Greetings, curious reader. You have stumbled upon the Guide’s most unnecessary feature: a weekly contest devoted to sniffing out rare whiffs of originality in spaceflight.
Here’s how it works: below you’ll find three curious travelogue entries. Each describes something that actually exists, though written in the Guide’s usual mix of admiration, sarcasm, and cosmic confusion. Your task is to guess what they are. The answers will be revealed next week. Unless, of course, the planet explodes in the meantime, in which case the answers won’t matter.
Since this is the first edition, there are no “last week’s answers” to reveal. Consider this your clean launchpad. Now, brace your olfactory senses.
The Swiss Grasshopper with a Cheese Hat
If one had to name the least likely place to watch the dawn of reusable rocketry, the Swiss countryside would rank high. Better known for cows, chocolate, and the occasional high-speed train that still arrives late, Switzerland has recently produced a machine that hops like a caffeinated grasshopper.
This rocket doesn’t thunder into orbit. Instead, it performs a series of elegant yet nervous leaps, reaching about the height of a moderately tall church steeple before delicately sitting down on its own tail. It did this not once, but dozens of times, fifty-three, to be precise. Each landing was slightly smug, like a gymnast sticking the routine while hoping the judges were watching.
On one particularly glorious occasion, someone taped a slice of Gruyère cheese to its side, presumably to test aerodynamic dairy properties or, more likely, because Swiss students have an excellent sense of humor. NASA spends billions proving this maneuver is difficult. The Swiss proved it can also be funny.
After-whiff: When your rocket doubles as a charcuterie board, you’ve truly launched culture into space.
The Thinking Fridge in Orbit
Somewhere above Earth, orbiting silently among the wreckage of decades of poor housekeeping, floats a satellite that has developed a personality trait previously unknown in machinery: anxiety.
Most spacecraft are obedient pets. They sit quietly, awaiting instruction from ground control, much like a dog staring at its owner for the next command. This one, however, has broken with tradition. It carries a smaller version of itself inside its own circuitry, a digital twin, and spends its time whispering to itself about the state of its batteries, whether they will hold through the night, and whether anyone on the ground actually cares.
It is, in short, a fridge-sized hypochondriac. Unlike HAL, it won’t murder astronauts. Unlike Skynet, it won’t declare war. But if Marvin the Paranoid Android were orbiting nearby, he would certainly recognize a kindred spirit. “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and all they want me to do is monitor my voltage regulators.”
The difference is, Marvin would be right. This little fridge is stuck in space, fussing about its own innards, and nobody is listening. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Marvin was complaining about in the first place.
After-whiff: The universe’s first orbiting hypochondriac, now with bonus Marvin-grade despair.
The Boozy Engine on the Test Stand
There are many ways to build a rocket engine. Most involve kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or methane. A certain European team, however, reached into the kitchen cupboard of bad decisions and came up with two ingredients better known for parties than propulsion: laughing gas and isopropyl alcohol.
Together, they produce a flame so bright and temperamental that it could power a student disco, except it happens to generate thrust, about a thousand Newtons of it. The engine is small, loud, and just dangerous enough to make safety inspectors twitch. It cannot, at present, put anything meaningful into orbit. But as an experimental step toward reusability, it demonstrates that even cocktails have their place in rocket science.
Imagine a bar where instead of ordering shots, you ignite them. The exhaust note is less Sinatra, more heavy metal. Yet behind the silliness lies serious engineering: test data, control algorithms, and proof that ingenuity sometimes begins with a hangover.
After-whiff: Proof that happy hour can, in fact, be vertical.
Contest
You’ve now smelled three fresh Unicorn Farts. Can you identify the real-world projects they describe? Write your guesses down, send them into the void, or mutter them quietly into a towel.
The Guide will reveal the answers in next week’s edition, assuming we still exist.
