Trekking Into Space With Branson? You Can Now Pay Your Way in Bitcoins

People who bet big on Bitcoin in the early days are reaping their earthly rewards now, with the digital currency resting above $750 on Friday afternoon. They may also have earned themselves a ticket off planet Earth altogether.
Richard Branson, billionaire founder of the Virgin empire, announced today that his commercial space flight company will accept bitcoins as payment for a flight to the outer reaches of the atmosphere. "Virgin Galactic is the future of travel," he told his Twitter followers. "It's time we let future astronauts pay with a futuristic currency."
According to Branson, one "future astronaut," has already reserved her seat on a Virgin Galactic flight using bitcoins. Since one of those seats costs a cool quarter of a million dollars, it would have been difficult to pay for back in the summer of 2012, when each bitcoin was worth less than $10. But now fewer than 340 bitcoins would be enough for a ticket to ride.
"I have invested in some bitcoins myself, and find it fascinating how a whole new global currency has been created," Branson said in a post on the Virgin website. "For people who can afford to invest a little in bitcoins, it's worth looking into."
Branson said recently that he expects the first Virgin Galactic passenger flights to take place in 2014, blasting off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in Arizona. Check out his original Twitter announcement below:

PayPal Goes Galactic, Moves to Cash In on Space Payments

Though the idea may sound out of this world, the nascent space tourism industry is set to take off in the next decade, and humans will need a way to pay for things in space as well as send payments to Earth, said PayPal President David Marcus.
"As leaders in online payments, it's kind of our duty to lead the way on how commerce in space will happen. This is a big problem that needs to be solved," Marcus told CNBC's Squawk on the Street.
To address this "big problem," the company, which is owned by Ebay, has enlisted the Space Tourism Society and the SETI Institute to help it launch PayPal Galactic (yes, that's the real name), an initiative to devise solutions.
Space payments are still at least a decade in the future, Marcus said, but some basic questions need to be answered. For example, he said, "If you become a merchant in space, what is the currency ... that you're going to accept? How do you manage dispute? What's an IP address from space look like? How do you do all of theses things, and what government has regulation authority over space?"
"Those are big problems that will take years to be solved, and we just want to start the conversation," he added.
PayPal hosted a conference for its new initiative on Thursday at the SETI Institute to discuss why they were venturing into the space business. Speakers from the SETI Institute, the Space Tourism Society and the Silicon Valley Space Center also voiced the necessity of payments in space at the event.
But the guest of honor at the conference was astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who shared his excitement about the growing space tourism industry and PayPal's involvement in helping develop a payment infrastructure.
"The future of space is really limitless and the door to the space frontier certainly has been opened, cracked and we're going to widen it," Aldrin said. "Trailblazers in the private sector have inspired us to think of what is bigger than Earth...We are only a generation away from a permanent human residency on Mars."