Free How to Destroy the Universe by Paul Parsons

At an altitude of 16 km (10 miles), the rocket is released—rather like an air-launched missile—and then fires its engine to take it into space.
    The low speeds mean there’s negligible heating when the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere. No heat shield is needed and the G-forces are far less traumatic. Like the shuttle,
SpaceShipTwo
has wings to enable it to glide down to a controlled landing on a runway. Branson has stated that the ticket price is expected to fall dramatically after the first few years of operation and may ultimately drop as low as the cost of a luxury holiday on Earth. If that happens then we may well get to spend a few minutes in outer space.

CHAPTER 9
How to survive a lightning strike
    â€¢ Deadly discharge
    â€¢ Electric current
    â€¢ Electrical resistance
    â€¢ What is lightning?
    â€¢ Where to shelter
    â€¢ Out in the open
    â€¢ What are the odds?
    It is said that lightning never strikes in the same place twice. Tell that to Pennsylvania man Don Frick who in 2007 proved the pundits wrong when he was struck by lightning 27 years to the day after first being hit by this awesome force from the heavens. Amazingly, he survived again—quite an achievement when you’re tangling with up to a billion volts of electricity and temperatures nearly six times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
Deadly discharge
    Lightning strikes Earth 50 times every single second. In the US alone, lightning strikes cause damage estimated at $4–5 billion and kill 90 people annually. Eachstrike produces electrical currents measuring tens of thousands of amps, and a peak power of a terawatt: 1,000 billion watts, or about twice the rate of electricity consumption of the entire United States. The temperature around each strike reaches 30,000°C (54,000°F), causing the air to expand at supersonic speed to generate the ominous thunderclap that warns of the oncoming storm.
Electric current
    Lightning is the sudden discharge of electricity from a storm cloud down to the ground—or to another storm cloud of opposite electric charge. Charge is the fundamental property of electricity and is measured in coulombs, C, after the pioneering French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb. Electric charges create electric fields, which enable the charges to interact with one another over distance. The charges can be either positive (+) or negative (-) and the electric fields they set up cause the charge carriers to either repel one another, as is the case for two “like” charges (++ or--), or to attract, which happens when the charges are opposite (+-).
    The most common charge carrier is a subatomic particle called the electron. It is normally found in the atoms from which all materials are made, where large numbers of electrons orbit around each atom’s nucleus anddetermine, among other things, the atom’s chemical properties—how it reacts with other atoms. Each electron carries a tiny negative charge equal to −1.6 × 10 −19 C. That is, −1.6 divided by a 1 with 19 zeroes after it. In some materials, however, electrons leak from the atoms and slosh around between them to form a “sea” of electric charge carriers. Materials in which this happens are known as conductors, of which metals are a prime example. The surplus of electrons inside a conductor means that electric charge is free to move around inside it. And this can set up what’s called an electric current. Current is a measure of the amount of electricity flowing through a conductor, and is measured in amps, after the French mathematician Andre-Marie Ampère. An amp is defined as the amount of electric charge (measured in coulombs) flowing per second past a given point in a conductor. Because the charge on the electron is so tiny a current of 1 amp corresponds to a flow of 6.2 × 10 18 (6.2 billion billion) electrons per second.
Electrical resistance
    Current doesn’t flow of its own