In an ISDC presentation Saturday afternoon, Ryan Wilson of the X Prize Foundation described some innovative marketing efforts the organization is planning to promote this October’s X Prize Cup in New Mexico. In the next few weeks, he said, they play to start releasing a series of 30-40 “viral videos”: clips one to two minutes long promoting the event and some of the companies that plan to participate in it. The videos will be uploaded to sites like Google Video and YouTube, where the X Prize people hope people will see them and tell their friends about them, encouraging them to either attend the event or watching the webcast. On that last point, Wilson said that the foundation’s goal is to make the X Prize Cup the “top live streaming event of 2006″. The SpaceShipOne X Prize flights in 2004, he noted, attracted 2.7 million viewers, making it one of the largest online video audiences in history. At the show itself, he said that they’re planning on 20,000 people attending, up from the roughly 12,000 who went to the 2005 event.
No, it’s not what you think. During his luncheon speech yesterday at ISDC, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart made an interesting analogy about space tourism:
I realized that space tourism is a little bit like sex: it’s exciting, it’s a little bit dangerous, or risky, perhaps, and when it’s well done it’s tremendously satisfying. But there’s more to it than that because, at a deeper level, it’s also the basis for reproduction, which is the foundation of survival.
He went on to say that the long-term future of humanity is dependent on two things: getting humans into space, and protecting the Earth from asteroid impacts to enable that diaspora. His talk primarily focused on the latter, but he identified space tourism as a way of enabling the former. “It depends on the evolution of space tourism, which reflects the desire of everybody in this room, in one way or another, to get out into space.”
If you’re still focused on the sex part, though, Apogee Books is publishing a new book this summer titled Sex in Space by Laura Woodmansee which examines the myths and realities of the subject.