From a couple of years ago showing a whiteboard at Google's HQ where they'd been brainstroming ideas. I recall that one of them was "Orbiting mind control lasers".

I have a bad feeling about this.

He's put down $5million, which sounds like a deposit to me. And there will be two paying customers onboard.

No questions asked. Just change your mind. If it costs twenty+ maybe that was causing people to come back to their senses about just what they are doing with that money, when it might be put to better use in philanthropy. I know one person that did this mainly because the trip in question was not into true outer space in that it was still inside our atmosphere, and the 0-g was simply from the parabolic curve dipping back toward Earth...something that could be obtained far cheaper in specially equipped comercial airliners.

I would love to go, and always wanted to go to the moon and look back at the Earth. Probably not in my lifetime. As far as the ISS, I hear the rooms come with a hall bathroom. :)

$5m is probably the deposit.....

And frisk him as he gets on board, to make sure he's not concealing any discs containing a Google Desktop installer. I bet he tries to change the default search provider options up there too[1].

[1] Not that that is a bad thing, I wouldn't want to use Live search to find Russian toilet spares either.

By the time I read the article/posted that it was something like 3:30 in the morning.

Also: 5 mil doesn't seem like a lot to me, not for a ride on a soyuz to the ISS. I believe shipping regular cargo to LEO is someting like $20,000 a pound on the cheap, might-just-explode rockets, let alone man-rated ones. 5 mil being the deposit makes a lot more sense.

Sergey perhaps does not know of the recent Russian reentry vehicle which went off course by quite a long way. Having demonstrated their ability to determine US astronauts' requirements for diapers (negative apparently), the Russians may consider it a splendid occasion to show Sergey what search really means. As soon as they put wheels, steering, and an engine on the guidance computers...