How Much Would It Cost to Blast Your House into Space?

The short answer: quite a lot

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We all have those days when we’re sitting around thinking, Man, I really want to launch my entire home into space; I wonder how much that costs.

O.K., maybe those days are rare (or nonexistent), but once you start thinking about it, it would be pretty cool to blast your whole house to infinity and beyond. Unfortunately, it would also be just a bit pricey. The folks over at the Movoto real estate blog have apparently been giving this quite a bit of thought — and have come up with an answer. It would cost around $640 million to launch a house into space.

(PHOTOS: China Launches Its First Female Astronaut into Space)

Inspired by space-transport company SpaceX — which on Sunday night launched its first regular commercial supply rocket toward the International Space Station — the real estate firm created a formula to calculate just how much it would really cost to launch a house into space. Curious about the price tag on a spaceflight for your own house? Just visit Movoto’s interactive graphic and plug in your home’s square footage.

Some serious math went into the development of this algorithm. These space-travel wizards first selected a specific rocket — in this case, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. They then found a formula to determine how much a house weighs based on its square footage and number of stories. Next, they plugged that information into SpaceX’s guidelines, based on weight, for the cost of Falcon Heavy’s commercial missions. And voilà.

But really, why worry about math and logistics? What you really need to worry about is how you’re going to raise $640 million for this important project.

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