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Fishbowl Spaceship From Armadillo Aerospace
This fishbowl spaceship designed by Armadillo Aerospace is intended to give you a view of sub orbital flight that goes way beyond that "peek out the window" style we're all so used to.
(Fishbowl Spaceship)
Incredibly, the company's president John Carmack actually plans to build this thing and sent it rocketing upward by 2010. For just $100,000 you can go way beyond Mr. Toad's wild ride.
Some readers may find themselves irresistibly reminded of the General Products Hull #4 from Larry Niven's Known Space series.
"Nothing, but nothing, can get through a General Products hull. No kind of electromagnetic energy except visible light. No kind of matter, from the smallest subatomic particle to the fastest meteor. That's what the company's advertisements claim, and the guarantee backs them up.
(Read more about the General Products Hull)
I guess I'll be waiting for Armadillo Aerospace to install crash couches and provide me with a Puppeteer-style guarantee before I'd go up in the thing, though.
Update 28-Oct-2008: It also occurs to me that some readers might recall the artificial gold-fish-bowl worlds from Olaf Stapledon's 1937 classic Star Maker:
One very small and rather uncommon kind of artificial world consisted almost wholly of water. It was like a titanic bowl of gold-fish.
(Read more about Stapledon's gold-fish-bowl worlds )
End Update.
From Armadillo Aerospace via New Scientist; thanks to Erik Nodacker for the tip on this story.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/27/2008)
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