Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has joined Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos in the billionaire space race, as the de facto Saudi leader launched the first dissident into space.
Though the Crown Prince’s launch garnered little of the fanfare of Bezos’s nine-minute trip into the atmosphere, MBS was able to accomplish the feat with just a fraction of the budget of his American counterparts.
“Basically, we just taped him to an office chair, put it under 100 barrels of crude oil, and lit a match,” bin Salman explained. “Trust me, he made it well into the atmosphere. He might have even made it to Pluto.”
As of press time, it remained unclear whether the dissident, a college student who had organized a campaign to install more vending machines on campus, had returned safely to Earth.
The launch was just the first step in a rapidly growing space program, MBS told The Mideast Beast. By 2023, the Kingdom hopes to put a journalist on the moon and by 2025, the crown prince believes he will land a government minister on Mars. And the entire program has a budget of just a few thousand Riyals.
