Space Lottery

I think that Burt Rutan's group should hold a space lottery to help finance space development. Right now the average person won't be able to afford several hundred thousand dollars to get into space. However, imagine if he held a lottery all over the world. For $1 you get a chance of winning a flight. I'd bet you'd easily sell $10 million worth of tickets. Thats enough for 50 winners at say $200K per flight.

I'd buy a ticket for a chance of a once in a lifetime chance of going into space.

Sounds like a good idea. And it is great market research. The number of tickets sold would tell you for sure how interested the public REALLY is in space flight.

As far as I remember a few lotteries to win a suborbital ticket already exist(ed) - the ticket(s) were for flights by Virgin Galactic's vehicles.

After the first 400, 500 or 1,100 flights the price at Virgin Galactic will be at 20,000 $ according to what Sam Dinkin said in an article - when that price is valid there will be a lot of interesting space lotteries perhaps.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Let's see now ... buy a ticket for a chance ... ok so that's a 1 in 10,000,000 chance ... winning that gives you the once in a life-time gig ... so that's 1 in ... what ... 9,000,000,000 ...

Hey, you just shortened your odds by 900-fold!

Where did you say they were selling those tickets?

DKH

That's better than trying to woo venture capitalists. Those guys are nobody's friend.

They are very free with a little money--but are scrooges when it comes to real funding. They have no understanding of the industry. What they do is to pass some money around to keep their hands in the mix--to wet their beaks as it were.

That's fine when it comes to certain hairdressers on BRAVO whose dreams aren't much bigger than their brains--or tie-ins to certain cyclists who think they've accomplished something driving all over France seven times--but lousy for aerospace.

All they do is to fool good engineers into getting their hopes up--and get good aerospace men on cloud-9--just high enough so that when the 'venture' brothers pull the rugs out from under them--their heads hit the pavement---HARD.

You see one or two of these vultures at air shows, munching popcorn as starry-eyed aerospacemen hand them expensive brochures that wind up in the toilet not 20 minutes later. They probably had a good laugh when Hudson showed them the ROTON contraption.

Just remember that most suits are bad golfers--strong on addressing the ball--but poor on follow-through. That's something to bear in mind the next time you consider spending a fortune on glossy prints to pass around in visits to the same old air/space shows--where you see the same old hucksters--where everyone is selling and no one is buying. A real vendors convention. Chew upon this before you try fighting off your mates over the one weasel in the Armani suit who calls himself a venture capitalist. He's not worth it--and as they say in the romance self-help books---'he's just not that into you.'

True, Gov't does this too, as was the case with Project ORION. They led people on--only to dash their dreams. This left Freeman Dyson with a bad taste in his mouth--and only helps to sour people on space at all levels--thus the Jeffrey Bells and other 'recovering space addicts' who let cheats ruin their vision.

Venture capitalists are little better than the usual "Graeme-the-fix" types who give you just enough smack in your arm to leave you wanting more--and then it costs you everything--control of the company you just set up, say.

Is it too late to re-open the gulags for their ilk?

P.S. A lottery is a great idea. Now if we could tie it into the red light districts and pyramid schemes that the venture capitalists use to make their money--off suckers.

"And 10% of every Ron Jeremy video goes to BoosterSpace (TM) --where the term 'strap-on' has a whole other meaning."

Only $19.95. Call in the next 15 min and get our special 'high-thrust' formula--all natural.

Well, at least there was some little mention of the topic of this thread in all that crap.

I think this could be an approach to make space travel available to the little guy. Not sure if there would be an optimal distribution system. Perhaps it could be tied into the same system as PowerBall etc... You go to 711 and buy a slurpie. Then ask for a quick pick SpaceLotto. Wait up Wednesday and see if you are going up into space

What other areas might work? Perhaps sell them at the airport. You're about to fly out and see a sign to pay $1 for a chance to go into space. I think the environment would be conducive to get people to take a chance just for the fun of it. Or perhaps tie in with various museums like the Exploratorium in San Francisco etc... I don't know what would work.

Airports are the perfect distribution system. The mood is already set. Now, lets say the cost is $200,000 initially to go into space. Right now Burt Rutan has contracted with Virgin. So every time someone buys a Virgin ticket there should be the ticketting agent asking "For an additional $1 would you like to participate in our Space Lottery?" Now think of it, you just spent $322 to fly from point A to point B, or $819 to fly from point X to point Y. An extra $1 is nothing. You can make it exciting. In the lobby area of your terminal there can be television sets showing space blast offs, there can be statements from people who recently won "Oh my God. It was amazing..." Turn it into a game. If they don't win,it was fun. Maybe make it a scratcher game rather than a random number drawing.

I don't know what Virgin's passenger traffic is like. Suppose they transport every year 5 million people (I have no idea what it actually is). At $200,000 a flight, that makes 25 regular folks having a flight into space. The only down side is that Virgin has an exclusive contract with Rutan. Imagine if all the airlines set up a side business of space flights. There are hundreds of millions of passenger flights in the U.S. alone. With say 200 million passenger flights at $200,000 a flight, that makes 1000 regular people. And it wouldn't have to be just the U.S. I'm sure Japanese airlines, Korean airlines etc... could sell for $1 charge added onto each flight to win a trip into space. I'd bet you could get a few thousand people into space yearly just with a game like this. It would be fun and different. I mean if I just spent $1000 to fly from New York to London, whats an extra dollar?

I'd like to know just how much money Rutan has actually received from Branson so far.

Richard has all the attention span of a mayfly.

Great idea. Small problem: it's illegal.

I did wonder if it was illegal. However, don't food companies do this sort of thing? Buy a coke bottle and if you collect enough bottle caps you win a prize. Or go to McDonalds and scratch off a card, see if you win some trip, or new car etc...

Wouldn't the same principle apply?

Like you buy your flight ticket, pay an extra $1, then get a scratchoff. If you scratch off the areas and get three SpaceShipOnes, you win a flight. But you might get 2 SS1 and one moon etc... If the problem is the charging of the $1, then just raise all prices by $1, and let it be "free". Its all fungible.

Ah, but the promotions all have one nifty side-benefit: "No Purchase Necessary".

That is more than just a side benefit. It is what makes those contests legal. Charging $1 for a chance to get a ticket is gambling. Legal in Las Vegas maybe, but not in Austin. Giving away chances for a free flight is just a promotion. Trouble with that is it generates no income.

Now that I think of it, Las Vegas is not far from Mojave. And it has an airport.

True, but most people would rather buy the item on which the free chance is included than spend the time and energy to send an envelope to the company asking for the freebie.

And Vegas has also got LOTS of money. I'm still in favor of an orbital casino.

Hey, no vice laws.

That reminds me... the 7-Up contest for a Ticket to Space ends on August 31 or whenever game code supplies are exhausted. www.7up.com

Has anybody ever seen 7-Up in specially marked containers with Space Ticket game codes? Has anybody here played the game?