After months of negotiations and meetings, I am happy and proud to announce that I will be the first blogger in the Virgin Galactic Blogger in Space Program!!!
Bloggers in Space (BS) is the brain child of Sir. Richard Branson who was looking for ways to promote his new venture, Virgin Galactic. I was contacted back in November by Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides and head of marketing Susan Newsam about the possibility of blogging from space. Needless to say, they had me at “space”!
If you aren’t aware of Virgin Galactic, it was created after aviation designer Burt Rutan won the $10,000,000 Ansari X PRIZE by placing a privately created spacecraft in a suborbital space flight.
Over the last several months we went back and forth about ideas for the BS program, the technical challenges of blogging in space, what we hoped to achieve with BS. After solidifying a set of goals for the BS program I then made a secret visit last January to the Virgin Galactic Spaceport in New Mexico. I received a tour of the facility (still under construction) and was able to learn more about the craft that was going to be flying me into space. Unfortunately, for security reasons, I was not allowed to take photos.
My flight will be taking off sometime in late 2012 or early 2013 once more test flights and the inaugural flights have taken place.
I’ll obviously be blogging much more about it over the next two years, but I can announce what the mission objectives are at this point. During the six minutes of weightlessness, I’ll have during the flight, I’ll be using a specially made iPhone to do the following:
- Update my website with a blog post from space
- Sent out a tweet from space
- Check in on Foursquare to earn the Space Badge
- Check in on Gowalla to earn a special space pin
- Leave a Yelp review of space
- Update my Facebook status from space
- Update my MySpace page from space
- Update my Match.com profile from space
- Leave a TripAdvisor review of space
- Update my Friendster profile from space
- Send a WUPHF from space
- Update Google Buzz from space
- Take an Instagram photo from space.
- Upload a photo to Flickrfrom space
- Record a YouTube video in space
We are confident that the BS program will usher in a new era in both space flight and social media.
While I will be the first blogger in space, there are already plans to have others follow in my footsteps. If you are a blogger and are interested in BS, just leave a comment below and you will be contacted by the appropriate parties.
Ad astra per aspera!