Ok, picture this. You have a satellite up in space. On this satellite is equipment to make pizzas and rocket them down to specific locations back on earth. So when you want a pizza, you call the satellite, order your pizza and give them your EXACT lattitude/longitude and 10 minutes later you have a pizza in your back yard. Oh, and the pizza's carried in this sort of 50's Bomb looking thing. Y'know, like a really fat dart. People could even have "Pizza Satellite" recepticles to make sure that one of the "lawn dart bomb satellite pizza containers" didn't hit anyone. Yeah... "Pizza Satellite"... Oh, and people would probably have to have accounts so some psycho couldn't order a pizza to be rocketed onto an enemy's head.-- HotBlackDesoto, Jun 28 2000 NinjaBurger http://www.ninjaburger.com/I'll go to NinjaBurger instead... [hippo, Jun 28 2000, last modified Oct 21 2004] Minuteman Pizza https://web.archive...netc/minuteman.htmlVery similar idea (albeit stationed on the ground), with photograph of entry cone. "When you are sure you are ready, simultaneously turn the two red keys at the bottom of the Pizzamatic to initiate delivery." [jutta, Jun 28 2000, last modified Mar 07 2022] Pizza Satellite https://questionabl...view.php?comic=3042Story arc episodes 3042 - 3050 [BunsenHoneydew, May 21 2019] NYT: Dreaming of Suitcases in Space https://www.nytimes...uitcases-space.html"A California start-up company believes it can one day speed delivery of important items by storing them in orbit." Pizza delivery from New York to San Francisco mentioned as a possible application later in the article, but no word about reentry heating. [jutta, Mar 07 2022] It does sound a little expensive, also the delivery time could be rather slow. This could be speeded up by placing uncooked pizzas on the outside of the landing pod, and cooking them during reentry-- Lemon, Jun 28 2000 Yeah the original start up would be kinda pricey, but you could deliver to like, the entire USA. The only real problem is the containers (the "lawn dart bomb satellite pizza containers"). These things probably won't be cheap, and nobody wants to take them back, right? That's just a pain, it's easier to order and have your local pizza delivery guy (such as myself) drive it to you. Oh! I know! You make it so the "lawn dart bomb satellite pizza containers" have little wheels, that pop out, and a little engine, so after the pizza is "delivered", it'll just drive itself back to the local "lasn dart bomb satellite pizza containers" collection place. Ha! Ok, and after that the only thing to worry about is how to get the "lawn dart bomb satellite pizza containers" back to the pizza satellite.... I guess the only thing you could do there is ship them in bulk, y'know? Send up like a hundred thousand at a time. Yeah...-- HotBlackDesoto, Jun 28 2000 No they won't. Not if you design the "lan dart bomb satellite pizza containers" right. with the right metals and what-not.-- HotBlackDesoto, Jun 30 2000 OK, so maybe the uncooked pizzas should be flat against the *inside* of the landing pod. It should get pretty much like a pizza oven in there.-- Lemon, Jun 30 2000 This is exactly the same as Iridium, and would fail for the same reasons. There aren't enough pizza/phone users who want pizza/phone access in remote locations to give PizzaSatellite/Iridium a competitive edge. Those pizza/phone users that live in built-up areas will always go for the cheaper moped/cellphone delivery mechanism.-- hippo, Jul 04 2000 Whatever man! Am I the ONLY one here that's been watching survivor, or what? They would KILL for a pizza about now! Besides, I've explained that it'd be a high start up cost, but after that it'd be dirt cheap.-- HotBlackDesoto, Jul 10 2000 ...apart from replacing the satellites (low-earth orbit satellites don't have a very long lifespan) and the weekly shuttle trip to take the raw ingredients into orbit.-- hippo, Jul 10 2000 You'd have to have the rentry vehicals have a parachute or something or else they'd make huge craters on impact. Even low-mass objects (and a rentry vehical/pizza oven wouldn't be really that low mass) do lots of damage on impact. They'd need to be slowed at least a little once they reached the atmosphere proper, maybe have an onboard GPS which guides the sailing object to its destination.-- amadeus, Jul 10 2000 You could try and grow the ingredients out there, hippo. Plenty of sunlight for tomatoes.
Now, where's that old copy of "Silent Running"...-- Lemon, Jul 11 2000 Well the "lawn dart bomb satellite pizza containers" wouldn't be THAT big, y'know? And, like Lemon said, you could grow the ingredients. So basically, you have to replace the satellites every now and then, and you'd have to send up a shuttle of some sort full of Lawn dart bomb pizza satellites. That's your running cost right there.-- HotBlackDesoto, Jul 11 2000 Except that every "lawn dart" container has to be able to steer itself (you can't just drop them or shoot them, because of the unpredictability of air currents). That adds expense and bulk to the container.-- bookworm, Jul 12 2000 What would you do if they got the toppings wrong?-- Toss, Jul 12 2000 Well the overhead wouldn't matter because so many people would order. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't want to order pizza from the pizza satellite??? Seriously. AND, we'd offer pizzas for the same price as pizza hut, or anywhere else, with say.. a $2.50 delivery charge per order. The population of earth is like, 6 billion, right? If one in 100 people (I'm not sure how many that is, but it's a lot) ordered one pizza every three months, that's... A LOT of business. Everything would be automated too. So you just have your overhead, and that's like, it. It costs you nothing per pizza after that. It's like, a flat rate. No matter how many people order, you still have the same cost. You gotta think big.-- HotBlackDesoto, Jul 13 2000 All you spend money on is fuel. You just have to engineer the "lawn dart bomb satellite pizza containers" to use gravity to get them where they're going. Then they only have to use fuel on the last few miles. Even if we made say... $1 for every pizza we sold. We could still turn a profit.-- HotBlackDesoto, Jul 14 2000 Er, HotBlack Desoto, 6 billion divided by 100 is 60 million; Dividing by 100 is very easy - you just move the decimal point two places to the left.-- hippo, Jul 14 2000 Oh, I'm sorry... You must have mistaken me for someone who cares. (Smart Ass)-- HotBlackDesoto, Jul 16 2000 mmm... pizza deep in earth crust.-- kimble, Jul 16 2000 See, the people love it!-- HotBlackDesoto, Jul 23 2000 Right.
And if you get the trajectory wrong, you can 'Pizza-Bomb' enemy countries back into the stone age. A container big enough to hold an extra-large pizza would have enough kinetic energy on impact to wipe out a couple of square city blocks if something went wrong. Who cares if basketball-sized rocks would do the same- pizza-bombing a country has much more shock value!
Hmm. Maybe 'deliver' a couple dozen 'Astro-Anchovy and Limburger Cheese Specials' to Iraq? They'd probably do a better job than the 'smart bombs' did. If the blast doesn't kill them, the stink will!-- BigThor, Jul 26 2000 One advantage of the rocket-launched pizzas sent by satellite is that the GPS-equipped customer could be on-the-move when ordering the pizza, and delivery could be made to a yet-to-be-determined location . . . and now I am going to add this as a whole new halfbakery idea.-- ofersh, Jul 31 2000 Why a satellite? Why not a Zeppelin? And why just pizzas and not all things that are being delivered at home? (except girls) FedEx has a canalboat going through the canals of Amsterdam because their cars can't get through traffic fast enough. Bike messengers get new packages from the boat that does the circles through town endlessly. In the boat the package handling and labelling is done. You could do the same with trucks on the citybelt expressway with built-in pizzerias and dilevery guys on motors driving buy. Saves the restaurant owner real-estate costs. No license needed for street vending either. - ReindeR-- rrr, Aug 05 2000 Cheese comes from cows, not plants. You can't grow it in space.-- loneranger, Aug 05 2000 There's no need for cows! <looking at my feet>-- enveekaa, Aug 05 2000 Nobody likes limburger on pizzas...-- StarChaser, Aug 05 2000 Who says you have to use cow milk to make cheese? I was actually thinking about using coconut milk.-- HotBlackDesoto, Aug 13 2000 Have to use mammal milk, at least...coconuts don't have any butterfat in them...-- StarChaser, Aug 13 2000 There's soy "cheese". I'll leave it to you to decide whether it would be good on pizza. (Hint: it wouldn't.)-- egnor, Aug 15 2000 Already knew that...phony anything isn't as good as the real one, and anything made of soy crap is even worse...-- StarChaser, Aug 18 2000 You only have to clone the cows udder/mammery glands, and feed it an appropriate slurry. Pepperoni - I dont know.-- Scott_D, Aug 18 2000 I think most people would hit the "Cancel Order" button when they saw that their pizza was about to cost $48,000 dollars.-- Vance, Feb 05 2001 I know this idea is totally impractical but that's why I love it.
Bithor's post just made me imagine about 100,000 guys in turbans scarfing down pizza with big smiles on, laughing maniacally.
Out of all the entities in the world, the one that would like this most is the US army, hell "Expensive and Impractical" is practically their slogan.-- Spacecoyote, Jan 21 2008 I love [hotblack]'s july 13 2000 entry. It's only maybe 4 or 5 orders of magnitude off.-- Custardguts, Jan 24 2008 Getting the pizzas to the satellite(s) would be problematic, along with inaccurate GPSs-- cpf, Jan 24 2008 "Bob, will you order us a pizza?"
"Sure"
(10 minutes later)
"OH MY GOD, YOU KILLED THE JONES FAMILY"
"Quickly, blame the French"
(No offence intended to the French)-- keithbrunkala, Jan 24 2008 [link] to a fictional treatment.
If this was wikipedia I guess this would go under "In Popular Culture"-- BunsenHoneydew, May 21 2019 I want multiple pizzas too-- notexactly, May 27 2019 Hey, I didn't order pineapple. How do I send this back?-- doctorremulac3, May 30 2019 This reminds me of that company that's planning to send coffee beans to space and roast them with the heat of reentry. Except it turns out that's impractical, so a lot of people think they're actually going to send the beans to space just to be able to say they did and later roast them on the ground.-- notexactly, Jun 14 2019 Hahaha what a link, Jutta! And what a gem of an idea, I can't believe I never saw this. Sadly, was before my time. This idea is everything the HB means to me!-- 21 Quest, Mar 08 2022 random, halfbakery