Blue Origin Auction Winner Backs Out, 18-Year-Old Flies Instead (theatlantic.com) 98
18-year-old Oliver Daemon will become the youngest person ever to travel to space as the fourth passenger on Blue Origin's first crewed mission this week to the edge of outer space (flying with Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk).
The Atlantic calls it "a rather unusual bunch": When they take off on Tuesday, they will each fulfill a personal dream, but as a crew, they're making history: No group like this one has ever gone to space together before. Even the participants of the most diverse missions to the International Space Station have had far more in common with one another than this quartet. They were all professional astronauts, with comparable ages, educational backgrounds, and even temperaments, given that potential astronauts must undergo psychological screenings before getting the job. The motley crew of Blue Origin's first passenger flight seems closer to a cast of offbeat characters gathered together for a zany adventure: If The Breakfast Club had the brain, the jock, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal, this Blue Origin flight has the boss, the tag-along, the real deal, and the kid...
Blue Origin has conducted 15 test flights of the New Shepard rocket, but has never before flown the vehicle with people on board.
Of the passengers on Bezos's debut flight, Daemen might be the most unexpected pick. In fact, Daemen wasn't supposed to be on this flight. Blue Origin had held an auction for one of the seats on the flight, culminating in a top bid of a whopping $28 million. But the company said today that the winner, whose name has not been disclosed, decided to skip this particular flight and go later, citing "scheduling conflicts," so the company slotted in Daemen, a soon-to-be physics student at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. (Blue Origin said the teen was "a participant in the auction," but did not disclose how much the seat cost.)
Daemen and Funk, as Blue Origin pointed out in its announcement, "represent the youngest and oldest astronauts to travel to space." But describing them by age alone elides the very different journeys they have taken to reach this point. Funk is an aviation legend who underwent more difficult tests than John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, had to, and has waited 60 years for this moment. Daemen is a teenager who took a gap year to get his pilot's license, and the son of a private-equity executive... Daemen represents a new class of spacefarers; in the coming years, as private companies such as Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and Elon Musk's SpaceX make people into astronauts more readily than government agencies like NASA can, the distance between a childhood dream and reality is bound to shrink. Expect more smorgasbord space crews like the Blue Origin one, filled with an assortment of very wealthy individuals and the people they choose to go with them...
The rules about who can become an astronaut have changed, and the new "right stuff" is money and luck.
The Atlantic calls it "a rather unusual bunch": When they take off on Tuesday, they will each fulfill a personal dream, but as a crew, they're making history: No group like this one has ever gone to space together before. Even the participants of the most diverse missions to the International Space Station have had far more in common with one another than this quartet. They were all professional astronauts, with comparable ages, educational backgrounds, and even temperaments, given that potential astronauts must undergo psychological screenings before getting the job. The motley crew of Blue Origin's first passenger flight seems closer to a cast of offbeat characters gathered together for a zany adventure: If The Breakfast Club had the brain, the jock, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal, this Blue Origin flight has the boss, the tag-along, the real deal, and the kid...
Blue Origin has conducted 15 test flights of the New Shepard rocket, but has never before flown the vehicle with people on board.
Of the passengers on Bezos's debut flight, Daemen might be the most unexpected pick. In fact, Daemen wasn't supposed to be on this flight. Blue Origin had held an auction for one of the seats on the flight, culminating in a top bid of a whopping $28 million. But the company said today that the winner, whose name has not been disclosed, decided to skip this particular flight and go later, citing "scheduling conflicts," so the company slotted in Daemen, a soon-to-be physics student at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. (Blue Origin said the teen was "a participant in the auction," but did not disclose how much the seat cost.)
Daemen and Funk, as Blue Origin pointed out in its announcement, "represent the youngest and oldest astronauts to travel to space." But describing them by age alone elides the very different journeys they have taken to reach this point. Funk is an aviation legend who underwent more difficult tests than John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, had to, and has waited 60 years for this moment. Daemen is a teenager who took a gap year to get his pilot's license, and the son of a private-equity executive... Daemen represents a new class of spacefarers; in the coming years, as private companies such as Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and Elon Musk's SpaceX make people into astronauts more readily than government agencies like NASA can, the distance between a childhood dream and reality is bound to shrink. Expect more smorgasbord space crews like the Blue Origin one, filled with an assortment of very wealthy individuals and the people they choose to go with them...
The rules about who can become an astronaut have changed, and the new "right stuff" is money and luck.
The "right" organ. (Score:2)
The rules about who can become an astronaut have changed, and the new "right stuff" is money and luck.
And no heart problems.
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"Did the check clear?"
"Yup, he had the right stuff after all."
Guess we know how he got selected (Score:5, Interesting)
> Daemen is a teenager who took a gap year to get his pilot's license, and the son of a private-equity executive
It's good to be the private equity executive's son.
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Uh, you can get a private pilot license without being a private-equity executive's kid. It's middle-class reachable if you really wanted one bad. Just get a job and pay for lessons on the weekend. You need to accumulate about 40 hours of flying time (60 being the recommended, I believe). Depending on your city/town and the number of lessons you need, you could probably get it for between $10K to $30K total. You may save some money and get good at it by practicing on X-plane and Gleim too.
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I think more important fact is being part of an auction which is mentioned in article. I doubt he can put large enough part of $28mil as a teenager. I think his father helped a lot here.
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I don't know if you noticed in TFS, but the kid wasn't the $28M bid. That was the still unknown guy who had "scheduling problems" that kept from from going up, even though the date was known long in advance.
The kid was "a participant", but for all we know he could be paying the regular price. Also, who could resist the "oldest and youngest" pairing, it's just too click-baity to pass up.
Re: Guess we know how he got selected (Score:2)
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Uh, you can get a private pilot license without being a private-equity executive's kid.
Woosh. It was not the pilot's license that got him in, but the presumed millions of dollars bid by his father in the auction.
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Yeah the license isnt' too bad, $10k should get you one. It's still a lot of money, but as a one-time thing is kind of ok. Rental fees, at least here in Europe, are off the charts though. Like $200/hr for a old 172 which I think is almost double what I've seen in the US. This really makes you question whether it's worth it when flying to an airport an 60n away, having a coffee there, and then flying back could pay for a week in a nice hotel somewhere in the mountains or on the beach.
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$200/hr... flown or blown, your choice.
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Teenagers on a gap year are renowned for living middle-class lifestyles. All the ones I've known have worked part time to scrape up enough money to go and live in a dirt hut somewhere unsanitary for a few months and/or work bars in foreign countries. I approve of this.
However, I agree with you that if he worked full time in a near minimum wage job and spent all of his post-tax income on lessons, it's viable.
It also means he's living at home and his parents are paying for food, transport and entertainment, b
Re: Guess we know how he got selected (Score:2)
Re: Guess we know how he got selected (Score:2)
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you could probably get it for between $10K to $30K total.
How much of that is instructor hours? How much of that is airplane rental hours (to log the minimum flight time required to get the license?)
Sorry, but I'm pretty sure $30K would be the average cost, not the ceiling. (But I live in lower NY.)
You may save some money and get good at it by practicing on X-plane and Gleim too.
It won't count towards a license, so its not really saving money.
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Of course we know how he got selected. He was a bidder in an action where the winner dropped out.
Rich people do rich people things, news at 11.
Suborbital hops (Score:4, Insightful)
It was lame when they tried to pass off Alan Shepard's suborbital flight as being comparable to the first manned orbital flight and it's lame when the billionaires do the same.
I knew this Blue Origin fanboi a while back who wouldn't accept the fact that all of Blue Origin's *plans* were irrelevant in light of SpaceX's demonstrated accomplishments.
The press reporting on this bullshit isn't much smarter than that guy.
Bezos can spend his money how he likes, but until he does something actually noteworthy, as opposed to buying himself press coverage in his own newspapers, I don't give a high-altitude flying fuck.
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Why he doesn't paint his rocket pink is a mystery.
Because if he did, Elon Musk wouldn't be able to resist painting the Starship-and-Super-Heavy-Booster combination black.
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Depending on how you count it, Blue Origins could be the first to make a vertical rocket landing.
Eh?! Surely you could count NASA's lunar lander among others in that list?
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could be the first to make a vertical rocket landing
We've all known since we were kids that that's the real way to land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re: Suborbital hops (Score:3, Interesting)
Space tourism is to launching rockets as 300 ft private yachts are to seafaring. In my opinion. One is technological advancement, the other is a toy for the ultra rich. I don't really take issue with yoys for the rich but I do take offense at the lie that toys for the rich are anything more than toys for the rich.
A 10k wristwatch is not revolutionary timepiece technology anymore than the juicero was revolutionary nutritional technology.
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The expensive toy for a rich person in my country was repurposed as a hospital ship when we went to war.
Don't be knocking a well designed toy.
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A 10k wristwatch is not revolutionary timepiece technology
This! I have a 10k wristwatch and it's the least accurate timepiece I own. When someone asked me why I have it I say "it's one of the few widely socially acceptable pieces of men's jewelry and I find it really really pretty". Anything beyond that is a joke.
Sure the insides of it were revolutionary of the day, but an equivalent movement can be had from Japan for $350 (which I actually also own as well because I sure as heck am not going to do sports while wearing expensive fashion accessories.
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Christ, you are a pathetic human being thegarbz.
Why because I have some spare money to buy things someone else produce? Or because I needed a watch and chose a pretty looking one?
You are a pretend Marxist with a $10000 wristwatch.
What I am is educated enough to know you have no idea what Marxism is. If you did you'd realise you can't "pretend" to be a Marxist by buying something.
Anyway judge away. All you doing by labelling people by the watch they wear is demonstrating your own value as a human. I don't need to label you, you did that yourself. I pity you.
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This is missing the point though. The R&D and the rockets have to be paid for somehow. Musk decided to go after commercial contracts and to create demand by building the Starlink constellation. Branson and Bezos decided to get people to pay for a joyride.
The end goal is not tourism, it's just a means to the same end that Musk has in mind. Trips to Luna and beyond.
Obviously Musk's plan is working much better, but that could be unrelated to the source of funding.
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The end goal is not tourism, it's just a means to the same end that Musk has in mind. Trips to Luna and beyond.
Too bad they're not working on spacecraft which can do that. Instead they're dicking around with bullshit to let the ultra-wealthy waste their money more rapidly when we should just be taking that money away from the cadre of high-class career criminals sitting on it now.
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Blue Origin has more than New Shepard in the works. New Glenn is going to be their orbital class rocket. The engines for that, the BE-4, will also fly on ULA's Vulcan and you're not gonna believe where that mission heads.
The moon!
So, yes,
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"Blue Origin is about space tourism."
That's kind of the point (IMHO), what kind of tourism/experience is it if you only spend a few minutes in weightlessness and it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars? You can get virtually the same experience for MUCH less on the "vomit comet" flights. The only thing you don't "get" on those is a silly "astronaut" designation because you spend a few seconds above an arbitrary altitude. And that novelty of that is going to wear off really quick once a few dozen pe
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The only thing you don't "get" on those is a silly "astronaut" designation because you spend a few seconds above an arbitrary altitude.
Which BTW in a hot second is going to be worth fuck-all as the number of non-crew "astronauts" increases. If you're one of the first, that might be something to brag about. If you're the 143rd person to go to space as a seat warmer, who is going to give a fuck? Nobody worth impressing.
Nobody worth impressing (Score:2)
...except for the imaginary girlfriend
Re:Suborbital hops (Score:5, Insightful)
You could say space tourism is a form of 'appealing to the masses'. Microsoft did that and became the multi multi billion dollar company it became because of it. I'm thinking back to where Windows 95 was something like a year behind, and IBM had a technically far superior product, OS/2. It even had a form of early virtual machine. You could install Windows 3.1 in it and run it in an OS/2 window. But IBM advertised it to computer professionals in prime time, using stylized foreign language ads and appealing to the intellectuals. The masses didn't give two shits about it. They won't watch a good movie with subtitles, why would they stop to watch a commercial with subtitles; it would interrupt them going to the kitchen for some more nachos. Then Windows 95 finally was released, way after the point that IBM should have captured the market away from MS; but didn't.
What Microsoft did was to advertise the shit out of Windows 95 to the masses, not the computer professionals. Look how cool this is, you can be cool too. It is fun and productive and listen, the Rolling Stones are singing on our commercials for this, because it's that cool. And the masses liked being talked to in their own language and bought the shit out of it. And the bosses who used it at home said, this Windows 95 works good, we want it at work too, even though you tell me it is a shit work station OS. We control the money and we want to buy Windows 95.
Space tourism will work the same way. People will want the money funnelled into the company that makes them feel like they could be a part of it. If SpaceX can't do this too, they may get government contracts, but the cool product that makes the average person feel like they have a chance at the beyond average will probably win. And I like SpaceX. But so far they only have one billionaire tourist going for a trip. And their isn't any talk about some day taking people up for day trips. Only going to Mars, which is way beyond what the masses want to do (it would interrupt them from going to the kitchen for some nachos).
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I don't really say it's fair to say BO is only concerned with space tourism.
New Shepard's only real job is space tourism, but they did it with a hydrolox engine and propulsive landing to get experience with it. BO has plans for a lunar lander, which they lost the bid on to SpaceX, and experience with a hydrolox engine will be helpful for any lunar operations.
They've also g
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If that is what it takes to get the space race accelerating, THEN SO BE IT.
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PS, i would suggest that all future space tourist tickets be lottery based, buy a ticket to fund the space program and you can take a chance for the ride of your life, survival not guaranteed. Plenty of people will buy tickets, winners can either fly or auction them on eBay, highest bidder wins or the original winner can choose to test themselves.
It will sell better and make more money for space programs, a chance to reach for the stars, strictly government owned and controlled, else chaos, what goes up mi
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"...I don't give a high-altitude flying fuck."
Seems like you do. Not "giving a fuck" would include not wasting your time on things like, you know, posting about it.
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It was lame when they tried to pass off Alan Shepard's suborbital flight as being comparable to the first manned orbital flight
Who, specifically, made that comparison, and what exactly are your own credentials in the aerospace field that would make your opinion remotely worth a shit?
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I don't think you know anything about radiation, cancer, space or chiropractors.
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Re: These people will need chiropractic when back. (Score:2)
Re: These people will need chiropractic when back. (Score:3)
It has been so long since I have seen your posts I assumed you had been petrified after being covered in hot grits.
Please Send Flat Earthers (Score:2)
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The crew is in on it and all the windows are actually display screens so you can't believe anything with your eyes.
Re:Please Send Flat Earthers (Score:5, Funny)
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Wouldn't work. They'd claim that the windows created a distortion
Fine, let them open the window.
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Blue Origin could do the public a favor and start sending as many flat earthers as possible to a high enough altitude that they can undeniably observe earth's curvature with their own eyes.
They wouldn't believe it. I'd suggest taking as many as you can, and tossing them out an airlock.
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I see you have never tried to argue with one. They'll claim the view was generated using a 3D 8K display on the window. And the anti-gravity .. they'll say it can be done with magnets (you try to explain to them that it can't be.)
Re:Please Send Flat Earthers (Score:4, Funny)
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Here's a proof of concept with a small frog
More arguments should be settled this way.
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Good point.
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I see you have never tried to argue with one. They'll claim the view was generated using a 3D 8K display on the window. And the anti-gravity .. they'll say it can be done with magnets (you try to explain to them that it can't be.)
They could try strapping these people to the outside of the rocket.
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Wait a sec, you get a free suborbital flight if you...
THE EARTH IS FLAT, PEOPLE!!!
Born into money (Score:2)
How is that different than being born with genes or upbringing for being a good pilot, work ethic etc.?
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How do you know if someone who has never worked a day in their life has a good work ethic?
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Maybe they have worked. :shrugs:
I guess corporations can do whatever they want, but a more socially-acceptable allocation of seats would be a single-ticket-per-person raffle.
Auctioning seats to rich people is "let them eat cake" tone-deaf. There will eventually be a reckoning for the 1%'s pervasive myopia like the French Revolution.
Re:Born into money (Score:4, Insightful)
But from the utilitarian standpoint, it is inarguable that rewarding some behaviors promotes more of those behaviors - in other words creating incentives so that needs are met.
For example if we pay people for digging ditches by the foot, then big strong men who choose to work hard make the most money. It is arguable whether that is "fair" since women, small men, or other traits they didn't "choose" (which might ultimately include all factors including e.g. ambition) make less. But what is inarguable is that doing this causes more ditches to be dug. Whereas if people's reward has no relation to whether or how much they dig (e.g. all exactly equal, or all according to inheritance), then no incentive is created, and little if any digging will occur.
To the point of this article, a society that hands out the possibility of being a celebrity astronaut to hot shit fighter pilots will ultimately have more skilled pilots to defend its airspace than one that hands out the rides to trust fund babies, and will tend to prevail long-term (again, this does not depend on any argument about fairness).
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Terrible, false equivalency analogy. The strong men didn't underpay, make their employees pee in Coca-Cola bottles, or fire them for not picking items fast enough. Amazon is a slavery engine factory factory legitimized stealing vast sums of money from workers, customers, and US taxpayers.
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Being born with good genes and/or upbringing to have a good work ethic means you do something useful to society most of the time. Also, in order to do anything with those traits you have to at least be able to fake being a half decent person and you can't get out of serious crimes by claiming affluenza.
Race to Pluto! (Score:2)
What happens when tech-billionaires think they're rocket scientists? Race to Pluto!
52 years ago, we landed a man on the moon (Score:1)
Someone flying slightly higher than a commercial aircraft means fuck all. Stop fawning over the billionaires' latest dick measuring contest.
Re:52 years ago, we landed a man on the moon (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, if they'd at least stay there... I kinda get reminded of the old joke where someone bursts into the meeting of the East German Worker's Party "Comrades! The Russians are on the moon!"
And a hopeful voice from the back asks "All of them?"
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Hey you can do your part and sign the partition to keep Bezos in space: https://www.change.org/p/the-p... [change.org]
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Since when do billionaires care about decisions made by us plebs?
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They don't, doesn't make it any less funny though ;-)
Crew or Tourists? (Score:2)
I seem to remember that, back in the day, the Apollo astronauts had a year or two of training, physical and operational. Has the Blue Origin crew in the article had any preparation at all, or do they just take the trip with someone else worrying about the actual details?
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The chief of the Russian space program in the 1950s, Sergei Korolev, wanted to first send a circus acrobat to space, not a pilot. Stalin overrode him for prestige & image purposes. But the fact is Korolev was correct, a pilot can only F things up. Before they sent a human, Russia sent dogs into orbit and returned them safely to Earth. How much piloting do you think the dogs (named Belka and Strelka) did?
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Wally Funk was one of the first women in astronaut training during the Mercury days. She also holds, or has held, every FAA license a civilian can get.
She's 100% badass and I would say well qualified for the trip.
They're "astronauts?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in the same way a ship's passenger is a "sailor," or a taxi passenger is a "driver," or a child strapped in his mom's rear bike seat is a "cyclist..."
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Only in the same way a ship's passenger is a "sailor," or a taxi passenger is a "driver," or a child strapped in his mom's rear bike seat is a "cyclist..."
Well said. How about asstronauts?
Re:They're "astronauts?" (Score:4, Informative)
Technically you're confusing "astronaut" and "pilot". An astronaut is any crew member of a space craft.
Now as to where the line of "space" actually starts, that is still an open debate. Maybe high-altitude cabin crew is a better description.
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But I guess the word crew is also not fitting to passengers. I guess you original post the sailor example is actually quite close, but it is still distinct from the driver or the cyclist examples.
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But I guess the word crew is also not fitting to passengers [...]
Use NASA's term--"Payload Specialist"
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They're not crew, they're passengers.
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By that definition a lot of NASA people are not astronauts either. They didn't fly the craft, they were just passengers.
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They had stuff to do on the missions. These rich pricks have nothing to do but potentially become a projectile if not properly strapped down. They're not astronauts, they're space tourists, and let them be happy with that. Though actually, since they didn't make it to the karman line, they're not even that. They're high atmosphere tourists.
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Excuse me but Branson was busy "evaluating the customer experience".
Yeah I'm not counting that either.
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I'm sure you'll already be awake...masturbating.
So what? (Score:1)
Somebody does something that doesn't matter. Ok, thanks.