A ticket to ride XCOR’s suborbital Lynx spaceplane: $10. The hitch: it’s a lottery.
Ticket to Rise
This seems like a decent enough idea to me. Spaceflight is *waaaay* beyond the means of regular folks, but as the success of lotteries across the country shows, people are more than willing to cough up a handful of bucks for a vanishingly small chance of winning.
This is a way to fund charities as well. You can choose from a list of charities that your money will go to, including dubious but well-known organizations like PETA and a bunch of charities I’ve never heard of, like “Girl Tank” (which turns out to be neither of the two things that immediately sprang to mind), and the somehow awesome-sounding “Chuck Jones Center for Creativity.” Sadly, the list of charities seems kinda newagey (at least one of ’em is all about “transcendental meditation”); I’d be happier if there was an organization organizing a “nuclear reactor for every neighborhood” or “end poverty by assassinating tyrants and theocrats and instilling capitalism” or some such, but hey, cheap space flight!
There are a half dozen or so different donation amounts, from $10 to $1000, with five lotto tickets per dollar donated. Maybe it’s just my browser, but the website seems kinda squirrely to navigate.