So, LOHAN: What's it to be?
Low Orbital High Altitude Norks? Ballockets to that
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The El Reg Special Projects Bureau team is greatly obliged to all of you who chipped in with suggestions as to just what our audacious rocket-powered spaceplane project should be called.
If you're not yet up to speed on the successor to the Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) project, then you can check out our intitial concept here.
Of course, there's no way we're even going to start looking at rocket motors and advanced composite material aircraft designs until we've got a proper title in place. The provisional codename is, as you know, "LOHAN", and we're pretty happy with that unless we hear thunderous disapproval.
Here, though, are a few other ideas. If we need to explain any of these, then you're in the wrong place:
- Brilliantly Engineered Earthshattering Rocketship
- British Astronautical Rocket-Driven Orbital Test
- British Expeditionary Apparatus Vectored Earth Recovery
- British Object Of Blinding Speed
- British Rocket Into Troposphere - Not Exactly Yuri
- Elevated Launch Test, Onboard Navigation
- Enter Low Terrestrial Orbit Now
- Gas Augmented Grand Aeromobile
- Gigantic Injunction Generating Gliding Spaceplane
- High Altitude Rocket Powered Long-range Arial Gyroscopically Engineered Rocketplane
- Jub Orbiting Rocket Drives All Nuts
- Keeping National Innovation Going However The .uk Looks Economically Yuseless
- Launch Assisted Device (with) Yaw Gyrocompassing (and) Autonomous Guidence Activation
- Near Earth Enterprisingly Deployed Rocket Ejected from High Altitude Balloon (aka WINEHOUSE)
- Paris Over, Rev Two. Meeeeaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww: Aircraft Navigation
- Plane Impelling Plucky Playmobil Astronaut
- Possibility Of Remote Telemetry Malfunctioning Again: Negligible
- Pre Orbital Rocket Test of Manouvered Aerial Navigation
- Wildly Interesting Legitimately Logical (and) Kinetically Advanced Terrestrial Escape
Hmmmm. Moving swiftly back to LOHAN, here are some of your backronym offerings:
- Laughing Over Horizon At Nerds
- Levitating On Helium And Nitrous
- Long Orbital Hi-jinks, Absent Nickers
- Long Overdue Half Assed Notion
- Low Orbit Half-assed Aeronautical Nightmare
- Low Orbit Hawk with Autonomous Navigation
- Low Orbit Heatseeking Aegypiinaen Ninjabot
- Low Orbit, Helium-Aided Nipples, er, Narwhal, er, Nipper
- Low-Orbit Helium-Assisted Nerdoplane
- Low Orbit Hype Attracting Numpty
- Low Orbital High Altitude Norks
- Lower Orbit Helium Aircraft: Navigable
- Lubricated Obviously High And Nude
Well, we think you can see where the more sensible pitches are heading, so here's our shortlist of three, for your consideration:
- Low Orbit High Altitude Navigator
- Low Orbit Highly Autonomous Navigator
- Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator
Your thoughts are, as ever, most welcome. We'll make a final decision on this most pressing of matters by Friday, and then we'll be able to get on with some serious "rockoon" (or indeed "ballocket") business. ®
