Listening to the
whining of the very wealthy in the last election about how their freedom
was being taken away and about how they were being taxed into oblivion left all
of us wondering just what they needed all that money for. Well now we have the answer, they
just want to ride. And they have
been waiting an almost unbearable six years to do so.
Mark Twain wrote The Innocents Abroad The Caption Here: The Idiots Aboard |
On April
29th Virgin Galactic, a private space firm, lit the engine on SpaceShipTwo, its air-launched
suborbital rocketplane, for the first time. Unlike other companies such as
SpaceX, which has contracts to launch satellites and resupply the International
Space Station, Virgin is focusing on the tourist trade. For $200,000 a seat,
customers will get a joyride just over the 100km-high (62-mile) Karman Line,
which marks the boundary of space. After six minutes of weightlessness, SpaceShipTwo will ferry its passengers back to a
landing strip in the Mojave desert . The
successful test-firing is a milestone for a firm repeatedly hit by delays:
passenger flights were originally scheduled to begin in 2007.
It was always the dream of the Founding Fathers to
build a country that let very rich people take a joyride over the Karman Line. Really,
it’s in the Federalist Papers and letting wealthy people blow $200k on a trip
into outer space is reason enough in our book to keep their taxes low. After all, think of the shame of Mitt Romney if his neighbors went on that trip and Mitt didn’t’.
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