Space Race

The title of this blog comes from a pub-time conversation around the turn of the millennium, in which the possibility of firing the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) into the sun by launching her from a giant cannon at the top of Greenwich Hill was considered. The logistics of doing so can be found in the very first post.

Now, seven years later, another excellent suggestion has been proposed involving sending Thora Hird on a giant stairlift to the moon. This got me wondering though: if it had been a race between the two sturdy old pensioners, who would have reached their celestial destination first? The sheer velocity of the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) would have stood her in good stead, escaping the earth’s atmosphere with the speed of a rifle bullet like a powder-blue projectile, but then eight light-minutes worth of distance is a very long way. Dame Thora’s progress would be slow and steady on the other hand, inching her way heavenwards at a considerably slower pace, but towards a much closer target.

It was calculated that the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) would have taken around 155 days to plummet into the fiery hell of our nearest star, but how long would it have taken Dame Thora to chug gradually towards the Earth’s only satellite? The similarity in the weight and combustibility of the two can be assumed to be roughly the same and they therefore make excellent subjects for a comparative test.

Logistically, it’s not without its problems. Stannah (or similar) would need to be commissioned to manufacture a bespoke stairlift at least 238,855 miles high – the average distance from the Earth to the moon. A staircase of corresponding length would also have to be built to affix the stairlift to (carpet, treads and a banister would be optional).

For the purposes of the experiment we can take Greenwich as being at sea level, and a few seconds' swift Googling tells us that the typical travel speed for domestic stairlifts ranges between 0.07 and 0.15 metres per second (a mean of 0.11).

From a standing start at Greenwich observatory Thora would have started ascending slowly skywards as soon as Big Ben struck midnight. We can therefore calculate that it would have taken her only around eight minutes to reach the height of Nelson’s column (51m) and just under an hour to surpass the height of the Empire State building (381m). At 10:34pm on the first day of the New Year she would have achieved the height of Everest (8,848m) and would have eventually escaped the earth’s atmosphere on 15th April 2000, some 105 days after her journey began. By stark contrast, at the time when Thora was being jostled by satellites, the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) would have been some 85,000,000 miles distant and well on her way to victory.

The earth’s gravitational pull would need to be factored into any objects (or dames) heading through the outer reaches of the troposphere and into the inky blackness of space, though it’s safe to assume that once she’d escaped gravity, the corresponding reduction in mechanical friction (which would normally impede her progress) would result in her picking up speed.

Even with this increase however (which we can arbitrarily take to be around 10%), she would have lost in spectacular fashion en route to her lunar landing. The remainder of her journey would have taken another 3,611 days, which means she would still be traveling today, and would be scheduled for touchdown on 20th November 2009 – 3,455 days after the Queen Mum (God rest her soul) had been incinerated her into space dust at temperatures approaching 15 million degrees.

Thora would have the last laugh though. Whereas the Queen Mum’s (God rest her soul) final destination would end in her spectacular demise, Thora could feasibly begin her homeward journey with a flick of a switch, heading back “downstairs” to a hero’s welcome on terra firma (though care would have to be taken though to ensure she didn’t burn up on re-entry). National hero status would be assured, and her jowly bespectacled Northern remains could occupy the fourth plinth overlooking Trafalgar Square as testament to British endeavour and achievement.