Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not the miniature robotic space shuttle that NASA’s planning to send into orbit this month, but another of the space agency’s unmanned vehicles has edged closer to its beginning its mission, with the “nearly autonomous” Global Hawk aircraft having completed a key test flight bright and early on April 2nd. While the aircraft has flown before, this was the first flight for it after being loaded up with eleven different scientific instruments, which will be used to examine trace gases, aerosols, and dynamics of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. This flight will shortly be followed by another test run to ensure that everything checks out, after which it will begin its first long-duration mission sometime later this month. While there’s no video of this particular test flight, there is a video of the instruments being loaded onto the aircraft, shot with the very camera that’s now installed vehicle’s tail (and augmented with the requisite Benny Hill theme song). Check it out after the break.

Richard Garriott, the developer of the Ultima RPG series and also known as Lord British, seems to think he owns a piece of the moon.

This stems from last week’s announcement that NASA scientists finally located the Lunokhod 2 (pictured), a moon rover that the agency lost track of 37 years ago. Garriott had purchased it an auction along with the Soviet Union’s Luna 21 lander back in 1993 for $68,000.

That’s fine–although weird, in a way. But now Garriott is claiming that owning these devices on the moon may entitle him to ownership of the property they rest on, as TechEYE.net reports.

“I think I can truly make the only private, legitimate claim to territory – at the very least around my rover and, potentially, along its point of travel…to give me some actual property rights on the moon,” Garriott said in the report.

Hey Richard, any chance you can go back and deliver us a proper Ultima X, and stop wasting time fantasizing about how to improve the plot of Ultima II?

Seek ye, the rover of kings: Scientists have spotted Lunokhod 2, a Russian space vehicle that landed on the moon in 1973 and stopped working that same year, after a 37-year period where no one knew where the thing was, NPR reports.

What makes Lunokhod 2 even more interesting is that it belongs to Richard Garriott, of Ultima and Origin Systems fame. Garriott purchased the rover at a 1993 Sotheby’s auction for $68,500, making him the world’s only private owner of an object on a celestial body aside from Earth.

Garriott said in the report that he’s thrilled to finally have photos of his “private flag sitting on the moon.”

“My rover has traveled over 40 kilometers. It has tilled the soil or turned the soil with its wheels and it has surveyed land as far as the eye can see — or as far as its cameras can see,” he said.

In 2008, Richard Garriott became the latest of a series of space tourists to visit the International Space Station.