More on my Journey

So I've told you all that I'm trying to get into space, and I told you that I started in High School, but I haven't given you any idea about what I've done so far. So let me tell you how my life has been warped and twisted by this endeavor!

The first step was college. This was a bit of a stickler for me. Now I daresay it's easy to get funding for college (through loans, if nothing else) so long as your grades are good. Unfortunately for me, grades have never been my strong suit. However, I knew college would be essential if I was to get into space. Back then, there were no operating space tourism companies, but I assumed that space travel would be prohibitively expensive. The relevant statistic here is that college graduates, on average, make a million dollars more during their lifetimes. This brings me to my first rule for getting into space:

Rule 1: Go to College.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to get into space without going to college, but it will be a lot harder. And yeah, college is a drag. Doubly so for me. But it has to be done.

But back to my problem. Grades. Blah. The way I feel about grades can be summed up by the following list of more accurate measurements of a student's abilities:
1. How far the student can spit.
2. The distance between the student's nostrils.
3. The height of the student's best friend.
4. A random number between one and a million.
5. The sum of the student's phone number.
6. 28.

As you have probably guessed by now, my grades were horrid. I'll save further rants about our terrible grading system for another post. On to college! My college of choice had a two-tiered application process. If you had a high school GPA of 3.00, you could fill out a simple form. If it was lower, you had to fill out a more complex form and submit an essay. My high school GPA was (drumroll) 2.98. What a frustrating number that was! It wasn't that I didn't do the work; it's just that I didn't learn the way everyone expected me to. 95% of high school classes relied on memorization through repetition. I, frankly, suck at that. I'm much much better at memorization through experience, but high school is not known for teaching by hands-on example. As a result, I fought tooth-and-nail until my fingertips were but bloody stumps to get that 2.98! But then I realized, one summer, I took a course at a local community college, because it was on some advanced topics of a subject I was interested in (computer science), which they barely taught at all in high school. I was given a choice, and in my infinite wisdom, I opted to take it as college credit so that I would have just a smidgen done when I finally did make it to college. I got an A in that course, but could I really claim it as high school credit, having already racked up 4 college credits for it? Could I really play the system like that? Could I really channel this warped and twisted system to my own design?

Turns out I could!

That A bumped me up to a 3.01 GPA, just enough to let me slip into my college of choice! But I'll quit boring you now. College is important, blah blah blah. Later, I'll bore you about my college years, and perhaps go off on that whole grades rant I promised. See you there!

I'm going to space!

Welcome one and all!

My name (well, my name here) is Joe Space Tourist. And let me tell you why:

When I was in high school (about ten years or so ago; I'm 26), I decided that someday, I would go to space. I was just a regular kid in a regular school among the regular masses, silent and vocal, repressed and excited, optimistic and beaten-down. But I had watched the shuttle launches. I had watched the old Mercury and Apollo, and Soyuz capsules fly into space, circle the Earth, bring people from this planet safely to the Moon and back again, and Touch The Sky. I knew; I knew that I had to be part of this. That I had to, somehow, in some way, bring myself to the edge of human exploration, of human thought and dreams and imagination. I wanted to do something fantastic, and I still do.

In short, I fully intend to light a rocket under my butt and shoot myself out of the atmosphere.

I had a problem though; I simply was not cut out for the astronaut corps. I (frankly) sucked at school, I have bad eyesight in one eye, and I wasn't willing to join the military, for reasons that I may or may not get into later. I knew back then, and I fully admitted to myself, that I would never be an astronaut in the traditional sense. So even back in high school, I put my hopes on private companies to eventually help me find a way to fulfill my dream.

Then came the Ansari X-Prize. What a great idea! To promise $20 million dollars to the first private company that could launch three people into space twice within a week. Practically the definition of space tourism! And the results were spectacular. In the year 2004, there were exactly four manned launches into space. One was a Russian Soyuz capsule sending new personnel and supplies to the International Space Station. The other three were SpaceShipOne.

SpaceShipOne and the whole team at Scaled Composites are amazing. A hundred and twenty people created a successful space program with only $10 million in funds. How incredible is that? Not only that, but the ship they designed only had a few moving parts, was mechanically controlled, was capable of re-entering the atmosphere without a heat shield and was first piloted by a 60 year old high school dropout! There is nothing about SpaceShipOne's story that isn't incredible! If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the Discovery Channel documentary on the design, construction, and testing of SpaceShipOne (on the right). It's very entertaining and thought-provoking, and they come very close to complete disaster no less than three times!

After SpaceShipOne's three successful flights, it was retired (it now hangs from the ceiling at the Smithsonian), and Scaled Composites partnered with the newly-founded Virgin Galactic to create SpaceShipTwo and sell flights to the general public. They're not the only ones; today, there are no fewer than five companies around the world with serious plans to provide similar flights. Virgin Galactic even set a price: $200,000 per flight.

$200,000? That's a bit of a stickler. Most people assume that this prohibitive price sets space tourism firmly in the realm of the obscenely wealthy.

Well, that is why I'm writing this blog. I'm going to prove them wrong, and I'm going to share my journey with you.

The $200,000 price tag gave me three choices. I could give up on my dream, but for me, that's not an option. I could wait for more companies to enter the arena and prices to drop; this could very well happen, but I don't want to rely on it. So my third option is to spend my life working toward this. That is what I have decided to do.

In other words, I'm not here to say that anyone can do this. Not everyone can. It's going to take a hell of a lot of drive, determination, careful planning, and above all, the ability to turn nay-sayers into fuel for the fire. Anyone who tells me I can't do this only makes me more determined to prove them wrong. In other words, what I am saying is that anyone with these qualities can do this. You, too, can go to space.

And I'm going to prove it.