If you’re tired of having your closet cluttered up by old skin mags, or if renting a climate controlled mini storage unit isn’t stylish enough for your cultural debris, a truly viable option is now on the market. For a starting bid of merely six million $US (easily within reach for many young Georgetown heirs and heiresses), the Nebraska-based corporation Orbital Development is now accepting offers to launch precisely 22 pounds of cargo of your choosing into space, and to crash said payload directly into the moon.
According to CNN.com, the company considers their glorified garbage truck to be “the simplest lunar project possible.” It doesn’t take a NASA flight technician to realize that no “lunar project” can really be all that simple. But Orbital Development remains stoic in their business model. Just ignore the fact that most of your six million dollars has to go towards an 18-month phase of actually designing the damn thing (not to mention building and testing it), and the plan seems bulletproof. Keep in mind that all this time, you’re sitting on your hands and wondering if those expensive nude boudoir shots taken by an eminent Austrian art photographer were really the best way to leave yourself to interstellar posterity.
CNN reports that the company will use “a Russian aerospace contractor’s commercial test launch vehicle” to send your dirty laundry to the lunar orb. Given the reliability of Russians in general, let alone their aerospace technology, there’s a decent bet that your little bundle of joy will never make it off the launch pad. More importantly, though, make sure you don’t pack anything fragile; Orbital Development warns, “Condition of the cargo cannot be guaranteed after the 4,000 mph impact.”
