zero-g.org

Hello all,
I have this domain name:
http://www.zero-g.org

I have a web site idea and I would like to ask for your opinion.

I was thinking to make a donation system for the people who can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to space. But if you donate a dollar you could get a chance to win a ticket to space. The trick here is getting enough people to donate but if it works I could help both sides: the space travel agencies will get customers and regular people could go to space and they don’t have to be millionaires.

I could start for now sending people to experience zero-g using the services of :http://www.nogravity.com and later on when new space agencies will be available we could expand to those agencies.

Please let me know if you think. Any other ideas are ABSOLUTELY welcome.

Thank you
FM

You may need to check international laws, or limit it to the US (I don't know the US law that good).
In belgium, it's illegal to gamble, except on special licensed places, so your website would be illegal for belgian citizens if you do not have a local license.

Ignoring that part, I don't really love gambling, but for things like this.. I think it's a good idea

I'm in California, US and you a right about the lottery. I don't think I'll be able to go this way so I have to find some other way to help.
Again, any sugestions are more then welcome.

All the best,
FM

Hello, el930692,

taking into account Sigurd's advice it might be one - of perhaps several - solution to work together with people and enterprises who already have a licence.

I suppose you will be acting legally as long as you only work out your idea, find a way to claim property rights on it and then present it in short - not in detail! - at the website.

The website should adress licence-holdewrs as well as people who want a chance to win.

You may find licence-holders interested in your idea and paying a little bit for it. If they pay then this would be a basis for you to act as a kind of broker. Your job as broker would be to find the people interested to win a ticket by being a customer of the licence-holders.

This way public lotteries are working in Germany - private shops are selling lottery tickets in charge of the licence-holders.

Perhaps GoldenPalace .com may be interested.

There might be to add more - but by now I have to wait for thoughts...



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

That's an excellent idea.
Thank you Ekkehard !

Keep in mind that I'm really not a gambling sort of person, and therefore don't have much knowledge in that area..

What you describe sounds more like a raffle. Yes, even the definition of "raffle":

"A lottery in which a number of persons buy chances to win a prize."

contains mention of a lottery. However, I've seen raffles for many many years.. even before Florida (for example, since I live here) changed its gambling laws to include a lottery. Is there a possibility that a raffle is a legal exception in many places that don't otherwise allow lotteries? (the other possibility is that all those raffles were illegal)

If this sounds like semantics.. well, yes, it probably is. However, playing that semantics game MIGHT allow you to do what you want to do.

Sorry I can't be more helpful. I'm really not into gambling in most forms. I buy maybe 2 bingo scratchoffs a year, unless I hit a big winner with those 2.. then I roll the winnings into other tickets and just keep playing until I run out of winning tickets. Boring, huh?

It#s starting to become detailed and complex now.

When I read the initial post of this topic I thought of a roulette-like idea - a "gamE2 nearly totally depending on random and fortune.

That's quite different to the XPRIZE, to tombolas 8which are allowed to take place very free in Germany) and so called "Preisausschreiben" by newspapers and enterprises. I don't know wether there are restrictions to tombolas - they might be forbidden to take place periodically perhaps - but there are often tombolas.

Lotteries in Germany are normal parts of events called "Jahrmarkt" or "Kirmes" - I don't remember the english meaning this moment. It's to a very small degree similar to Disneyworld etc.

At such a "Jahrmarkt" there are lotteries and tombolas but the prizes don't have values above 1oo,- Euros normally. Sometimes you can win a car. This possibility sometimes is given by enterprises and newspapers too as advertisement.

This is moving away from the orginal idea discussed here I think and I remember to have read at this board of a reality show that gives a suborbital ticket for participation and it may be that there was someone other offering a prize. But these both were different to the idea in discussion here.

The only thing I want to add this moment, el930692, is that it might be helpful - and concerning other things good too - to reserve a certain amount of the money got for a ticket of the lottery for the XPRIZE Foundation if it agrees.



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

Initially, I’m going to build a space travel community web site to educate people about the space travel possibilities. Today I’ll work on the template and in about a week I’ll have the first version of the web site.
I’ll wait longer for more people to come with more ideas or maybe some companies will step up and help me help the space travel believers.
Again, thank you so much for your help!

Looks like someone else is also thinking about the space lottery idea

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/243/1

Oh, WOW ! Maybe I should get in touch with him.
Thank you for the tip!

Here is the first version. I don't have much content but I'm working on it.
http://www.zero-g.org

It seems you're going to compete with http://www.xprizenews.org for news and with this forum for discussions related to space goodluck

“Competition” isn’t exactly the word I had in mind when I created those x prize topics.
To exclude x prize from the space tourism discussions I don’t think is possible and I would probably call this discussion a “satellite” discussion.
I don’t expect and I don’t intend to create a main x prize discussion on http://www.zero-g.org but it’s possible that many people will find out for the first time about x prize from http://www.zero-g.org.
Soon, I’ll have to contact the x prize web master to ask for the permission to use a small banner to send people from http://www.zero-g.org. to the http://www.xprize.org donation page. I think that the x prize must be helped in any way because they are the main space tourism motivators at this point in time.

Just had a look at the site. Nice clean colours - easy to read design, but a couple of things I noticed:
- dates on the front page news/articles would be good. As a user I like to briefly scan to see if anything is new, and if so, then read those articles.
- it's too cumbersome to get down to the actual news articles - I don't want to have to click 3 times - I should be able to get to the main content within 1, or max 2 clicks.

Otherwise, I'll still be going to xprizenews.org for my main X-Prize related news, but will stop past your site every now and then to see how it progresses.

dolby_uk,
Thank you very much for your excellent suggestions. I went and made them today so things are much better now.

Also to eliminate any confusion I want to mention that zero-g.org is not an x prize web site and doesn’t pretend to be. This is a personal web site where I’ll try as much as I can to promote and inform people about the new space tourism horizons that have been opened by this wonderful people at x prize.

By opening this new web site I don’t pretend I have any merit and the x prize should get all the credits for opening the eyes of the people. My job at zero-g.org is not to compete but to put my shoulder along with others in promoting this great idea of “Space Tourism”.
This is all I can do. I’m not a millionaire to make donations, I’m not aeronautics engineer to help with building the space ships, but I can help with getting people exited about this great idea and this is exactly what I’m trying to do at zero-g.org, so help me God.
All the best,
FM