“Love you to the moon and back” could soon be way more than a simple declaration of love, with a French marriage proposal company touting a one-week interplanetary proposal package for US$145 million.
Aiming to “stage the craziest and most outstanding proposal of the last 13.8 billion years”, the Paris-based ApoteoSurprise outlines the out-of-this-world programme in a press release.
Five months on from registration, the lovebirds will undergo 12 weeks of pre-requisite technical and physical training, before they take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
And as weightlessness is first felt, Richard Strauss’s “Thus spoke Zarathustra, Op.30” (Theme from 2001 Space Odyssey) will resound in the two space tourists’ helmets.
The couple will arrive in lunar orbit three days later, flying over the satellite’s surface at 200/300km altitude.
For 30 minutes, they will be cut-off from all communication with Earth while the capsule flies over the dark side of the Moon.
Then comes time to pop the big question. Halfway through the orbital flight, the suitor retrieves the engagement ring “secretly hidden in his space suit” while Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon plays.
Before atmospheric re-entry and a touch down, the couple will be treated to an Earth-rise seen from behind the lunar craters.
The self-contained and autonomous spacecraft will travel at a speed of up to 38,000 kmh and be equipped with eight cameras.
