Four years at Tufts University or six minutes in outer space?
For a measly $200,000, aspiring astronauts can book a place on one of SpaceShipTwo's inaugural flights, set to launch in 2011.
SpaceShipTwo is the commercial spacecraft at the heart of Sir Richard Branson's astoundingly eccentric Virgin Galactic, a company that aims to make space travel accessible to everyone — well, everyone with a spare $200,000.
Virgin Galactic is currently accepting bookings to go into space. These so-called astronauts (NASA employees will no doubt take issue with this title) will undergo a medical exam as well as briefings and possibly some sort of training and then be strapped in for a quick flight into suborbital space. For six minutes. And then glide back to earth.
The trip starts at point A and, two hours later, ends at point A. There is no point B — no destination — and for part of the trip, the ship travels, quite literally, through nothingness. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is time travel. Virgin Galactic has built a time machine that holds eight people (six paying astronauts and two crew members) that, for $200,000, will take travelers into the future.
So let's try this again: four years at Tufts University or time travel?
Confucius famously said, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." With this reasoning, it seems that the college education — the knowledge of how to fish (this would be an amazing Experimental College course) — is the obvious choice, but the other option here isn't a single fish — it's time travel.
Confucius never said anything about time travel.
The ramification of Confucius in a time machine is unimaginable for now (when it appears as a sitcom or Michael Bay movie in two years, you read it here first), but let's hope that Branson throws money at the idea for a while until it too is feasible.
But alas, either way, it's equal parts ridiculous and incredible. For the past 50 years, every kid ever has wanted to be an astronaut. Up until five, maybe 10 (if we're being conservative) years ago, it wasn't a realistic option for 99.999 percent of Earth's population. Now that figure is something more like 99.998 percent.
Two-hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, and even billionaire Branson understands this and has made it his goal to bring the price down over the next decade or two. Unless things go terribly wrong (knock on wood), we could all go to space (aka travel through time) during our lifetime.
They're even talking about commercial orbital space flight.
I can't even imagine that. It's too much for us, and yet it could happen.
I want to hate Virgin Galactic. I want to be cynical and snarky about it, but I can't. Branson may be out of his mind, but if he is, it's only because he's been able to solve the Grownup Problem (see my column from April 12). He's giddy about outer space in the same way your little cousin is. There were plastic star stickers on your ceiling when you were a kid, and maybe one day you can look out through a reinforced porthole, cut in the side of a carbon composite rocket ship and see real stars. See them whizz past as you orbit the globe.
Richard Branson is our Willy Wonka, but instead of candy and Oompa Loompas, he's giving us spaceships and astronauts.
If Tufts teaches me to fish, and I make a lot of money fishing (yeah, I'm taking it literally) and I can spare it, maybe one day, I'll be an astronaut, too.
Virgin Galactic: 4.5 out of 5 stars (no pun intended).
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Mitchell Geller is a junior majoring in psychology and English. He can be reached at Mitchell.Geller@tufts.edu.
