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British Man Trades Frequent Flyer Miles for Space Shot
lvmoon writes "Start saving up your airline miles. Alan Watts, a British businessman, was able to use his 2,000,000 frequent flyer miles for a space flight, a ticket aboard a 2009 Virgin Galactic space flight." From the article: "Electrician Alan Watts said he flew to and from the United States on Virgin Atlantic flights more than 40 times in the past six years, earning him enough miles to take the trip into space with Virgin's space wing, London's The Sun newspaper reported Friday. The trip cost 2 million frequent flier miles, compared to the 90,000 miles required for a first-class flight from London to New York." Besides being funny, does this say anything about space travel in the 21st century? Is space is no longer the final frontier? I'm pretty sure Roddenberry didn't have frequent flier miles in mind when he came up with the Enterprise.
An interesting theory... however, twelve years ago I was investigating various ways of doing product promotions and had looked quite a bit at frequent flyer promotions. At the time I could buy frequent flyer miles at eight cents a piece (with substantial discounts for VERY large purchases), and generally they applied towards tickets in the ten cent per mile price. (25,000 frequent flier miles for a round trip ticket of approximately $2500 peak value -- the average seat cost being based on the highest available fare for that seat type)
At two million frequent flier miles for a $200k ticket, they gave him ten cents value a piece today, as well. I haven't looked, but I would guess the cost to buy miles hasn't changed either (or even kept pace with inflation). What has changed is discount airlines pulling prices down, so the disconnect between the price you're "paying" for FF miles and the vlaue you get back isn't as good since its trivial to find non-peak price seats on flights.
A) They won't be going to space in the sense that astronauts (and especially some cosmonauts) have been. It's just a few minutes of staying at a considerable height...
B) The virgin spaceship is not a rocket. Takeoff should not be a bad experience.
Yes, but as has been said before by many Slashdot posters, getting to the edge of space and getting into orbit are as different as driving to the store and flying across the country. The Virgin craft will not get into orbit, and is thus useless for any sustained space flight or delivery. You are comparing apples and oranges sir. There is currently no other way to get a nut into orbit other than stacking TNT to the height of a street lamp.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Earth is increasingly short of fresh water....
Eh? The Earth has the same amount of fresh water it's always had and always will. It's a ">closed system and any water you see/drink/urinate now has been around pretty much doing it's thing since forever.
If you don't like the Sun why don't you read the story in the Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_techno logy/article1771872.ece Or maybe Xinhua http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-09/29/conte nt_5155160.htm ?
What about the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5388482.stm ?
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
That's only like 7 a year. If you were in the semiconductor industry, you'd probably do that number of visits to Asia, where the best trip time you can hope for is the 18-hour Newark to Singapore flight on Singapore Airlines. When I started my job with that kind of travel, it only paid about $40,000/year, and the techs (who travel more) made even less... we certainly considered the job to be "normal" :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What are you talking about? Most frequent flier accounts now don't have any restrictions like that. You don't need to fly standby. What a wierdo.