A Rock To Tie A String Around

Hearty congratulations to my Facebook friend, Emily Holman! She has indeed, won Super Fantastic Blog Contest 2010! Emily secured her place in the seat of honor by offering me up many ideas, but the one that the box wine liked the most was:

Would you take a trip to Space?

My answer is yes, in a heartbeat. This is actually not the first time I’ve thought about this. A few years ago when Richard Branson first started talking about ‘Virgin Galactic’, I checked it out for my future travel plans.

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

It turns out that for a mere $200,000 – you can book your very own galactic flight. Don’t have $200,000? No problem! You can put a deposit down for a puny $20,000.

Okay, all sarcasm aside, it does sound pretty freakin’ cool. You train for two days, go up in the specially designed Branson Space rockets, do a couple of graceful space somersaults, and then you shoot back down into the atmosphere. That night you go to sleep with some serious space cred.

You can book right online too, or talk to a Space Agent (I think I talked to one of those last week when I had to call Blue Cross – ba dum dum…) and book over the phone. Of course, there’s the somewhat ambiguous travel dates…by ambiguous, I mean nonexistent. Branson’s been getting space reservations since 2005, and still no launch date in sight. He is however, seriously considering building his space station airport in the New Mexico desert, from the artist’s rendering on his website, it looks pretty cool too.

Which leads me to the real topic of this blog….why is Richard Branson such a tool? Seriously, people? You’re putting a $20,000 deposit down on a space flight that comes from the mind of the guy that hosted that mindfuck reality show a few years back where he convinced a contestant to go over Victoria Falls in a specially designed barrel, then when he finally go the guy to agree – he kicked him off the show for being so gullible.

Seriously?

I don’t know why Richard Branson offends me so much. He’s actually really onto something with this space travel for profit thing, especially now that NASA will be holding bake sales to fund their moon missions. Maybe NASA should reserve one or two seats per flight for rich tourists, for the $200,000 tickets they could sell, the astronauts could surely find time to deliver fresh towels and freeze dried ice cream to the passengers. Of course, they’d have to work amidst comments like:

“We live there! Right there! In the big one, right above the Mexico!”

They’d adjust.

I guess it’s just the idea that he’s charging for something that doesn’t even exist yet. It would be like me charging the neighbor kids for floating pony rides on my special magical pony/bird hybrids that I plan on creating in the garage on the weekend Dr. Moreau style. Of course, if I were Richard Branson, the reality of succeeding with my floating ponies would be greater, as is his dream of flying overprivledged tourists into space for a three minute vacation. I suppose it all comes down to opportunity.

I know this probably what Emily had in mind for her prize-winning blog….as consolation for her almost sure disappointment, I’ll give her a free advance ticket to my floating pony circus, coming your way, in the somewhat vague future.