Every boy wants to be an astronaut. If I had a government grant to promote STEM for girls, I’d pretend every girl wants to as well. Some do. Especially the soccer players. But mostly boys. Ashton Kutcher probably wanted to fly in space since he was but a super annoying toddler looking up at the stars from in Iowa. Something to focus on to avoid the less pleasant sensation of midwestern cornfield child sexual assault. Don’t hate me, hate Iowa.
Perhaps nobody in Hollywood without engorged breasts and a narrow waist has done more with less than Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher was arrested his senior year in high school for breaking into his own high school to steal money. He partied for a while in college, likely did way better with the ladies than most of the rest of us, before an older gentleman in a bar told him he was smoking hot and should be a model. That conversation is linked 98% of the time to oral sex in the alley. As if only young women have to genuflect to become models.
Kutcher took home the blue ribbon in a local modeling competition. Thereafter he was whisked to New York to be a Calvin Klein model. Kutcher turned a relatively short stint in boy-looking-forlorn modeling into being cast on That 70’s Show. He followed early TV success with a series of bad movies as a comedic leading man, some basic cable reality shows, and marrying Bruce Willis’ ex-wife. Now he does what other models do when retired by 30. He makes babies and invests in startups.
Kutcher had the survival instinct to marry Mila Kunis for his second ring. The two originally met working on That 70’s show. Kunis comes from a Jewish family that fled anti-Semitism in the USSR, taking Mila with them when she was six. If you know anything about Soviet emigres, you know they are extremely practical people. I speak from experience. They are built for cold winters the freezing temperatures broken only by the occasional village arson. If they starred in the film 127 Hours, it would be retitled Half-An-Hour because they’d hack off a limb immediately if it meant escape And without hesitation. Very coyote-like.
Envisioning a relationship between a Cossack-battling warrior and a former Calvin Klein model dumb enough to break into his own high school, take a guess who’s “the decider” in that marriage. She’s the Jamie Spears to Ashton’s Britney. She decides how many beers he has at a party. She certainly decides whether or not he goes into space.
Previously, Kutcher was married to the years-more-mature Demi Moore. Moore did Whip-Its while Kutcher partied with his square-jawed stepdaughters and occasionally a random chick he’d meet at bars while Demi was stuck up in a backyard tree believing the grass below was lava. Kutcher also plunked down $250,000 to reserve a seat on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercial spacecraft. At the time, Branson was eight years into working on his sub-orbital joy ride and another eight away from putting the first civilian (himself) into space.
With a successful test flight to 50-miles above the earth, which is “space” according to the Virgin Galactic completely objective P.R. department, and with Jeff Bezos in competing billionaire position with his own space toy, game on in the take-rich-people-into-sort-of-space race. It’s time to dig up the old reservations list. Ah, there’s Kutcher, Ashton.
But that was 2013 Kutcher buying that game token, pre-Mila Kunis. Because 2021 Kutcher came out this week to announce, yes, indeed, he plunked down a quarter-million eight years ago for a sub-orbital space ride, but no, he would not be going.
“When I got married 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, so I ended up selling my ticket back to Virgin Galactic.”
Ashton Kutcher, explaining what happened to his balls.
There’s pussy-whipped and then there’s intergalactic pussy whipped. How do you turn down space flight? Sub-orbital or not, if you’re 43 like Kutcher, this is prime time midlife shoot for the moon time. This wasn’t some whim. Like when the husband comes home and announces he’s decided to quit the rat race to open an organic hand-pressed juice boutique. That’s annoying. Also, pretty gay. Kutcher plunked his hard-earned Two-and-a-Half Men mugging for the camera money down on this space trip in 2013. He had to be jacked when he got that email confirmation. Like Charlie Bucket finding that golden ticket in the one candy bar his paper route affords him every decade. And just like that, Mila Kunis “encouraged” him out of climbing the Virgin stairs to the stars. How disappointing.
There’s no place for some angry Men’s Rights rant about how husbands need to be alphas and bully their way through a marriage. You got married. The first time to a nitrous-huffing aging movie star. You didn’t get into the second one as a naive country boy. Own the 50-50 arrangement. But, shit, dude — space. This isn’t like informing your husband he can no longer go on his Cambodian sex tourism trips to bareback Khmer waifs. This is space. The final frontier. 43 isn’t old. But it’s not 16. You wait a decade to play among the stars, who knows.
There’s no reason to feel sorry for Ashton Kutcher. He’s done well for himself. And no doubt agreeing to sell back your primo ticket to ride buys you some kind of once-a-year level naughty natty business. But a hummer on earth isn’t the same as an around-the-world literally around the world. Let your kids tell their friends at school that their dad’s going into space. Because bragging about his work in My Boss’s Daughter isn’t getting the same playground results.
