Is Space-Shot.com a pyramid scheme?

Edited by Administrator: Sigurd; Someone who removed his posts, asked if Space-Shot.com is a pyramid scheme, here's sam dinkin's reply:

In a pyramid scheme, investors pay in and hope to earn an impossible return by fleecing subsequent investors.

In contrast, SpaceShot has players participate in a tournament. If a player wins, they continue in the tournament. If they lose they are out of the tournament. By losing, players are voluntarily providing the money required to help the winners get to space. There is no fraud or subterfuge. It is just like a single elimination tennis tournament with a $300,000 prize. Is that a pyramid scheme? SpaceShot returns very good value to players. The lion's share of revenues are returned to players in the form of prizes. There is no investment going on. It is a consensual trade of the money to compete for the right to compete and, if successful, win.

In another sense, spaceshot is like a human pyramid of thousands of people standing on each other's shoulders enabling the person at the top to ascend to space.

Setting up a lottery to win a space flight was suggested earlier in another thread, but it was pointed out that that would be considered illegal gambling in most cities and states. Predicting the weather better than someone else is the closest thing to random chance that I can imagine without technically being gambling (no offense intended to the meteorologists). Actually, it does seem an awful lot like predicting which horse will win a particular race. That is a kind of skill too.

So as I see it, this is the hoped for space lottery.

The government and private industry each spend hundreds of millions of dollars on weather prediction. There are weather prediction supercomputiers. Weather prediction is definitely a skill. That said, it is pretty hard. I can certainly remember times the weather man on TV said one thing and the weather did something else.

It's kind of an iconic joke. Nicholas Cage starred in the movie The Weather Man about a great TV forecaster who could not get anyone to take him seriously. Well, I don't promise you will be taken seriously if you are a great weather predictor, but I do promise that if you win the tournament, you will get a trip to space or the alternative cash prize.