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GREENBELT (MARYLAND): The game would
be called Float Ball. It would combine elements of basketball, football and the
Lionel Richie video for ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ into a sort of free-for-all,
compelling weightless players to bounce off walls, obstacles and one another
while herding weightless balls of various colours to either end of the playing
space, which would be placed inside the cabin of a zero-gravity plane or,
possibly, on the moon. Eventually, one day, if all went well, some sort of
custom arena would be constructed.

“On Mars, there’s a bonus,”
said the game’s promoter, Ken Harvey, speaking to an attentive audience of
National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers, technicians and
scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center here recently, “where you have to
pick up a person holding a certain ball and throw them through a hoop as a sort
of extra point.”

The football analogy seemed to come easily to mind.
Ken Harvey was that Ken Harvey, No. 57 in your Washington Redskins program for
much of the late 1990s.

Now 43, he has not played a down since he
dropped out of training camp in 1999. With two sons nearing college age, Harvey
has taken the steady, earthbound gig as an anchor while training his restless
imagination on a high-concept project he has called, somewhat risibly,
SpaceSportilization.

While casting about as a motivational speaker,
Harvey struck up a friendship with Allen Herbert, a fellow congregant at Grace
Covenant Church in Chantilly, Virginia. Herbert, who studied aerospace
engineering in college, encouraged him to consider the outer reaches of the
tourism business.

Seeking his own role with some degree of
skepticism, Harvey met with Eric Anderson, the president of Space Adventures, a
private company in Vienna, Virginia, that has delivered six paying customers to
the International Space Station.

Anderson, whose firm also operates
suborbital flights providing five minutes of weightlessness for $5,000, said
that a Float Ball league would require a couple of decades of significant
reductions in the cost of space travel. In the meantime, he said, thinking big
can hardly hurt, least of all when the big thinker is a famous football player.