Watching the space
race from the couch

Now that privately funded SpaceShipOne has entered space and returned -- in one piece -- twice in two weeks, it looks like handfuls of run-of-the-mill millionaires might be rocketing 62 miles up in SpaceShipTwo as soon as 2007, needing only the kind of Right Stuff that $200,000 can buy.

Kudos are in order. But despite safety claims, it will be awhile before Digital Slobs try to compare fares to the Final Frontier on travelocity.com.

For us, the expression "living vicariously" is almost redundant. Never mind parasailing or mountain climbing, most of us have yet to tackle stairs two at a time.

While many Respectable People think civilizations should be judged by how far they reach for the stars, Slobs think they should be judged by how fast they can get pizza delivered.

Many of us speculate, for example, that citizens of Atlantis had pies flown into their homes like Frisbees via telekinesis (now there's a worthwhile project for NASA).

Still, even Slobs admit this is a pivotal point in the history of spaceflight, shortly before we flip the channel back to "Regis & Kelly." Some even say NASA's days are numbered. However, when it comes to safety, private gatekeepers to the Great Beyond have their own convincing to do.

After all, about the only word that comes close to being comforting in the phrase "Houston, we have a problem" is "Houston." Even those of us with rich uncles don't want to be stuck in sub- orbital space with a pilot on hold, waiting for customer support out of Bangladesh to turn off the Musak so it can calculate our secondary re-entry window before we start drifting toward Venus.

And the fact that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bankrolled SpaceShipOne doesn't add to any aura of infallibility. True, it's hard to do anything these days without Microsoft in the room, but at least when the servers freeze up in our offices, our buildings aren't sucked into a lifeless vacuum. When you run out of RAM in space, no one can hear you scream.

Nevertheless, the race to brand the space race has begun. 7-Up is planning a contest next year, offering a free ride on one of Richard Branson's first Virgin Galactic spaceflights.

Linking 7-Up to space travel is marketing genius, not only because it has "up" in its name, but because of all the major soft drinks, it acts the most like club soda on the kind of stains that will likely be left onboard from the nausea of zero gravity.

And if there is a Slob, somewhere, who yearns to dodge floating globs of vomit, this contest is his only hope, since none of us can cough up the $200,000 ticket price otherwise (though many of us have invested at least half that in video-game consoles since the mid-1980s).

Regardless, we shouldn't envy those who have wallets brave enough to enter space before us. Joining the 62-mile-high club is sure to have its anti-climaxes as well.

The fact is, since the Big Bang, there really hasn't been that much excitement in space. After the initial "wow," we might be overcome with a sense that the parade has passed our naked eyes by. Getting on SpaceShipTwo might be like paying $200,000 for a nosebleed seat to the Superbowl 13.7 billion years after kickoff.

And to see anything, from a wardrobe malfunction to a supernova, the couch in your living room is probably still the best seat in the universe. Unless, of course, they let us take TVs up there with us.