Ashton Kutcher, once passenger No. 500, won’t be flying Virgin Galactic any time soon
You know how much fun Richard Branson and his mates appeared to be having on their Virgin Galactic edge-of-space flight last week? Ashton Kutcher will be having none of that fun.
Blame Mila Kunis — and those darn kids of theirs.
Kutcher was famously the 500th person to buy a six-figure ticket to space from Virgin Galactic, way back in March 2012, when the “That ’70s Show” alum was the highest-paid actor in television. Virgin Group founder Branson blogged about it at the time, noting that the actor and venture capitalist had “a childhood dream of going to space.”
Unfortunately, some other childhoods got in the way, Kutcher revealed Thursday in an interview with Cheddar News, where he had been riffing on cryptocurrency.
Ashton Kutcher figured he’d screwed up nearly two decades ago when he went to pick up a date and she didn’t answer the door.
“You just hit on a really sensitive subject for me,” the former “Two and a Half Men” star said when asked about his Virgin Galactic plans.
“When I got married [to Kunis] and had kids, my wife basically encouraged that it was not a smart family decision to be heading into space when we have young children,” he said. “So I ended up selling my ticket back to Virgin Galactic.”
Thank goodness it was refundable. The 43-year-old didn’t say exactly when he had backed out.
Kutcher split from first wife Demi Moore in 2011 and finalized that divorce in October 2013. He and Kunis went public as a couple in fall 2012, had a baby in 2014 and got married in June 2015. Their second child arrived in late 2016.
Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson celebrated on Sunday after successfully going to suborbital space on a crewed flight.
Branson had bragged in 2012 that Virgin Galactic expected to put paying passengers in the sky by 2013 or 2014. Instead, he finally hit the skies last Sunday, July 11, with five Virgin Galactic employees, beating rival billionaire Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin‘s planned voyage by nine whole days.
Kutcher, meanwhile, seemed a little confused about the details as he kept talking to Cheddar.
“I was supposed to be on the next flight,” Kutcher said, apparently forgetting that as passenger No. 500 he might have had to wait a bit. “But I will not be on the next flight.”
Still, he’s keeping his dream alive, maybe for when daughter Wyatt and son Dimitri are grown. And who knows, by then space travel might be a little more ordinary than it seems to be this week.
“At some point,” Kutcher promised, “I’m going to space.”
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