Rocket Sellers

This is not an April Fool’s Joke. I really do want to sell you a flight on a rocket ship.

If you have already been to space, you probably want to go again. If you haven’t had your chance yet, you may be wondering when you will be able to go.

That’s a tricky question. Even if you are Charles Simonyi, you are not going back to orbit in the very near future.

Space Tourism, I regret to inform you, does not exactly exist yet.

A few early adopters have paved the way. Dennis Tito bought the first ticket to orbit, originally to space station Mir with MirCorp, the company that intended to privatize the decommissioned Russian space base. When that business venture failed, he got an upgrade to International Space Station.

But I don’t think of Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen, Anousheh Ansari, Charles Simonyi and Richard Garriott as space tourists. They are space pioneers. Paving a path, changing minds, going there for the rest of us who can’t go yet. They prove it’s possible, even if you choose a path other than Government Employee.

You too can be a space pioneer. The path to space is opening up. There are steps along the way, and you can fly along on some of them.

If you didn’t Fly Your Stuff on Bigelow Aerospace Genesis II, you already lost out on the best space bargain of the century so far. Only $299, money back guarantee, to put your little memento into Earth orbit and get photographic proof it’s up there. Sending a ping pong ball shrine to orbit inside an inflatable space station test article is not the spacefaring prowess we thought would be possible by now, way back in the 20th century. Didn’t you just know you’d be vacationing on the Moon by now? But since you are not, don’t you wish you had your stuff on Genesis II? What else can you do?

There are steps along the way. Buy a ticket to fly in a rocket ship. Be a spaceflight participant. Be a customer. Advance the art and technology of getting off Earth by being in the market for the service. Be a space pioneer. Your descendants will thank you.

And if you are interested in leasing a habitat on orbit from Bigelow Aerospace or booking one-way passage to Mars with SpaceX, tell them Robin sent you.

… More later on what you can do to ensure that Earth doesn’t fail because we never got around to taking advantage of space…