Esther Dyson To Train For Space Flight

DynaSoar writes "Esther Dyson, known to many as a founding and consistently guiding member of ICANN, and for working with the startups of Flickr, del.icio.us, Medscape and others, is now expanding her interests upwards. She recently announced that she will be heading to Moscow to train as backup astronaut for Charles Simonyi, who plans to fly aboard Soyuz TMA-14 next year. The US$3 million price tag won't be her first cash contribution towards personal space flight. She's already an investor in Space Adventures, the company that arranges the space tourist flights on Soyuz."

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Two girls, one capsule!

Re:uh...

[Digitus1337]

In space, her urine would form Dyson Spheres.

Re:

[thsths]

And of course on board of Soyuz you are a cosmonaut, not an astronaut. Space may be the same for everyone, but marketing divides it up :-)

Typical typo?

[pur1ty]

Should be del.icio.us I think.

Re:

[VisualD]

price tag won't her first cash contribution

Also missing: be

Re:

[Cylix]

Nah, it's a typo domain, she's a famous squatter!

Typical word missing

[ServerIrv]

Just thought I'd add fuel to the fire. Let's nitpick every singly grammatical inaccuracy contained in the article summary. Here is my contribution.

"US$3 million price tag won't her first cash contribution"
should be
"US$3 million price tag won't BE her first cash contribution"

Re:Typical word missing

[Anonymous Coward]

No audio preview for editors, apparently.

Re:

[BizzyM]

How about: "US$3 million price tag Don't BE her first cash contribution" -Word-

including my own

[ServerIrv]

singly -> single
I'd claim a fat-finger error, but I'd need fingers the size of the Hulk's to make that mistake.

Re:

[ServerIrv]

There...now I even know how to hit "Reply to This." I need more sleep.
To comment on the actual article: I'm all for the general public getting these chances. Hopefully it will increase the awareness and need for space travel.

Re:

[Ieatsyou]

To comment on the actual article: I'm all for the general public getting these chances. Hopefully it will increase the awareness and need for space travel.

General public? I don't know about you, but the general public usually doesn't have $3 million dollars to blow. Just more proof of how the rich will slowly control space just like they control the planet. heh

Re:

[ServerIrv]

Agreed. I don't have $3 million to blow, although, the option becomes more and more avaliable. You and I will probably never control space flight, but I'd love to see the day when there is commercial space flight, and this is more evidence that it will eventually be realized.

Re:

[lysergic.acid]

good point. and why is an economics major in charge of ICANN? shouldn't TLDs and IPs be managed by a more technical-minded organization? i'd be much more comfortable with an organization similar to the W3C managing these things. at least W3C serves as an open forum for how the web should be run, but ICANN seems run more like a commercial organization, with no transparency (generous use of NDAs & no public disclosure), and seemingly abuses its regulatory power to help commercial corporations like VeriSig

That fool!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Surely she should know better than most that she'll never make it past the sphere!

Re:

[Yvan256]

Brings a whole new meaning to Dyson's Spheres.

advertising - dot com - space travel

[heroine]

Any dot com superstar executives reinvest their winnings in their own product or do they all want to be astronauts instead?

Cyberdyne + Dyson

[Seth Kriticos]

So a few articles ago there was the news of Cyberdyne corporating developing HAL. And now news about Dyson. Coincidence?

Re:

[Ortega-Starfire]

This is the smoking gun. No one try to deny it, it must be true!

Not funny

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> The US$3 million price tag won't her first cash contribution...

The leaving-a-word-out meme/troll is really unfunny. It's even more unfunny when you use it in a story rather than a comment.

Re:

[Yvan256]

Yeah, it annoys me too they do that.

Next on the list...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Next thing she's planning on doing after her trip into space is create a new linux distribution!
It will start out with a unique program to freely distribute physical copies on Dysan floppy disks to anyone who requests one on her website.

Ugh. Esther Dyson.

[Grendel Drago]

I remember seeing her at a conference. (I don't remember which one.) She was going on about how the domain name system was innovative because it provided a flat address space for everyone on the planet. I'm not sure why phones, postal addresses or even email didn't make a better fit, but I suppose she doesn't run those.

She talked about all the delightful services that whatever she was hawking would provide. When she took Q&A, I asked if it wasn't indicative of something that people had gone to great lengths to avoid all this "value" she wanted to add to the network, and that the true value of the internet was at its endpoints. Damn it, now I wish I remembered it better. Still, I can feel my hackles rise whenever she's mentioned. It makes me think of "The Guy I Almost Was" and Mondo 2K and all that other hucksterism.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Somebody out there has a funny story about her coming into a Silicon Valley company as a consultant, giving a board room speech filled with technobabble and a pitch for a current investment of hers and walking out with a $10K fee. I can't find it on Google at the moment, perhaps somebody here has it. The quirky thing about it is that I can't separate fact from fiction on this one in my memory, which may be telling.

So she's attempting to expand...

[Illbay]

...Dyson's SPHERE of influence! *NYUK*

Oh, and CHICKENS...

[Illbay]

...raised on a high-calorie diet in microgravity would expand uniformly about the bird's center of gravity.

So a large Arkansas-based poultry producer is looking into producing...

TYSON'S SPHERES!!!