Buran Buran

NO!  That Is Not A Typo!
If it wasn't 01/01/2020 when you're supposed to start with a clean slate and be righteous and forbearing, I'd come down that wi-fi signal and laser you into ignorant ashes.
     Okay, for the hard of intellect, no, today's title is nothing to do with that character played by Milo O'Shea? in "Barbarella" -

Duran Duran
(And I was right about the actor)

     Not.  Nor is it a reference to that Eighties band who were inexplicably popular at the time, when all the right-thinking people were into The Comsat Angels and The Sound*, and who simply lifted their name from that very same "Barbarella" film.  

Any excuse.  Any excuse.
(What?  You seriously think I was going to put up a picture of Duran x 2?)

     It is, in fact, a slanted reference to yesteryon's posting about Project Dyna-Soar.  You remember?  The re-usable space plane?
     That never came to fruition.  What came in it's stead was the Space Shuttle, a re-usable spacecraft.  Art?

This puppy

     The Space Shuttle was, to be impolite about it, a money hog like no other.  Each launch cost £300 million, and indeed up to £1 billion, which is a reflection of what deep pockets Uncle Sam has.  There were 135 launches, and two disasters when a shuttle blew up on ascent and another disintegrated on descent (Challenger and Columbia, if you must know).  Still, serving for 30 years - 1981 to 2011 - and managing that many launches is quite an achievement.
     Now, who always wanted to go one better than the South Canadians?  No matter what it was: ice-hockey, main battle tanks, chess games or ice-cream flavours, anything and everything, even to the (possibly satirical) claim that jazz was invented in Russia along the banks of the Dniepr River.
     The Sinister Union, of course.  Art?

Buran and Energia, with puny human for scale

     Their space shuttle was named "Buran", and looks suspiciously similar to the South Canadian one, though this may just be a case of form following function.  It was lofted to orbit by the enormous Energia rocket system in 1988, at which point the Sinister politicians Who Wanted One Like Theirs were doubtlessly shaking each other left hands, because they had a glass of vodka in the other.  What the Sinister technical staff dealing with cosmonautry were thinking is quite another matter, as all their funding had gone into Buran (which means "Blizzard" and we'll come back to this).  It went on display at the Paris Air Show in 1989.  Art?

Monster monster!

     On it's maiden flight in 1988, Buran went into orbit and carried out two of same before coming back to land, entirely automated and without a crew, which just goes to show you how clever them Ruffians can be when the politicians allow it.     However! and you just knew that was coming, didn't you?  That flight was the only one it ever made.  A couple of years later the Sinister Union fell apart and budgets shrank instantly and immensely.  The story has an even sadder ending.  Buran ended up in a hangar in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, pretty much a footnote to history, and during a blizzard in 2002 the hangar collapsed, killing several workers and demolishing Buran.  Art?

Buran done in by buran

     There you go.  A prime example of be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.  And then you'll be sorry.  Motley!  Fetch the telescope, I want to see if I can spot those Spacex satellites.

Meanwhile, Back In Dorset ...
Yes, back to the wargame set in Fearnley-Whittingstall, where, if you recall, four sections of elite Teuton Fallschirmjager had arrived in the village, ready to  snatch a couple of British boffins -

Things are cooking

     The problem was, I (playing the Teutons) had no idea which house the boffins were in, until they made a panicked exit from the pub.  Not only that, contingents of Grenadier Guards kept popping up and potting my men, ending with an ambush that completely wiped out one section.  They were also fired upon by the far less formidable Home Guard, who used a Northover Projector - maybe more of that later.
     I shall jump to the end of the game.  Art?

     At the top you can see the Teuton trawler with a couple of towed barges, all ready to evacuate the FJs; the beach has been cleared of mines and a Landwasserschlepper is on the beach, ready to accept captured boffins.
     However - again with the however!
     By this point the boffins were now hiding in the church hall, with an escort of at least half a dozen soldiers.  So I knew where they were but didn't dare attack for fear of killing them - and at this point we closed the game down, calling it a probable draw.
     There, that wasn't too painful, was it?

The awesome and terrifying Northover in action

Say Hello To The Future
Conrad is still getting used to a car that has built-in GPS, rear parking sensors, a heated front windscreen and a functioning CD player.  He nervously predicts that self-driving cars will be commonplace, soon.
     Anyway, that has nothing to do with what I really wanted to talk about, which was sailing.

I shall not punish you this time, Art

     Not on water but in space, where there is a free and constant source of propulsion known informally as the "Solar Wind".  Many are the sci-fi stories and novels that exploit this by using "Solar sails" as a means of getting from A to B cheaply yet effectively.
     However - that word again!  Art?

Not a special effect

     This shows the successful unfurling of LightSail, a proof-of-concept mission that has put a solar sail into low Earth orbit; moreover, a sail with enough power-harvesting potential to tow a useful payload.  Art?

Thus

     And, fittingly, it was put up there by a SpaceX Falcon rocket.
     
     Hello The Future!

And with that, we are done and gone.  Pip pip!


*  Maybe it was only me.