Being SPECTRE they naturally hold an auction. Highest bidder get to decide.
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Except that they’re all Bond villains. How does that work?
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Virgin Orbit (a different company owned by Branson) has already begun commercial satellite launches. It’s fairly boring though, launching small rockets dropped from a modified 747 rather that a weird custom launch vehicle.
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I have a feeling we’ll be OK
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Wake me when they award “first billionaire to reach escape velocity”.
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Remember, Earth had to go through WWIII to get to first contact. So the billionaires are helping in their own way.
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I’d prefer terminal velocity, as long as it actually is.
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Made me think of this:
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The media is so freaking lazy on this point. There already was a billionaire in space, Guy Laliberté, in 2009.
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Remember that next time you buy a game or stream movie instead of washing the feet of the poor.
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“capture his magical words and share them with the world later.”
Oh no, insane billionaires are now doing spells in space!
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meh, i’m ok with it. anything that advances space stuff is good by me. i mean, even if he decided to use his billions for good terrestrial things (see Bill Gates), he still would not escape being slagged, so i can’t blame him for pursuing a long-held dream.
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Laliberté was in orbit too, not just taking a sniff of vacuum for a few minutes. Dennis Tito is considered a billionaire today, but maybe he wasn’t when he flew, so that might not count.
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The competition here is to be the first person to launch themselves into space. That is, they own the rockets and the companies that designed them.
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All of those guys obviously had money to burn, I just thought most of them were mere centimillionaires!
Oh, forgot about Charles Simonyi. He was definitely a billionaire. He few to the ISS twice.
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I’m with you. I say hurrah.
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Does it seem like he’s channeling David Bowie?
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Yeah, I think of all the cocaine farmers and supercar engineers who have missed out.
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Unfriendly takeover using Disney lawyers, then IPO.
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This is a remarkable thing to have happened in my lifetime. We’ve gone from space being the province of highly-trained, borderline suicidal test pilots with “the right stuff” to people with too much money. Manned flight has always been more symbolic than useful, just a demonstration of how reliable and safe the launch and landing engineering was. When I was a child, there were two governments capable of a flight like this, and both killed astronauts in the process. Now there are 3 private companies as well as multiple countries in the mix.
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