have a couple extra hundred thousand dollars lying around? well if you do, this guy wants to send you to space.
as soon as next year, for the low ticket price of 200,000 dollars (which includes a 7 day stay in a luxury hotel near the launch site) any average american with a healthy heart can be blasted into sub-orbital space for about 15 minutes, experience weightlessness for less than five minutes, take a few quick looks around, point out their houses then head home.
sounds all well and good, really, and its a testament to technological progress and venture capitalism when a billionaire globe-trotter nut job can start sending any old schmuck who wants another feather in their cap, or has been to the south seas just one to many times and its just getting simply boring, into space, the former final frontier. however, there is much deeper issue at stake here.
remember this guy? of course you don't, unless you watch a lot of jeopardy. or what about this guy? yeah you might have seen him on TV once. point is, this sort of thing used to be a BIG FUCKING DEAL, only the proudest and bravest people in the world were willing to rocket themselves into space in order to stand on the top of the world. of course in a cold war backdrop they were pitting themselves into mass-psychological warfare against communism, however the fact still remains that these men had to work for the opportunity to see what only even up to the present, less than 500 people have seen with their own eyes. nowadays apparently what those people worked for has amounted to giving mega-rich people a new vacation destination and richard branson a few more billion dollars.
the meek shall inherit the earth, am i right?
sf
