Making sure that a rocket is safe enough to carry a shuttle into space is a pretty thankless task. There’s no real way to do a test run. There’s no way that you can make adjustments after the first run: once you start this baby going you had better be damn sure that it’s going to work as advertised.

So it is with NASA’s latest creation: the Constellation Program. The Orbit shuttle will carry members of the crew into space, while the Ares rocket will power them into the Stratosphere.

If you read the above two paragraphs then you are probably coming to the conclusion that flying on something mounted to an untested Ares rocket probably is quite an exciting thing to do (if, that is, you find near-death experiences exciting).

So how to get around this little problem? Massive, massive design reviews and testing, as far as possible, the individual parts. This huge regime explains in some way why the Ares rocket has just completed its initial testing and yet still will not be ready until 2015. Some people 1,100 specialists are involved in the rigorous design reviews.

That’s 1,100 that those brave crew must rely on. Building Ares is a huge task: making sure it works is a bigger one.

Medical researchers don’t really know a great deal about salvia. In fact they know next to nothing about the drug and its effects. Part of the problem is that people have only really started to research it properly in the past few years. Now that the politicians and lawmakers are threatening to ban salvia divinorum it is unlikely that those researchers will ever get their chance to work out just what makes the currently legal drug tick.

So what does it do to the body? Salvia is a subjective drug which means the feelings that you experience when you take it will be different to those experienced by others. It will probably even be different if you take it twice.

Some of the confirmed effects of Salvia are:

Uncontrollable laughter or fits of giggles, regression, the retrieval of old memories, outer-body experiences, overlapping realities and acute hallucinations. What you get out of the experience may include some of these, or other feelings: some people simple report feeling a little ‘odd’. Others really don’t like the feelings that they get.

The only way you’ll know what you feel is to try it yourself! Given that it might soon be illegal Salvia virgins would do well to consider this now rather than later.