Apologies if you thought the title was an elaborate pornographic allusion, but I’m being completely literal: After the jump, you will see Google‘s recently shuttered Nexus One film itself BEING SHOT 28,000 FEET INTO THE AIR, or about 5.3 miles vertically.

The event was part of the PhoneSat initiative; with the support of the Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, they strapped the smart phone with a parachute to a rocket with 1,000 lbs of thrust, to test whether the phones could be sent high enough to enter orbit. This captured video, by the way, is from the second phone launched into the sky. We won’t tell you what happened to the first one (it shattered into a million pieces).

This past weekend, Google announced on the Nexus One Android phone blog that the company’s flagship device has been discontinued, only half a year later. Once the last shipment has been sold, U.S. consumers will no longer be able to purchase the once-hyped smartphone from Google. The doomsday announcement for the Nexus One had been expected ever since disappointing sales in its first month, and the subsequent closure of the web store in May.

Created in partnership with Taiwan-based manufacturer HTC to display advanced possibilities of the Android operating software, Google’s Nexus One smartphone was a unique handset in that it could be sold unlocked (not restricted to a single network provider). Perhaps the feature didn’t gel with the average consumer, or the steep price of a $529 unlocked handset was offputting.

Well, this is inconvenient: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Google‘s application to trademark the name “Nexus One,” on the grounds that it sounds too similar to an existing product.

Geek.com: “The application was refused because of “likelihood of confusion” with an existing trademark of the word “Nexus”, which was registered by Integra Telecom, a telecommunication services company, in 2008.”

Yesterday, Apple stunned techies by announcing a sweeping patent infringement lawsuit against HTC, the mobile manufacturer that just so happens to make Google’s Nexus One and Android phones. While Apple’s suit accuses a number of HTC-made phones of infringement, including HTC’s Windows Mobile series, Engadget reads the tea leaves and notes that “Android sets are specifically included [in the suit] because they run Android.” HTC said it hadn’t even heard of the suit until it read Apple’s press release and accounts in the tech press. To those who initially saw the lawsuit with HTC as a veiled way for Apple to strike back at Google, the details of the suit, to the extent they were revealed, seemed only to confirm their beliefs.

While Google could have stood aside through all of this, as it was not once named in Apple’s suit it has gone out of its way to issue a statement in support of HTC:

Linux inventor and tech pioneer Linus Torvalds has taken a side in the smartphone wars: specifically, the Google Nexus One‘s side.

Writing on his personal blog, he says that while he “generally hates” phones, he sees the Nexus One as “a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget”:

Well, this is interesting: over on gdgt, where they’re hosting a liveblog of the Apple Tablet iPad unveiling, there are Nexus One ads on every page. But when you go into a non-Apple gdgt post — say, this discussion of the HMX-H100 camcorder — it’s regular, remnant-looking ads all the way. Smart targeting? Competitor-baiting? A little bit of both?