"Emmett won a future spaceflight as part of a 2005 sweepstakes sponsored by software giant Oracle Corp. He forfeited the prize after calculating he would owe $25,000 in taxes for the spaceflight valued at $139,000."Wow. That's almost as bad as the good ol' Canuck Dominion itself. If that flight were taking off from this Queens land it would no doubt be charged GST/PST at a rate of 14% requiring him to pay $19,460 in taxes.
And I wonder if our airline security taxes would be applied to him to boot.
In any event, I can't help but wonder if the real challenge that space tourism faces isn't technical and isn't regulatory... What if the biggest challenge to space tourism is taxes?
Some of us are crazy enough to put a second mortgage on the mansion in order to pay our way to space (myself included). But the question is on top of all that, am I willing to sell the car and the boat too?
Yikes. That's another question altogether. I can see where the bub is coming from, but really for him a ticket was paltry 25 grand not the 139 gee's I'm willing to go for.
He should've ponied up the cash and taken the chance.
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