The Moon and the green men

For $100 million you can send 5 people to the ISS, or, if the folks in
at http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital succeed, 500 people on a
sub-orbital trip. How about funding an international lottery with the
grand prize a trip to the ISS and 400 sub-orbital trips? That would
create a large tourist market and generate a lot of publicity.

Another thing you might do, fund the design and construction (or at
least part) of a tourist module for the shuttle. I think the marginal
cost of a shuttle flight is $80 million. If you can get 18 people in
the module, there's room for 6 tourists (plus two pilots) in the orbiter
flight deck and mid-deck. That's 24, to make a profit let's say you need
$100 million per flight. That's $4 million per passenger for, say, a
weekend in space. Now all you have to do is get the government to eat
the fixed costs (~3 billion/year), but the government already pays
this ...

On Tuesday, June 4, 2002, at 09:24 AM, panamabob wrote:

> can we really do something , with say $100million and access to
> aerospace
> junkyards and creative ideas, or is it just a topic for esoteric
> musings by
> unemployed or under employed geeks?

Space tourism could be our ticket to the stars. Save your pennies,
suborbital flights for $100,000 may start in 2005! See
http://www.spaceadventures.com/suborbital for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html