent the hours before lift-off on the back of a camel, a common mode of transportation in the Kazakhstan steppes.

The story gets more bizarre.

With his fellow cosmonauts, Simonyi docked at the International Space Station on Monday with a picnic basket full of Stewart’s gourmet food-which some have taken as a romantic love token. Simonyi plans to share the meal with the ISS astronauts on April 12, Russian Cosmonaut Day.

Simonyi also intends to blog about his space adventures while in orbit. The blog already lists some of Simonyi’s stranger space-flight experiences: urinating on the tire of the bus taking cosmonauts to the launch pad, batting a black toy cat that is a good-luck charm to cosmonaut Oleg Kotov and much, much more.

Source: Daily Mail, Scientific American

-S.H.