From the You’ve Gotta Be Making This Up Department comes news that Romania is poised to join the space race.

Armed only, it seems, with a knocked-off version of Photoshop, the Romanian Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Association intends to launch “Helen” from a site near the Black Sea next month. It seems that “Helen” doesn’t actually look like the large green pepper shaker in their photograph but more like an orange pencil, and their test site looks less like Kennedy Space Centre and more like, well, a muddy field in Valcea County, Romania, but they are certainly keen.

All of this is in competiton for the Google Lunar X prize which is an international competition to land a robot on the surface of the Moon and have it travel 1500ft across the lunar surface and send images and data back to the Earth. Do that and you get $30 million.

Engineer Dumitru Popescu, the coordinator of the ARCA project, said: “We have done a lot of technical work for this competition and also raised funds and found sponsors.” Including the Residence Hotels group and a dating agency, so the “international conferences” which they doubtless have to attend are probably more fun than they sound…plus you can genuinely use the chat-up line “yes, I’m a rocket scientist”.

The launching of the rocket will be done from a solar balloon, and it will use ‘eco-fuel’, whatever that is. Probably rotting cabbages as it’s from Romania. They are keeping quiet about how much this is costing and you’ve missed the press conference which was in Bucharest yesterday. TheEye will keep watch on this and inform readers of the launch date so that co-conspirators can invest in robust hats for protection.

The UK of course abandoned direct space efforts several decades ago and has only just recently allowed funding to go towards training British astronauts to fly on missions. The closest we currently have to a space programme is the fact that we still give £100 million to India in Overseas Aid each year and £40 million to China, and their space programmes are doing very nicely, thank you.