Wanna be an Astronaut?

The London, Ontario-based Canadian Arrow team wants to send you into space, provided you are Canadian, have aerospace and flight knowledge, are healthy and physically fit, and have $95 burning a hole in your pocket to apply on-line and another $8,000 if they decide you have the right stuff to finance your astronaut training.

But act now! This offer is only good until April 2003. Organizers plan to have one team member take the first flight, another the second flight and the third person will be a backup, with a launch.....next summer! Once they know the Arrow works safely, they'll start offering flights to the general public. Expensive flights. But it means there's a chance that I may have the chance to see outer space before I die, which is one of my oldest lifelong dreams.

Apply to become an astronaut here.

Learn about the X-Prize (the international competition to build a reusable rocket for space tourism with a payoff of $10,000,000 US to the team that does it first) here.

And finally, get an idea of Canada's best chance of winning the competition, the Canadian Arrow, here. It looks like something out of a Tin-Tin comic book, but if it works, who cares? The most amazing thing is that the design of the rocket and its main engine is based on the German WWII scourge of the skies, the V2 rocket. Trippy. 1940's technology as a solution for the spaceflight of the future. Jules Verne, eat your heart out.