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

Is space the final frontier?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

No. Space travel is a temporary situation. It will cost too much and become unfeasible in the next 50 - 100 years.

It's industrial civilisation's equivalent of the pyramids. Valuable at the time. But in the far distant future, they won't remember the asteroid we deflected in 2044. A weird result of a massive excess in resources, funds, and exuberance.

It's NOT the end of the world. It's just different.

Really. Different.

RS

Of the set of people who ever will travel in space, most of them already have.

Re:Is space the final frontier?

[cyber-vandal]

Trolls *sigh*

Re:Hyperinflation in the Airmiles currency

[Ucklak]

I soon expect air-miles to be practically worthless.

Aren't they already worthless?

At least for the states, you can only use them within the continental US, you can only use them when it's not busy or overbooked, you can't reserve seats with them and have to use them on no-shows. You may be lucky and be able to use them internationally only on certain dates.

To me at least, it's far better to spend $50-$600 on a ticket than to deal with the hassle of those rules.

I friend and I were meeting in Hawaii a couple of years ago. He used his miles to fly to Los Angeles but had to wait 2 days to get a seat after in LA.

I travel and have just about every account with miles on most of the airlines and still haven't racked up enough to get a 'free' flight. Add all my miles up for a single card and I do but I'm not going to pay more to fly in airline A to rack up `miles` when airline B has the cheaper rate.
1 airline dumped my miles because I haven't flown with them in 3 years. Yeah, that's worth it.

I have a family member that visits us often and he sticks with 1 airline and has racked up miles to get a few free trips. He's single, and is able to hang out at the airport. A lot of us don't have that luxury.

It seems that miles are worth more when you add them on top of a paying fare like upgrade to first class.