Space Money

Attention Roman numismatics fans: despite the recent liquidity crisis and the reactionary remedies proposed by certain Illinois politicians, thankfully at least one problem has been solved as we enter a brave new era on the heels of Rick Deckard and George Jetson... how will we buy things in space? Travelex in a tremendous burst of vertical thinking has created space currency for space tourists to make space purchases in space hotels in... spacey space. Just to be cutesy, they called it the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, despite it being decidedly less than intergalactic, and I'm not sure how something is quasi-universal, but I'll let it slide because backronyms are in vogue, which is to say they're Very Overused Generators of Unbelievable Ennui... or is that too many adverbs? It certainly is developed for space, with rounded edges to prevent injuries in zero gravity, and able to withstand a wide range of conditions without degrading harmfully (unlike pennies which emit mustard gas when left in the sun too long... that's why I don't pick them up off the sidewalk). They're also pretty huge and ungainly, requiring an Elizabethan coin purse with a velcro top of some kind to carry them, which obviously just invites space pirates.

What I really couldn't figure out is what type of transaction these are supposed to be used for. Travelex suggests the development of inflatable space hotels means that everyone will be popping up to space soon and needing to change currency like all other holiday travelers, and for the sake of argument, I'll buy that they're just keeping ahead of demand. They also note that frequent transfers of financial data between the orbiting hotel and earth based banks would be highly impractical, to say nothing of the cosmic rays wiping the magnetic strip, so there'd be no charging your dehydrated ice cream midnight snack on your Visa card. So it starts to make sense, except I started wondering, who are these prospective travelers who have $10m per person for a vacation in space, but have such a lousy credit rating the space hotel can't run a tab and bill them back on earth? The data transfer problem is fairly well solved when you have some sort of vehicle transporting the hotel guests back and forth anyways, and you can put a piece of paper with everybody's tab in the pilot's hand. In any case, isn't this just a situation begging for an all-inclusive vacation package, like for $11m the hotel doesn't nickel and dime you to death over every bag of peanuts you have at the space bar?

Of course, other non-governmental currencies have been implemented with varying degrees of success, like flooz.com burning through $50m of VC money before their bankruptcy caused a sudden devaluation of the flooz credit. On the other hand, one type of specialized, corporate backed currency is tremendously popular (and it's not Itchy & Scratchy Money): casino chips, which can be used to buy a number of goods and services within the confines of the issuing casino. The thing is, you don't buy chips beforehand from a kiosk on the street and you don't carry them back out, unlike the QUID, which raises a couple other questions, like why are people carrying this shit back and forth to orbit instead of just having some issued to them on arrival as part of their hotel package?

Eventually I realized what problem they do solve: it's the only way to have an unlogged pure cash transaction in space, by which two parties meet in space and nobody registers who arrived with 10,000 QUID and left with zero, and who arrived with zero and left with 10,000. (And more importantly to the "all-inclusive" package, the hotel isn't involved.) So who offers a product or service in space that requires the exchange of a big bag of marbles? Two words: space prostitutes. Outside the legal boundaries of planet earth, and certainly pretty far from the prying eyes of cash-strapped authorities since NASA sure isn't going to be flying by, enough space money lets you do what ever you want in space, for a price... you knew there had to be a reason the Russians put a dog in orbit back in the 60s, and there are any number of activities even the Dutch would blush at here on Earth. But really it is kind of disturbing to think that as governments are starting to crack down on Thailand and other Asian destinations, somebody's opening a new frontier for sex tourism.

There is another possibility of course, specifically that you would travel between multiple destinations in space which are not all willing to all grant you a line of credit, but considering the joint efforts of the United States, European Union, and the Russian Federation are not enough to keep a single space destination going, and nobody's been to the moon since Apollo 15, is the inability to buy a pretzel from a cart vendor really the limiting factor in space tourism?