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The All New All New Groundspeak UK Pub Quiz


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IIRC, the 'proper' letters are: A B C Ch D Dd E F Ff G H I J L Ll M N O P R S T U W Y. So there are 25 of those. However, there are also soft and nasal mutations (ph, rh, th, ng), which might be considered letters. So I'll try 25 without mutations and 29 with.

 

DING! Correct. As a primary school teacher we say there are 29 letters to the alphabet.

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Your luck holds true. A DING! for you, sir. :)
Thanks very much. Taking a tangent, Sputnik is an interesting object. Although the original is long-since-burnt-up, several 'contemporary', Soviet-made copies exist - either development or back-up units. Most are in museums (as are many replicas) but one is owned by a remarkable individual with a link to Geocaching. The second person to wear the Union flag in orbit, the second in orbit to be the child of a previous generation 'naut (their father Owen flying on Skylab and a shuttle mission) and the only private individual to own an object on the moon. They would have been the first 'space tourist' if it wasn't for the Dot-Com crash, are a keen magician, and shot a short sci-fi film while in space; the first. They also officiated over the first zero-gee wedding, on a 727 'vomit comet'... But who are they?! (I used Google to set the question but please don't to answer it. There should be enough info above for you to get the name I'm after.)
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Thanks. *Twok* Since the Space Shuttles were retired in 2011, NASA have been working on a replacement but it's a very interesting development that private enterprise is making a real inroad into space. Going back a generation, Shuttle missions were all named STS and then numbered, eg STS-31 to launch the Hubble space telescope, and STS-61, to fix it. But what does STS stand for?

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At last one I know thanks to James May. Lego as we know it was 1st produced in 1949, but the company that makes it started making wooden toys 1932 and changed its name to Lego in 1934 (cant remember what it was called before).

In which country?

 

Denmark - we've driven passed the factory when we visited Lego land in Denmark last year! :) also got a couple of caches (and a souvenir now) whilst we were there :)

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Space Transportation System. :)
Advantage, Betelgeuse. Ding! The Space Transportation System was intended to be a whole set of modular craft, including a space tug (designed to be left in orbit and crewed and refilled as necessary) for inter-orbital work, a replacement for Apollo which would be good for setting up a moon base and a reusable 'space truck' which became the Shuttle. With the success of Apollo 11 and the winning of that phase of the Space Race, Nixon and Congress decided not to fund a Mars trip in the 'post-Apollo era', and as the final three planned moon landings were pulled, it was clear budgets were only going south. NASA's grand plans for fleets of nuclear-powered ships, stations - including a Luna-orbit Skylab - and bases were shelved, along with promising technology such as NERVA high-ISP nuclear engines. A good book on 'what might have been' is Stephen Baxter's Voyage. Which he wrote about 10 miles from my home, in Great Missendon. Small world ;)
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America's space shuttles were retired from service in 2011 - or were they?

 

America still has three shuttles in service. For the DING! Can you tell me either:

 

Their flight designation OR the manufacturer and model?

 

If you can answer both then expect a black helicopter or two overhead. ;)

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That'll get you the DING!

 

Boeing X-37B is correct. The USAF have 3 of them in service - they were intended to be launched from the NASA shuttle originally, but it was decided that it wasn't an economical launch system and so they are now strapped to an Atlas V. They're unmanned and designed to stay in orbit for up to 270 days at a time.

 

The flight designation is OTV (Orbital Test Vehicle) 1, 2 and 3.

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