Of the many challenges facing tourism in space, one of the least obvious is the problem of intergalactic monetary exchange. Far more pressing to the nascent industry are issues such as extraterrestrial transportation and gravity-free accommodations. Charles Simonyi’s twelve-day trip to the International Space Station in 2007 cost him $25 million, more than the budget of an average family vacation. Yet years before even the most optimistic technophiles expect space tourism to be more than a fifteen-minute suborbital joyride on Virgin Galactic, a currency has been established, initially trading on Travelex for $12.50. It’s called the quid. Quid is an acronym for “quasi-universal intergalactic denomination.” Of course it’s also an appropriation of British slang for the pound sterling, and it is this association with the common term for a familiar item that gives it resonance, an evocative word for a provocative concept. One might have expected the new space money to repurpose the official name of an existing currency. The British and French have preferred that strategy when they’ve colonized other countries, and even Douglas Adams, for all his creativity, fell upon the formula when he coined the Altairian dollar in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But colonization robs a place of its exoticism. And if space tourism has any purpose, it’s escapism in extremis. Unlike the pound or the dollar, the quid has no inherent allegiances. The word has also been used at various stages as slang for the shilling, the sovereign, and the guinea, as well as the euro and the old Irish punt. Even the origin is “obscure,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites a characteristic early use of the word in Thomas Shadwell’s Squire of Alsatia: “Let me equip thee with a Quid.” The 1688 publication date of Shadwell’s play overrules one popular folk etymology, which claims that quid is short for Quidhampton, location of a mill that produced paper money for the Bank of England. The Bank of England wasn’t established until 1694.
