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.

Comments

Hyperinflation in the Airmiles currency

[Ckwop]

He's lucky too because he's got this free ticket in before the much expected hyperinflation in the air-miles currency.

This surprises some people but in fact, air-miles are a form of currency. They can be exchanged for real world goods and services and therefore have an intrinsic real world value. The problem is that the vast majority of air-miles go unspent. Since a constantly increasing amount of currency is chasing a limited amount of goods the value of the currency is constantly falling.

The fact that this guy was able to accrue two million air-miles doing a normal job tells you that inflation has already crippled the currency. I soon expect air-miles to be practically worthless.

Simon

Uhm... he did more than fly...

[C10H14N2]

2M miles? 40 trips? US->UK? WTF?

Considering a circumnavigation of the equator is only 25k miles and London->Los Angeles is only about 5500 miles, it would take a LAX-LHR round-trip every two weeks without fail for six years to truly earn all that in real air miles. Obviously dude got most of that mileage by racking up credit-card miles as no sane person, regardless of business requirement, would keep up a travel schedule that ridiculous for that long without a break.

Why is this a big deal?

[Chineseyes]

Its cool and all but these are suborbital flights I don't know about you but when I first think of space flight I think of being in space for a hell of a lot more than a few minutes. Its a great first step but sounds more like an extended amusement park ride than actual tourism to me its as if you were to go on a cruise to the Caymans, they dropped you off on the coast for 5 minutes then you had to get back on and leave. If anything I am just happy that all these wealthy people are paying the first adopter fee so the rest of us can one day get a real space flight a lot cheaper, a lot longer, and probably a hell of a lot better.

Re:Is space the final frontier?

[ultranova]

The Hubbert peak. The end of the era of cheap energy. Oil won't run out, it'll just get more and more expensive to produce, taking up a larger and larger proportion of the economy.

Switch to nuclear and run vechiles with hydrogen, batteries or vegetable oil. The anti-nuclear morons will complain, but they will anyway no matter what you do. Or drill a deep hole in the ground, drop some water there and watch geothermal heat turn it to steam. Or build tidal or wave harnesses in coastal regions to harness said water motions. And so on.

The whole peak oil hysteria is caused because we humans are lazy and haven't bothered improving our energy production technology significantly in a century or so. Maybe it will give the long-needed kick in the rear to start making rational, rather than just money-making, choices in energy policy.

There will have to be something very valuable in space to justify the energy required to get there.

How about endless amount of sunlight that can be harnessed and beamed back to Earth or used to power factories in orbit or in Moon) ?