At the beginning of this year, AXE brand of men’s personal care products created a sensation with a marketing stunt around a Superbowl ad. The ad presented users of the Apollo scent as heroes.  What can be more heroic than an astronaut? The promotional video therefor featured the hero astronaut and his girlfriend. I don’t think I ever saw anything so cheesy. In any case, somehow this brought about the idea of actually recruiting people to sign up, go through space-flight training, and compete against each other over a seat on the space-plane Lynx.

A model of the XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx suborbital space plane was in fact present at the Space Tech Expo conference in May 2013 in Long Beach, CA. This was the sign:

XCOR Lynx: the sign at Space Tech Expo May 2013

This was the booth. You can see the illustration on the left, showing the path the space plane takes when it flies to space. After an initial engine burst to get it to altitude, the rest is just a glide back to the ground.

And this was the model:

What’s most amazing about this story is that the plane will not be operational for another year at least, but AXE still managed to get Buzz Aldrin – the 2nd Moon-Walker – to sponsor this event. See a humorous article at wired.com, that was published in January after the initial announcement.

There was conflicting information about the gender the competition is open to. Some publications said the competition is open for both men and women. That’s not so clear from the ad at the top. In any case, I would like to know how the competitors enjoyed themselves in space training, and how much deodorant will they see from this deal…