Come on Up (to the ISS) You're the Next Contestant

Ender writes "The Voice of America and the NY times (Free registration, yetti, yatta ...) are running articles informing us that the Russian space Agency Rosaviakosmos has an agreement with Moscow to send a TV contest winner to the International Space Station. All contestants would train for space flight during the programs and this would show the audience how cosmonauts are trained prior to their space flight." Boy bands are ineligible.

Comments

Space travel as Entertainment

[Gopher971]

Are we finally seeing space travel as "Reality TV"? Im all for expansion of space but do we really need MTV's "The Real World in Space" TM? :-)

It's been done

[rassie]

The Danish TV station TV2 did a similar show about a year ago. Check out missionen.tv2.dk. However, this was not to go to the ISS, but to win a trip on a Space Cruiser. (the site is old, and it looks not very well maintained)

I believe it is also being done on the Norwegian TV2 (no relation between the two).

Re:Well

[Rogerborg]

Well said.

My favourite (verbal, undocumented AFAIK) Buzz Aldrin quote:

"I never imagined that space exploration would mean parking cargo in low earth orbit"

So sure, if that's all we're going to do, let's do it for profit, not for knowlege. Jeezus, we know how to park cargo in orbit.

Further, if the trillions pumped into NASA really can't be made to pay off, then we should do some pretty harsh assessment of what the purpose of a space program is. I don't mean that we should can it, I mean that we should skip the screwing around and just start flinging brave souls out in rickety generation ships to nearby systems on the honest basis that we're 99.9% confident of condeming them (and their possible children) to death, but that if we wait until we're even 10% confident that we can get a foothold on another planet, we'll never go, because our actual research has effectively stalled and we have neither the will to push it on, or the guts to accept failure.