10 ms·

They paid $100k to ride on Xcor's space plane. Now they want their money back

78 points by dsr12 8y ago

b_b 8y ago
To clarify any misunderstandings from the title, the people paid but never actually got to fly, so they (fairly) want their money back.
- hedora 8y ago
  Also, there is an incognito / private mode blocker between the click-baity title and the article. :-(
- megaremote 8y ago
  Worth mentioning Xcor has gone bankrupt, and why they might have trouble getting their money.
  - JKCalhoun 8y ago
    Yes, that. And there was always that possibility. I would have hoped someone with $100K to drop would have known better — bankruptcy protection laws didn't just come about in the past few years.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      They've gone bankrupt in the old school, pre-modern-bankruptcy-law sense of the word, i.e. they've spent all their money and have none left. Bankruptcy protection laws aren't changing this outcome either way.
pkaye 8y ago
> Jones, a commercial pilot who lives in Tulsa, Okla., said scraping together the money for the Xcor ticket was a sacrifice. Honestly these things are very risky engineering efforts for an average person to invest in. Certainly not with cash up front.
- alangpierce 8y ago
  My impression is it was framed as a regular purchase, not an investment. Xcor owes them a full refund, and the only reason it won't happen is due to bankruptcy protections.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    When I buy a plane ticket, that's a regular purchase, because tens of thousands of planes exist and millions of people are actually flying on planes every day. When you purchase a ticket on a spacecraft that doesn't yet exist, hasn't even been fully developed yet, and that no one has ever flown on, it's quite a different situation. I don't think the company lied about any of these facts. It should have always been clear that there was more risk involved. And the reason the refund won't happen has little to do with bankruptcy protections and everything to do with the fact that the company failed. It turns out what they had tried to do was harder than expected, and they spent all their money without coming close to the end goal. That money is gone and won't be coming back, regardless of anything having to do with bankruptcy. As the saying goes, you can't squeeze blood from a stone. In theory they may be owed their $100k back, but in practice they'll never get it because it's no longer there.
    - jilop 8y ago
      They perpetuated a fraud by selling something that doesn't exist. They might have invited criminal punishment and personal tort liability.
      - lisper 8y ago
        > They perpetuated a fraud by selling something that doesn't exist. It's only fraud if they misrepresented the fact that it didn't yet exist, which seems very unlikely. Buying things that don't yet exist happens all the time. Thousands of people put down deposits on Tesla Model 3's that did not then exist. People regularly buy houses under construction, and people often lose money when the contractor fails to deliver. It happens all the time.
theothermkn 8y ago
> "..., there’s got to be a future in suborbital space,” Bennis said. “I want it to come in my lifetime.” But, why? What possible benefit is there from a suborbital vomit ride? They're probably not even high enough to get the overview effect. This is going to be the day of downvotes for me, but I can't see what good comes from strapping people in to a vehicle that gets less than 3% of the energy needed to get to orbit for a ticket price of $100k. None of the technical problems you'd have to solve would advance real spaceflight. It cannot be the space frontier dream of humankind to lob themselves briefly to 8 times the altitude of an airliner and then flop back down. I'd have been embarrassed to have gone on that trip for that price, to the point that I'd have turned down a free ticket for fear of having given the impression that I'd paid.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  This was my reaction as well. What exactly do you get for the $95,000 price premium and the massive amount of added risk? Not even bragging rights, since even the most generous definition of "space" is 50 mi, not the 37 mi Xcor planned.
- dehrmann 8y ago
  It's like paying for a European vacation and getting bused to DC and shown all the European embassies.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  And yet they found over 200 people willing to pony up the money to do it. I agree with you in that I personally don't think it's worth it, but evidently others do. Hell, people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork -- I'd be much more inclined to do a $100k suborbital flight over that, and it's a drop in the bucket to those people too.
  - riantogo 8y ago
    Artwork is not a good comparison here because those are tangible investments which appreciates in value. There is a market for art. If you bought one for a million you are going to likely sell for more than that.
ModernMech 8y ago
> 38 miles above the Earth ... high enough that passengers would feel 90 seconds of weightlessness. What does this even mean? As I'm sure we all know here, there is in fact gravity in space near the Earth. Astronauts on the space station experience 0.89g at 200 miles altitude. You get a feeling of weightlessness by masking gravity with inertial forces, not by being far from Earth (I mean, being far from Earth would do it, but you have to be really, really far. Certainly further than $100k is going to get you). If you just want to experience weightlessness you don't have to go far from Earth at all. Just take a trip on the vomit comet for $5k.
- teraflop 8y ago
  Your point is taken, but I think you're being overly pedantic. A parabolic arc with a larger height enables a longer period of weightlessness. You're welcome to debate whether it's good value for money, but the article's statement isn't wrong -- Xcor's spacecraft can (EDIT: theoretically) provide 90 seconds of weightlessness because of the height to which it travels. You can't replicate the same experience on the vomit comet; its service ceiling and maximum speed aren't high enough.
  - dehrmann 8y ago
    Does Vomit Comet "weightlessness" feel the same a zero-g weightlessness? In the Vomit Comet, sure you're floating around, but you're really just free falling.
    - dreamcompiler 8y ago
      You're just free-falling in orbit too. It's exactly the same thing.
    - ars 8y ago
      > as zero-g weightlessness No Human has ever experienced zero-g weightlessness, and none ever will. There is no part of the universe that is zero g. Gravity on the ISS is almost the same as gravity on Earth (90% of it). Even distant planets experience the gravity of the sun, and the collective gravity of the milky way. Instead what you have is free fall - that's basically what orbit is, you are falling toward the planet, but moving forward fast enough to keep missing. It sounds like a joke when phrased that way, but it really is what's happening. Do you wonder what it feels like to float in the space station? It feels like falling. Just constant falling without ever hitting anything. It does NOT feel like floating or flying. I assume the brain eventually gets used to the feeling, but not in 90 seconds. If you want to experience something at least kinda close to it, go sky diving, which feels like falling with something pressing on whatever part of you is pointed into the wind. If you want to experience floating, go scuba diving. If you want to experience flying, go to a sky diving simulator (vertical wind tunnel).
propter_hoc 8y ago
Amazing: they appear to have asserted to clients that 35% of the ticket amount would be held in escrow by a third party trustee. Meanwhile, the trustee appears to be stating that the trust agreement doesn't reach this level of protections. If true, this would elevate the matter from mismanagement into fraud.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I’m sure the contract is fairly explicit.
  - chrstphrknwtn 8y ago
    How sure?
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Have you ever read a contract where the fine print didn’t protect the company?
      - chrstphrknwtn 8y ago
        Just saying that it's hard to be sure about something you've not read.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
drfuchs 8y ago
Nothing new. Pan Am sold tickets for their first flight to the moon for $10,000 decades ago. Everyone who bought one lost out completely when they went bankrupt.
- blatherard 8y ago
  As far as I can tell, no such tickets were ever sold [1]. There was a "First Moon Flights" Club that they ran that had about 100K members, but that was free. [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9656/how-much-did-pan-am-tickets-to-the-moon-cost https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9656/how-much-di...
  - drfuchs 8y ago
    Well, I stand corrected. Coverage in the January 9, 1969 New York Times (page 94), and the July 21, 1969 issue (page 52), does indicate that nobody paid to get on the waiting list at Pan Am and TWA, but the estimated one-way(!) fare would be $14,000 in 1969 dollars (based on a then-current 6-cents-per-mile cost for airline travel). Interesting that both these airlines failed, and both were particularly oriented toward international travel.
neonate 8y ago
https://outline.com/7tuEXp https://outline.com/7tuEXp
nostp 8y ago
So basically the story is: wealthy idiots waste their money on spaceship vaporware. Am I meant to feel sympathy for them? Well, fuck the rich, fuck these parasites on society. And yes, that includes you.
- rhacker 8y ago
  ??
fit2rule 8y ago
If I had #200k to spend on a space flight, I'd put it in SpaceX. Give me a good suit, a couple of orbits and a way to land on the other side of the world, and back, and I'm in. I'd also entertain 'economy' re-entry vehicle options, for the hoots (as long as the suits good..) Well, as soon as have a spare $200k to take a rocket flight vacation, that is ..
- ratsimihah 8y ago
  There's no such thing as a way back. It's a one way trip!
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    They plan lunar orbit flights too.
  - fit2rule 8y ago
    I'd take it like this: a rocket (doesn't have to be a big one) ride from London to Tahiti, land through whatever sporty means might be a delicious option, take off again from Tahiti, rocket around the globe a couple times for fun, then land back in dreary old London for business. Gimme a good suit, and I'll land myself. ;)
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>Jones, a commercial pilot who lives in Tulsa, Okla., said scraping together the money for the Xcor ticket was a sacrifice. “I live in an apartment. I don’t drive the newest car,” he said. “That’s a lot of money. You’re talking kids’ college or buying a house.” That makes you a....... It's his money and he should have gotten the ride, but then Chapter 7 is part of life for everyone included. If he tried to get some sympathy on the "scraping together the money" angle he gets none from me. $100K ticket to space when you have to borrow, move money left and right etc is not prudent.

78 points by dsr12 8y ago

b_b 8y ago

To clarify any misunderstandings from the title, the people paid but never actually got to fly, so they (fairly) want their money back.

hedora 8y ago
Also, there is an incognito / private mode blocker between the click-baity title and the article. :-(
megaremote 8y ago
Worth mentioning Xcor has gone bankrupt, and why they might have trouble getting their money.
- JKCalhoun 8y ago
  Yes, that. And there was always that possibility. I would have hoped someone with $100K to drop would have known better — bankruptcy protection laws didn't just come about in the past few years.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    They've gone bankrupt in the old school, pre-modern-bankruptcy-law sense of the word, i.e. they've spent all their money and have none left. Bankruptcy protection laws aren't changing this outcome either way.

pkaye 8y ago

> Jones, a commercial pilot who lives in Tulsa, Okla., said scraping together the money for the Xcor ticket was a sacrifice. Honestly these things are very risky engineering efforts for an average person to invest in. Certainly not with cash up front.

alangpierce 8y ago
My impression is it was framed as a regular purchase, not an investment. Xcor owes them a full refund, and the only reason it won't happen is due to bankruptcy protections.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  When I buy a plane ticket, that's a regular purchase, because tens of thousands of planes exist and millions of people are actually flying on planes every day. When you purchase a ticket on a spacecraft that doesn't yet exist, hasn't even been fully developed yet, and that no one has ever flown on, it's quite a different situation. I don't think the company lied about any of these facts. It should have always been clear that there was more risk involved. And the reason the refund won't happen has little to do with bankruptcy protections and everything to do with the fact that the company failed. It turns out what they had tried to do was harder than expected, and they spent all their money without coming close to the end goal. That money is gone and won't be coming back, regardless of anything having to do with bankruptcy. As the saying goes, you can't squeeze blood from a stone. In theory they may be owed their $100k back, but in practice they'll never get it because it's no longer there.
  - jilop 8y ago
    They perpetuated a fraud by selling something that doesn't exist. They might have invited criminal punishment and personal tort liability.
    - lisper 8y ago
      > They perpetuated a fraud by selling something that doesn't exist. It's only fraud if they misrepresented the fact that it didn't yet exist, which seems very unlikely. Buying things that don't yet exist happens all the time. Thousands of people put down deposits on Tesla Model 3's that did not then exist. People regularly buy houses under construction, and people often lose money when the contractor fails to deliver. It happens all the time.

theothermkn 8y ago

> "..., there’s got to be a future in suborbital space,” Bennis said. “I want it to come in my lifetime.” But, why? What possible benefit is there from a suborbital vomit ride? They're probably not even high enough to get the overview effect. This is going to be the day of downvotes for me, but I can't see what good comes from strapping people in to a vehicle that gets less than 3% of the energy needed to get to orbit for a ticket price of $100k. None of the technical problems you'd have to solve would advance real spaceflight. It cannot be the space frontier dream of humankind to lob themselves briefly to 8 times the altitude of an airliner and then flop back down. I'd have been embarrassed to have gone on that trip for that price, to the point that I'd have turned down a free ticket for fear of having given the impression that I'd paid.

jpatokal 8y ago
This was my reaction as well. What exactly do you get for the $95,000 price premium and the massive amount of added risk? Not even bragging rights, since even the most generous definition of "space" is 50 mi, not the 37 mi Xcor planned.
dehrmann 8y ago
It's like paying for a European vacation and getting bused to DC and shown all the European embassies.
CydeWeys 8y ago
And yet they found over 200 people willing to pony up the money to do it. I agree with you in that I personally don't think it's worth it, but evidently others do. Hell, people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork -- I'd be much more inclined to do a $100k suborbital flight over that, and it's a drop in the bucket to those people too.
- riantogo 8y ago
  Artwork is not a good comparison here because those are tangible investments which appreciates in value. There is a market for art. If you bought one for a million you are going to likely sell for more than that.

ModernMech 8y ago

> 38 miles above the Earth ... high enough that passengers would feel 90 seconds of weightlessness. What does this even mean? As I'm sure we all know here, there is in fact gravity in space near the Earth. Astronauts on the space station experience 0.89g at 200 miles altitude. You get a feeling of weightlessness by masking gravity with inertial forces, not by being far from Earth (I mean, being far from Earth would do it, but you have to be really, really far. Certainly further than $100k is going to get you). If you just want to experience weightlessness you don't have to go far from Earth at all. Just take a trip on the vomit comet for $5k.

teraflop 8y ago
Your point is taken, but I think you're being overly pedantic. A parabolic arc with a larger height enables a longer period of weightlessness. You're welcome to debate whether it's good value for money, but the article's statement isn't wrong -- Xcor's spacecraft can (EDIT: theoretically) provide 90 seconds of weightlessness because of the height to which it travels. You can't replicate the same experience on the vomit comet; its service ceiling and maximum speed aren't high enough.
- dehrmann 8y ago
  Does Vomit Comet "weightlessness" feel the same a zero-g weightlessness? In the Vomit Comet, sure you're floating around, but you're really just free falling.
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago
    You're just free-falling in orbit too. It's exactly the same thing.
  - ars 8y ago
    > as zero-g weightlessness No Human has ever experienced zero-g weightlessness, and none ever will. There is no part of the universe that is zero g. Gravity on the ISS is almost the same as gravity on Earth (90% of it). Even distant planets experience the gravity of the sun, and the collective gravity of the milky way. Instead what you have is free fall - that's basically what orbit is, you are falling toward the planet, but moving forward fast enough to keep missing. It sounds like a joke when phrased that way, but it really is what's happening. Do you wonder what it feels like to float in the space station? It feels like falling. Just constant falling without ever hitting anything. It does NOT feel like floating or flying. I assume the brain eventually gets used to the feeling, but not in 90 seconds. If you want to experience something at least kinda close to it, go sky diving, which feels like falling with something pressing on whatever part of you is pointed into the wind. If you want to experience floating, go scuba diving. If you want to experience flying, go to a sky diving simulator (vertical wind tunnel).

propter_hoc 8y ago

Amazing: they appear to have asserted to clients that 35% of the ticket amount would be held in escrow by a third party trustee. Meanwhile, the trustee appears to be stating that the trust agreement doesn't reach this level of protections. If true, this would elevate the matter from mismanagement into fraud.

Aeolun 8y ago
I’m sure the contract is fairly explicit.
- chrstphrknwtn 8y ago
  How sure?
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Have you ever read a contract where the fine print didn’t protect the company?
    - chrstphrknwtn 8y ago
      Just saying that it's hard to be sure about something you've not read.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

drfuchs 8y ago

Nothing new. Pan Am sold tickets for their first flight to the moon for $10,000 decades ago. Everyone who bought one lost out completely when they went bankrupt.

blatherard 8y ago
As far as I can tell, no such tickets were ever sold [1]. There was a "First Moon Flights" Club that they ran that had about 100K members, but that was free. [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9656/how-much-did-pan-am-tickets-to-the-moon-cost https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9656/how-much-di...
- drfuchs 8y ago
  Well, I stand corrected. Coverage in the January 9, 1969 New York Times (page 94), and the July 21, 1969 issue (page 52), does indicate that nobody paid to get on the waiting list at Pan Am and TWA, but the estimated one-way(!) fare would be $14,000 in 1969 dollars (based on a then-current 6-cents-per-mile cost for airline travel). Interesting that both these airlines failed, and both were particularly oriented toward international travel.

neonate 8y ago

https://outline.com/7tuEXp https://outline.com/7tuEXp

nostp 8y ago

So basically the story is: wealthy idiots waste their money on spaceship vaporware. Am I meant to feel sympathy for them? Well, fuck the rich, fuck these parasites on society. And yes, that includes you.

rhacker 8y ago
??

fit2rule 8y ago

If I had #200k to spend on a space flight, I'd put it in SpaceX. Give me a good suit, a couple of orbits and a way to land on the other side of the world, and back, and I'm in. I'd also entertain 'economy' re-entry vehicle options, for the hoots (as long as the suits good..) Well, as soon as have a spare $200k to take a rocket flight vacation, that is ..

ratsimihah 8y ago
There's no such thing as a way back. It's a one way trip!
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  They plan lunar orbit flights too.
- fit2rule 8y ago
  I'd take it like this: a rocket (doesn't have to be a big one) ride from London to Tahiti, land through whatever sporty means might be a delicious option, take off again from Tahiti, rocket around the globe a couple times for fun, then land back in dreary old London for business. Gimme a good suit, and I'll land myself. ;)

onetimemanytime 8y ago

>>Jones, a commercial pilot who lives in Tulsa, Okla., said scraping together the money for the Xcor ticket was a sacrifice. “I live in an apartment. I don’t drive the newest car,” he said. “That’s a lot of money. You’re talking kids’ college or buying a house.” That makes you a....... It's his money and he should have gotten the ride, but then Chapter 7 is part of life for everyone included. If he tried to get some sympathy on the "scraping together the money" angle he gets none from me. $100K ticket to space when you have to borrow, move money left and right etc is not prudent.