Cue the traditional portentous drumroll, fanfare of trumpets and roar of the crowd as we announce that yesterday evening, a bloke in a white van rolled up to the door of the SPB's mountaintop headquarters bearing a big box...

....containing the components of the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane:

We apologise for the rather uninspiring snap, but rest assured our aircraft is a thing of great beauty, made all the more impressive for being among the world's first entirely 3D-printed airworthy vehicles. Of course, we'll bring you more comprehensive picture coverage when we've recovered from the excitement and got the thing properly unpacked. Expect a suitably formal unveiling in due course.

In the meantime, we invite you to join us in raising a glass or two to Southampton Uni postgrad students David Cooper, Chris Dodd and Amrith Surendra, designers of the Vulture 2.

Similarly, we offer a toast to 3T RPD Ltd, whose 3D printing machines hewed the spaceplane from the living nylon:

Top work. For those of you who inexplicably missed the Vulture 2 design saga, here are the various CAD renderings as revealed over the past few weeks:

So, it's all hands on deck to put the Vulture 2 together, after which we have to install the autopilot and control systems. More follows... ®

Further LOHAN resources:

• New to LOHAN? Try this mission summary for enlightenment.
• You can find full LOHAN coverage right here.
• Join the expert LOHAN debate down at Reg forums.
• All the LOHAN and Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) vids live on YouTube.
• For our SPB photo archive, proceed directly to Flickr.
• We sometimes indulge in light consensual tweeting, as you can see here.