Cornish airbase considered as space travel launch site - The Pasty sells saffron cakes from Cornwall and Cornish pasties

Sir Richard Branson’s business Virgin Galactic may consider using a Cornish airfield for its launch pad for space travel, it has been revealed.

Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, which is pumping hundreds of million pounds into making space travel affordable, has said it might use RAF St Mawgan, near Newquay, as a “spaceport”.

Although the company is yet to approach the owners of the Cornish airfield, it is “one of the very few possible sites in England”, he said.

Virgin Galactic is currently building five SpaceShipTwo spacecrafts, which it plans to send more than 70 miles above the Earth.

It hopes to “bring the dream of space travel for many millions closer to reality”.

Tickets for the three-hour journey will cost £115,000. Virgin Galactic plans to launch its first flight from its main base in New Mexico, USA, in 2008.

One hundred of Cornwall’s most vulnerable celtic crosses have recently been identified and fitted with microchips. Grants from a range of organizations, including the Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage are aiding in making the project possible.

The process uses electronic tags and causes no damage to the crosses. A number of crosses have been stolen over the past 20 years in order to feed a growing market for granite artifacts. The microchips are meant to deter criminals from these medieval boundary makers which established a path to the parish church.

“It is sad that protection of this sort should be needed,” said Ann Preston-Jones, senior archaeologist with Cornwall County Council. “As the crosses are monuments of great importance to Cornish identify and often well-loved and cherished by local communities.”

A Cornish car manufacturer has announced a light-weight sports car which looks set to rival the Lotus Elise.

The R1 costs a little over £30,000 and is built by Helston-based Javan Sports Cars. The light-weight sports car (it weighs just 670kg) has impressive acceleration, reaching 62mph in 3.6sec (well over a second quicker than the Lotus Elise R) thanks to its 220bhp 2 litre Honda i-VTEC engine.

Javan Sports Cars was founded by Javan Smith and Andrew Fletcher in 2002, and will begin by building 12 cars over the next year - with 3 orders from the United States already taken.

The company is planning an even lighter, faster Sprint version of the R1 for next year.

A wave power scheme off the Cornish coast could lead to unsurfable waves and damage Cornwall’s surfing and tourism industries, according to a surfing group.

The British Surfing Association (BSA), which has over 10,000 members, believes the planned £20 million wave hub off St. Ives could reduce the sttrength of waves by a quarter, with damaging knock-on effects for tourism.

The BSA’s Ben Farwagi said: “Surfing is worth £100 million plus to the economy of Cornwall - will the Regional Development Agency fill the financial gap when these tourists fail to return?

“We approve of the wave hub and the technology in principle, but remain fearful of near-shore surface devices which could well have far-reaching and damaging effects that may be very difficult to reverse.”

However, supporters of the scheme, one of the first of its kind in the world, say it could supply enough energy for 5,000 homes and create up to 1,800 jobs.

Steve Micklewright, of the WWF, said: “It could be a blue-print for the way future marine projects of this kind are developed - especially as there are plans for a string of bigger farms along the Westcountry coast.”

The Government will look at the plans over the next few months to decide whether to give it the go-ahead.

The World Wide Web was published 15 years ago today (6th August 2006) by Tim Berner Lee, an understated British physicist who used to holiday in Cornwall as a child.

Berners-Lee developed the Web, as well as HTML - the language web pages are written in, at the Cern physics laboratory near Geneva. Its original purpose was to help scientists from around the world share information.

“I grew up in suburban London,” said Berners-Lee in a 2001 interview, “I felt I had inherited my parent’s love of getting outside into the countryside.

“The whole family really liked to get out a lot, made a point of getting out - you head for the hills when you can’t get out of the smog. We would go down to Cornwall whenever we could.”