Are You Ready To Take A Ride In Space?

Let's have some fun today. Let's send each of you to space for the ride of your life! Elliana Sheriff began life in Southern California. She graduated from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is attractive, bright, eloquent, and adventurous. She was a natural for the television news business. She went into the television news business. She did well. Her career took her to Austin, Texas. (By the way, she is one of that special group of people who is a Tesla owner.) Like many other bright and special people, she decided to reinvent herself. She started the podcast Ellie in Space. She staked out a market niche. She wanted to humanize spaceflight. She tried to make it understandable to the regular watcher like me. She has prospered. She is now close to 100,000 subscribers. Ellie talked about normal people like us hitching a ride into space last night. She drew an analogy between the early days of commercial aviation in the 1930s. Long ago, you would fly around in an unpressurized, unheated aircraft like a DC-3. If you wanted to fly roundtrip from New York to Los Angeles, the round-trip ticket was $275. In those days this was almost half the price of a new Ford or Chevrolet. Here is a link to her podcast, I urge you to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NYHOJqGKB8 As of today, you have four options if you want to take a ride into space as follows: Virgin Galactic: 15-minute suborbital flight is a space plane: $450,000 per seat. Blue Origin: 15-minute suborbital flight in a space capsule: Up to $30 million per seat. Space-X: Orbital flight that could take you to the I.S.S.: $55 million per seat. Russia Soyuz capsule orbital flight to I.S.S.: $90 million per seat. If you are more adventurous and want to take a manned flight around the moon, Space-X has such a flight on offer for a reported $150 million per seat on a Space-X Dragon capsule that I presume will be launched by a Falcon Heavy. Some people have already signed up for this flight and paid a huge deposit. Elon Musk declines to disclose the names of these civilian astronauts with "deep pockets." One Japanese billionaire is rumored to be on this flight. As soon as the Starship is operational, a special version of the second stage will be configured to carry 100 colonists on a one-way trip to Mars. I have seen some plans for this spacecraft. Each colonist will have their own state room and a lot of creature comforts that most prior astronauts could only dream of. Elon has said that a ticket on this ship will cost you $500,000. Elon says that one can sell their house and buy a seat on this spacecraft. If I was 40 years younger, I would "Go for it!"