Getting Spacier Each Day

Courtesy of Shutterstock.com

I am going to space.

I was launched into this world during the salad days of NASA’s Apollo moon landings. Need I mention 2001: A Space Odyssey? Mind blowing stuff. As an adolescent, I experienced my generation’s first “where were you when you heard…” moment when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. 

Apart from this, Tom Wolfe’s iconic book, The Right Stuff, and its movie adaption drew me back to thinking about the void above us. I've always known that intestinal grit and Mensa IQs are prerequisites to even consider trying to get to outer space. Astronauts seemed superhuman.

I don’t think my celestial yearnings and sentiments are anything unique. Who doesn’t wonder what it’s like outside the Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational pull? The growing prospect of accessible space travel over the past few years is tantalizing. A spate of movies like Gravity and, more recently, Ad Astra, intruded into my thoughts as I went about my life. Then companies began to float the prospect of commercial space travel for civilians.

Soon after visiting the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, I drank too much hooch and woke up the next morning a citizen of Asgardia. It’s the "First Space Nation, a unique international community of forward-looking people, a digital state with its own transparent economy focused on scientific progress on Earth and in space." These days Asgardia has over one million citizens on terra firma, yet remains represented in space in the form of a 6 lbs. (2.7 kg) bread-box-size satellite floating in low-Earth orbit since November 2017.

So that’s that.

Branson’s Virgin’s Galactic SpaceShipTwo vs. Bezos’ New Shepherd space vehicle
Billionaires competed to reach space first in a private suborbital space vehicle! This brought renewed hope to average dudes like me. Thanks to Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and other lesser knowns, there is a renaissance in private sector space flight. 

So, I’ve finally put my money where my mouth is. I ponied up a $30 donation to the Space For Humanity NPO to qualify for 250 entries to win two seats on a flight into space with Virgin Galactic.

Win a raffle; go on suborbital space fandango…loony idea? Yes.
Possible? Surely yes, but mathematically speaking the odds of winning a seat aren’t good.
I’m optimistic the cosmic tumblers will fall into place for me.

The draw will be held in late September.
I repeat: I am going to space.

Warmest & best,
Major Tom