For a mere $5,000,000.00 – that’s five million dollars, you can spend three days in a space resort, 450 km about the Earth. Wow. I’d love to spend 3 days in space, watching the sun rise 15 times a day and spinning around the world 80 times. It sounds really nice. They even throw in a free training program on a tropical island. 200 people have expressed an interest. That’s about a billion dollars worth of interest, and 43 people have reserved a spot. That’s 215 million dollars. Let that figure settle in a bit while I discuss my personal finances.
With the global financial crisis, my $9,000 investment is worth nothing, my superannuation is worth about $60,000. It’s taken me about 25 years of working to get to that much. At this rate, I should be able to purchase a ticket in about 83 years, provided I can keep my job that long. If I saved every cent I earned currently, then I could get away by 2095. I’ll be 132.
The average yearly wage in China is about $140 a week1. It would take them around about 686 years to save up, and then only if they don’t spend one single yuan, compare that to the $170 a year that the average worker in Ethopia2gets and well, they might as well forget it.
Of course, I guess a lot of people don’t really want to fly into space, put on a velcro suit and play around in a small pod for 3 days. They’re too busy trying to work out how to feed their family. Trying to work out if they have enough money to get some medial attention. Trying to survive.
It’s a lot of money. It’s obscene. I’m not against people earning vast amounts of money, but really, if you have that much to throw around you really need to take stock of the world and reconsider your priorities. There are people much worse off than you, the 75 million in Ethiopia for example, and they could probably do with a few million dollars to help them along.
How can you spend so much money on a 3 day trip. That’s just selfish and I don’t care how much you give to charity, or how hard you’ve worked, its really not fair. We need to fix the earth, we need to look after each other, and that’s not possible while vast amounts of money are heading skyward.
Thanks for doing the math on that. I’d seen an article about that space hotel somewhere but never thought of putting it in perspective. It saddens me how much money gets wasted when it could all be put to far better humanitarian uses than the world’s first forays into space tourism. Hope a few spins around this little ole’ world will humble them all.
It’s amazing how we treat our fellow humans. We can be such selfish jerks at times.