To the Moon!

Now I have another adventure I must do before I die:

The Virginia company that pioneered commercial space travel by sending "tourists" up to the International Space Station is planning a new mission: rocketing people around the far side of the moon.

The price of a round-trip ticket: $100 million.

The first mission by Space Adventures could happen in 2008 or 2009 and is planned as a stepping stone to an eventual lunar landing by private citizens.

...(CEO Eric) Anderson said he already has prospective "private explorers" who are interested in the trip and could afford the ticket.

The last time I blew $100 million was when I tried to organize an expedition to find the Titanic, and that rat bastard Robert Ballard (D-o-c-t-o-r Robert Ballard) beat me to it. I'll chalk it up to inexperience given that in 1985 I was only eight, but what I lacked in experience, I made up for in enthusiasm (looking back, I now see it was only a 7-day sugar high I experienced after eating too many Skittles).

I imagine my lamentation after coming in second in a two man race. I foolishly tried to get a leg up on Dr. Ballard by purchasing, for $1 million, a secret map from a Navajo-Indian man with an eye-patch who called himself "Runs With Boats." Little did I know at the time that his natural habitat was mostly arid desert, and that the closest thing to a naval vessel he had ever seen was the yellow submarine in the Beatles' aptly titled movie. That should explain why our expedition ended up scouring Lake Huron instead of the Atlantic Ocean.

I won't be making that mistake again.

Needless to say, I've been safeguarding my remaining stash since that ill-fated expedition and am ecstatic that I now have another potential adventure to dump my cash into.

However, there is something very frightening about being strapped to 12-million pounds of thrust by something made in Russia. Its not the engineering I'm worried about as much as Vladimir-the-vodka-soaked-quality-control-guy. Then again, he's probably been drinking so long he would function better with it than without.

Still, its a little much for me to digest at the moment, so bear with me.