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Space Tourism
March 1st, 2007
Richard Branson and a bunch of his billionaire cronies are in a race to see who can be the first commercial non-governmental entity to send people into space and allow them to experience the effects of zero-G first hand. I’m very skeptical of the entire concept, granted the research that goes into this may perhaps someday enable us to escape Earth and settle on Mars or some other distant solar landscape. My reason for skepticism is not because I think humans in space is a far fetched idea, its because, given current global circumstances the money spent in this endeavor would probably be better spent elsewhere, say in Africa for instance. Space flight has been a human fascination for many a decade, but I must question, why this sudden urgency, why the sudden need?
The goal of all this outpouring of money is to make it viable for your average joe-schmo to go into orbit in his lifetime. That’s more like a really expensive amusement park ride. If humans have to go to space in droves there has to be something economically or environmentally viable out there. Just going to space to have the brief fleeting feeling of what its like to be an astronaut, is not going to drive or justify this kind of investment.
Some people just don’t know what to do with all their money.
Going Nowhere
February 25th, 2007
Well, I tried to depart Chicago’s O’Hare to catch a flight to Miami, earlier today. I had been at the airport since 8am and around 11:30pm AA informed me that we were not going anywhere that night. This after we boarded the aircraft twice and the crew secured all doors, and the second time around we almost made it all the way through the movie “Marie Antoinette”. Trying to get home was no easy task, the taxi lines were 4-5 lines wide and it was freezing outside, so yours truly sans coat wasn’t about to freeze outside. The el was the next option, when I got there, no trains were running, “ice on the tracks and there are crews out there scraping the ice off the tracks” is what the platform agent told me. Great. About an hour later, another train shows up and an announcement was made that all of us needed to board that train. Finally around 1:30am I made it back home, just in time to find that the heat was busted and my place had turned into an icebox. Yippeee!
While at the terminal, I actually called the Platinum desk and got through to a human operator after about 45 mins on hold, not too bad, who re-booked me for a flight via Nashville the next morning. By the time I had reached home, that flight had been cancelled too and another call to AA confirmed my fears and got me a re-booking on a flight via Washington Reagan the next afternoon. When I awakened the next morning, the first thing I did was check the weather forecasts everywhere, good thing I did, since they were anticipating Reagan to be under a winter storm advisory later on that afternoon. I got back on the horn with AA and got myself on yet another flight, this time via New Orleans.
It was pretty bad when I got to O’Hare, not as bad as last night, I ran into some of the other passengers from my flight yesterday, who were still stuck there trying to get out and get on their cruise in the Caribbean. My flight to New Orleans went off without a hitch, but when I got there I learned that my flight to Miami was further delayed by an hour. Well all said and done, I finally made it on that flight and reached Miami at 9:30pm.
Just a schooch over 36 hours for what was initially a 3 hour flight.