Sohmer:

This is hard for me, folks, so please be patient. I’m really just not that good at asking for help, but I think its past time that I do.So here I am, all my defenses and sarcasm laid down, asking for your help.Can I please, please, borrow 35 million dollars? USD? And by ‘borrow’ I mean keep and not ever have to repay?Please?Pretty please?Seriously. Give me the damn money.

Article: CNN.com

Me:

I have mixed emotions about this, I have to say. Call me a commi, but I get a stabbing pain the back of my eyes when I think about old men paying their way into the pages of history that had before been marked for only the strongest, smartest, and most daring of men the world can find. This whole situation smacks of Mt. Everest, to me, when you parallel "A private Virginia firm" with commercial "adventuring" companies who lead amateur climbers by the mittens up the face of the world’s highest peak; a "Soyuz capsule" with a fancy, never before worn backpack and set of unscratched crampons; and the accompanying cosmonaut with a sherpa.

Something is lost when you take a feat that is nearly unattainable and bring it down to a level where it only takes a tall enough stack of money to stand on to reach it. Just as the mountaineer's unwritten code of human decency has been lost on Everest -- whereon [url=http://www.theweekmagazine.com/article.aspx?id=1540]40 climbers passed a dying man[/url] who'd run out of oxygen because they didn't want to have wasted their money by forgoing the summit to help a fellow human being in distress -- so shall it be for the institution of aviation as a whole. Pilots are a rare breed of individuals who have always unwittingly commanded the respect of men through their singular mastery of the ethereal sea of blue above, and I firmly believe that it is rare to find an aviator who does not understand that there is an unspoken knowledge of fraternity inherent to those who wear wings, no matter the country. And I also believe that there isn't an aviator in the world who doesn't hold a green-eyed respect for those who've broken through the blue and earned the right to be called astronauts. So it is a tad perturbing to imagine some bourgeois corporate chairman cutting a check with his fancy fountain pen and being handed back a space suit and a round trip ticket for the most coveted ride in all of aviation.

And yet, taking a step back -- as it is inevitable that I will -- I can see a far bigger picture and appreciate the importance of this presently infuriating set of circumstances. What is it that every Trekkie, Jedi-wanabe, and Brown Coat (Death to the Alliance for all eternity) prays for before his bust of Patrick Stewart every night? Everyday, common, unhindered interstellar space travel.

As much as it kills me to say it; this could end up being noted as a time when voyages beyond our planet's boundaries became available to the non-professional, non-governmentally trained everyman. Space travel is now regarded with such a sense of awe and fear that it will take the selling out of idealism to bring humanity as a whole to the logical next step, the step which starts down a road that leads to a place where [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Flyer]Delta Flyers[/url], [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VF-1_Valkyrie]Veritech VF-1 Valkyrie[/url] fighters, and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Serenityship.jpg]Firefly [/url] class space-craft are all part of the everyday backdrops across humanity's domain.

But why on Earth anyone would willingly climb into a Soyuz rocket, a design that has been in Russia's space service since the sixties and has killed more commies than the Goulag, I'll never know.

The error this morning when I went to check for a response:
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Priceless