Word: rideing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dine out three times a week, belong to fitness clubs and travel for pleasure at least twice a year, albeit mostly within China. Mobile phones and personal computers have become common in this land of former hand-to-mouth farmers. That's providing abundant opportunities for companies looking to ride the spending wave. The emerging Chinese middle class has become an important target market for international businesses keen to supply it with products and services...
Welcome to the prelaunch program of Virgin Galactic, which hopes to be the world's first private spaceline, with liftoff by 2009. The adventure-addicted British entrepreneur says that over its first 10 years Virgin Galactic will send 50,000 civilians on a thrill ride more than 62 miles (100 km) up into space--to escape gravity and ogle our small fragile planet. Initial cost for the two-hour adventure...
...miles, well outside the atmosphere. For 4 min., the six passengers (now astronauts!) can unstrap and float weightless around the cabin. Earth will look like a shiny ball with white swirls surrounded by a totally black sky. Diving back into the atmosphere will be a wild ride, peaking at nearly 6 Gs--twice the rush you feel on the average roller coaster. Rutan's genius is his "carefree re-entry" design: SpaceShipTwo folds up its wings for re-entry then transforms into a conventional glider for a gentle slide home to the runway...
...oddest-looking suborbital ride, however, is by John Carmack, who is building podlike contraptions that sometimes land on all fours. Sometimes not. The Pixel, made for one, is a platform atop four tanks of fuel (liquid oxygen and ethanol). He's not strapping anyone in yet, right? "Funny you should say that," he says, picking up a motorcycle saddle at his Armadillo Aerospace shop one evening. "It goes on top of the electronic box over here. We did a parking-lot flight a couple of years ago and roughed up one of our earlier vehicles." Not to worry, he says...
...course, you can't get to Bigelow's space station without a ride. No problem, since spaceport plans are popping up faster than airports--seven at last count, from Truth or Consequences, N.M., to Sheboygan, Wis. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has signed off on plans for a $220 million--to--$225 million Spaceport America to focus on space tourism...