Ah, the ol' mini keg. When I was in college, I had friends that went to UAH in hunstville. It's a big rocket science school. Seriously. They train rocket scientists. Anyway, I was friends with a few of them and theirs was a wet campus. Delightful idea, wish mine was! We were all living up to the designation one night (zooted out of our minds on guinness, jack, Johnny walker, bud, old grandad, whatever) when somebody announced that they'd emptied Jim. Jim was a heinekin mini keg. They named it. The rocket scientists named the keg. Yes, these are the people who will be responsible for sending things into orbit, and they named the keg Jim.
They also decided that it was too good a thing to waste, so they immediately thought of cutting it in half and using half of Jim to make a satellite. Drunken rocket scientists being who they are, they sat around and calculated the amount of thrust needed for an object of said surface area, weight, and materials composition to break free of earth's gravitational pull. Not only did they write all this down and laugh about it, but they took it to class the next day, where their professor reviewed their work and pronounced (in a heavy Indian accent) that they were quite correct in their calculations, but that the keg material was insufficient to withstand the heat from atmospheric drag, and even if the thing made it into orbit, the vacuum known as space would rip it to pieces. After hearing this and kicking themselves for their glaring omission, they decided to use Jim to make an AM radio antenna.
Side note: One of these friends graduated with an Aerospace engineering degree and went straight to culinary school. He decided that he didn't like science after all, and wanted to be a chef. True story!
(spray bottle in picture for scale)
