Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Killer’s stab attack after weeks in UK
Electric roadster plays Bowie as it blasts into space
A MAN who served seven years for murder in his native Romania tried to stab a woman to death just weeks after arriving in the UK, a court heard.
Gheorghe Mihai, 38, told a friend he wanted to kill again moments before stabbing sister-in-law Roxana Mihai, 23, in the face, back and arm.
Witness Kieran Langan told a jury Mihai looked like “a man possessed”.
Roxana was saved when her husband punched Mihai, who fled to a garage where he was held in Wolverhampton in August.
He was found guilty of attempted murder and possessing a weapon at the town’s crown court this week. He was told he faces up to 20 years’ jail when sentenced next month and will be deported on release. THE world’s most powerful rocket successfully blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre last night.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy entered orbit carrying a Tesla Roadster car – with a dummy astronaut in the driver’s seat and David Bowie’s Space Oddity playing on the radio.
The rocket is designed to carry 64 tonnes into space.
But because of the high failure rate of maiden flights, Tesla founder Musk decided to send a dummy payload to Mars – his old sports car.
Cameras inside the rocket showed the car’s dashboard console displaying the message: “Don’t panic.”
According to Musk, it will take six months to complete the 250 million-mile journey.
The tycoon said: “The roadster will get about 400 million kilometres away from Earth, and it’ll be doing 11km/s.
“We estimate it will be in that orbit for several hundred million years, maybe in excess of a billion years.”
Thousands of spectators applauded as the rocket took off at Cape Canaveral.
SUPERSONIC
As it climbed, the announcer said: “You’ve heard the call out – vehicle is supersonic.”
Just over three minutes into the launch, the boosters successfully detached, marking a major milestone in the flight.
Five minutes later, they landed on the launch pad.
It is a major boost for Musk’s Spacex company.
Engineers say the Falcon Heavy, propelled by 27 Merlin rocket engines, is capable of achieving a thrust equivalent to more than 18 Boeing 747 planes.
It also has twice the lifting capacity of the biggest existing rocket – United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4 Heavy, which costs four times as much to send into orbit.
The size of Falcon Heavy’s payload will pave the way for much larger objects to be taken into space, including bigger satellites for use by US intelligence and the military.
Other uses will be sending more capable robots to the surface of Mars or outer planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.