Filed under: Transportation

Hold onto your dollar bills, y’all — the WhiteKnightTwo is set to be unveiled (and swooned over) on Monday. We knew the fabled space tourism vehicle was set to be unwrapped this month, but knowing that said event is merely hours away just gets our juices flowin’. Richard Branson and “other dignitaries” are preparing to officially launch the ship at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California (a short drive from Zzyzx, we hear), and we’re still being led to believe that test flights should begin as early as this fall. Hey, at least you know what you’re doing next year if your ship comes in.

[Via The Register]

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Filed under: Transportation

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is about to join an extremely short list of space tourists, according to reports. The search engine-kingpin just dropped a $5 million dollar “investment” on the company Space Adventures, which all but guarantees him a seat on the outfit’s next flight in 2011. The trip aboard the Russian Soyuz rocket will take Brin to the ISS in the first-ever private flight to the station (Ubuntu head Mark Shuttleworth has made the trip, though not on a private mission). The company stresses that the ride will be less about tourism and more about commercial exploration, with passengers bringing aboard experiments and taking part in flight operations. Now the only riddle left to solve is whether the last Cylon is Brin or Bezos.

[Via Gear Diary]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Does it say something about our priorities as a species that before space tourism has even been proven safe for and desirable to the masses, people are already coming up with ways to spend money in zero gravity? Well according to a group of researchers from the University of Leicester and the UK’s National Space Centre, the payment methods we use here on Earth would not make for viable space currency — due to sharp edges or radiation-prone magnetic strips — and would need to be replaced with something more suited to the environment. Enter the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (or QUID — clever Brits), a stackable, molded chip made of the same material used in non-stick pans, and lacking the chemicals or sharpness inherent to paper, plastic, and coins. The inventors peg the current exchange rate for the QUID at £6.25 to 1Q, which seems not only completely arbitrary, but fairly unnecessary, considering that we’ll have already spent all our Earth money (and probably re-financed the house) to pay Sir Richard for the damn flight. Keep reading to peep all five colorful denominations…

[Via BBC]

Continue reading Goodbye dollar, hello QUID: intergalactic currency proposed

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