Frequent Flyer Miles Take You to Space?

An anonymous reader writes "Pan Am might be gone and there isn't a Hilton in space yet, but you will soon be able to use your frequent flyer miles to at least come close to the final frontier. This article on SpaceRef.com details a new Space Adventures and US Airways partnership, where US Airways dividend miles may be cashed in for Space Adventures programs, most notably their sub-orbital flights that are expected to begin by 2005. Cost: only 10,000,000 miles. More reasonable totals can get you a zero-g parabolic flight, or a Mach 2.5 flight on a MiG-25. Space Adventures is the outfit that's been arranging trips to the ISS. One small problem though, is that they don't actually have a sub-orbital craft yet."

Comments

Re:10,000,000 miles?

[turg]

Miles usually expire after a couple of years if you don't use them. For a two-year window, you'd have to fly over 13000 miles a day to earn 10,000,000 miles.

In my experience, they expire if you do not earn any for a number of years. E.g. with American Airlines, your miles expire if you have not earned miles in the past three years -- but as long as you earn miles at least once every three years, none of your miles will ever expire.

Seeing as we're talking about USAirways, though, I'll take the 30 secods to look up their terms and conditions for Divendend Miles. Here's the relevant bit:

Beginning January 1, 2000, miles earned will not expire as long as any mileage earning or redemption activity occurs in your account within 36 months of the last account activity. Each qualifying activity on or after January 1, 2000, will extend the expiration date of all unexpired miles in your account for 36 months from the date of the qualifying activity. Dividend Miles earned through December 31, 1999 are not subject to expiration.

Pan Am isn't gone...

[nolesrule]

They are back now, probably under different ownership, but flying mostly regional flights in the North East and in Florida.

Pan Am's Website

I live near the St. Pete-Clearwater Airport and one day I was driving by and I saw a Pan Am plane at one of the gates. I was shocked, since I hadn't seen one in years. Apparently, they have been making flights for 2-1/2 years.

Re:What would be really cool

[oo7tushar]

If it takes 90 minutes to orbit the earth and it was there for 11 days then...176 orbits of ze planet.
12760 km around the equator (that's 7926 miles). They're orbiting 350 km up (hubble is there, to avoid air friction). So the radius of the earth is 2030 km, add 350 to that = 2380km, multiply by 2pi = 14954 km every 90 minutes (one orbit). Thereby giving us 14954*176=2631904 km or 1644940 miles.
Which means that NASA needs 10 more hubble repair missions and they get a free flight (all they gotta do is put the airlines logo on the shuttle).

Re:What happened to PanAm's res. list to the moon?

[turg]

jpellino wrote:

Anyone else got better details on this?

http://www.retrofuture.com/moontrip.html

Re:Tourism In Space Will Never Work

[Peyna]

I don't know about needing to be in peak physical condition, we shot John Glenn up there when he was pretty old, he might have be in better shape than most people his age, but I bet he wasn't in that great of shape.