Longest flight delay ever.
Elon Musk may have Promises to make commercial space travel an everyday occurrence With SpaceX, but those with infinite memories will recall that the idea came up many moons ago – while a prospective carrier had even handed over the IOU.
Pan Am – This airline was considered one of the best airlines in the world during the so-called Golden Age of travel – at one point it reportedly had its sights set on a race from Idlewild to London.
At the height of the space race in the late 1960s, the Flyer promised 100,000 people booking for future Moon flights.
At the time, leaving Earth’s orbit was the best achievement for highly trained astronauts like Neil Armstrong, who touched down on the lunar surface in 1969.
But that didn’t stop Pan Am from issuing 93,000 “First Moon Flights” club member cards starting in 1968 – anticipating the day when technology would meet the dream and demand.
Famous news anchor Walter Cronkite was just one courageous man on the lucky list, The Los Angeles Times reported,
The year 2000 was given as a possible start date for the voyages – but Pan Am went bankrupt after nine years Before he could fulfill his promise.
This strange idea came about in 1964 when Gerhard Pistor, an Austrian journalist, asked a travel agency in Vienna to book a trip to the Moon.
The reporter’s request was eventually forwarded to Pan Am, who recognized the opportunity for a great marketing gimmick.
Demand for admission to “The First Moon Flights Club” was apparently so high that the company, facing financial difficulties in the early 1970s, put a halt to new requests.
“The [club] Many people called it a publicity stunt.” According to the National Endowment for the Humanities,
“But Pan Am representatives maintained well into the 1980s that this was a real program, insisting that the airline would honor its bookings and that viable commercial space travel was imminent.”
Houston-based Intuitive Machines became tIt is the first private company to land a plane on the moonBack in early 2024.
Odysseus touched down on the moon’s surface on Feb. 22 — and stopped operating a week later, as The Post previously reported.
