The Corp To Launch New Space Program
Forty years after the world’s first moon walk, Students of Georgetown, Inc., better known as The Corp, has announced that it will open a new student Space Program service. This will be the Corp’s first major venture outside of basic on campus retail and is expected to drive the company well into bankruptcy within six weeks.
Founded in 1972 by pot smoking hippies, the Corp has grown from an anti-war juice stand into a mostly legitimate organization currently known for groceries, coffee, and movies. After rebounding from several fiscally miserable years, the Corp has turned significant profit over the last 3 years and has subsequently decided to squander the money in record fashion.
Originally pitched as a joke over bottles of Pelegrino Water at the Tombs on St. Patrick’s Day, Irishman Seamus O’Malley’s plan to purchase, renovate, and eventually launch a space shuttle has gained a surprising amount of support from Corp management. CEO Jon Carpenter released a statement saying, “The Corp has always wanted to do something absolutely absurd and we can think of nothing more pointless than trying to put a student in space.”
Initial plans are for Corp employees–largely greedy business school students with no science background–to do the actual work on the shuttles, build the launch pad, set up the flight plans, and man the control center. Ironically, the control center is slated to be put in the currently unused hole that was formerly Full Exposure, the Corp’s most recent success story.
Many questions are being raised about the logistics of a student-run space launch. The first and most glaring is the financial gap between the Corp’s modestly large budget and the billions of dollars needed for such a program. Other critics are choosing to focus on the safety issues confronting a group of drunken cashiers building and then manning a space shuttle. President Jack DeGioia commented that, “As much as the Corp contributes to our campus, I wouldn’t trust them on a Saturday night to build and maintain a bicycle.” It should be noted that President DeGioia was the only university employee with enough free time to answer calls from the Heckler, seemingly in a desperate attempt to ignore numerous starving students in the “free speech zone.”
Despite a gross lack of materials, financing, know-how, and sobriety, the Corp intends to move forward with the project. In the words of CEO Carpenter, “Oh, we’ll hit Mars by 2007. And if all this fails, I’ll still graduate, go into the real world, and be your boss in 2 years.”
