{"id":2071,"date":"2009-12-09T10:09:11","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T14:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=2071"},"modified":"2011-04-08T09:38:05","modified_gmt":"2011-04-08T13:38:05","slug":"hyping-space-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/12\/09\/hyping-space-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Hyping space travel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2009\/12\/09\/touching-the-face-of-god-vs-punching-him-in-the-nose\/\" target=\"_blank\">Colby Cosh<\/a> finds the marketing hype from Virgin Galactic to be more than a little over the top:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I continue to be awestruck at Sir Richard Branson\u2019s gift for hype. On Monday he rolled out Virgin Galactic\u2019s \u201cSpaceShipTwo\u201d, dutifully described by <em>Wired<\/em> magazine as \u201cthe first commercial spacecraft\u201d and \u201cthe first commercial spaceship\u201d. This must be galling for the folks at the spaceflight research firm SpaceX. In July of this year, to little fanfare, they successfully put a Malaysian satellite into low earth orbit using a privately designed and built unmanned rocket, the Falcon 1. This is definitely commerce, and RazakSat is definitely up there in space, bleeping away in Malay. Surely everything else is Bransonian semantics?<\/p>\n<p>SpaceShipTwo, despite the name, is an airplane &mdash; a very sophisticated and impressive airplane, designed to make brief suborbital hops after being carried aloft by another airplane. Branson\u2019s hundreds of more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with customers are buying the aviation experience of a lifetime, one that nobody returns from unmoved. But it will be an <em>aviation<\/em> experience. \u201cSpace\u201d is defined in custom, international law, and Virgin marketing literature as \u201chigh enough that airplanes mostly don\u2019t work anymore\u201d. To get there as an airplane passenger, by virtue of a few seconds of rocket boost tacked onto a conventional flight, seems a little like a technical cheat &mdash; the equivalent of trying to join the Mile High Club by oneself in the john.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colby Cosh finds the marketing hype from Virgin Galactic to be more than a little over the top: I continue to be awestruck at Sir Richard Branson\u2019s gift for hype. On Monday he rolled out Virgin Galactic\u2019s \u201cSpaceShipTwo\u201d, dutifully described by Wired magazine as \u201cthe first commercial spacecraft\u201d and \u201cthe first commercial spaceship\u201d. This must [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,15],"tags":[123,428,708],"class_list":["post-2071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-science","category-technology","tag-aircraft","tag-marketing","tag-spacex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-xp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8713,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions\/8713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}