PROPOSAL: One French agency believes that by the year 2022, it will be able to fly a couple around the moon to celebrate their engagement — for a cost of $145 million.
“The one-week interplanetary flight will be carried out using a self-contained and autonomous spacecraft allowing the two lovers to travel alone,” says ApoteoSurprise agency, a Paris-based marriage proposal planner.
The agency suggested the proposal would be made to the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” while the first moment of weightlessness will happen to Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Op.30” — more popularly known as the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Romantic, maybe, but a surprise proposal it probably wouldn’t be.
The package would require 12 weeks of technical and physical training before takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
While the capsule is flying over the dark side of the moon, communication with Earth will be cut for 30 minutes, giving the proposer privacy to pop the question. Halfway during this half-hour interlude from Earth, “Fly Me to the Moon” will play.
If spending millions of dollars to travel into space isn’t in your budget, the company also offers proposal packages right here on Earth in Paris.
For 290 euros (plus the cost to transport you and your love to Paris), ApoteoSurprise will send a fake delivery man to your hotel to help with a theatrical proposal.
NASA: Speaking of space, it was this month 60 years ago that NASA was created.
According to the agency, on July 2, 1958, after months of deliberation by politicians, the White House determined that U.S. human spaceflight programs would be under the authority of a civilian agency.
On July 29, 1958, NASA was officially created when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act.