It’s Blast Off for the “Beckham Ball”

The “Beckham Ball”, which many of you may or may not remember, was the ball that professional soccer player David Beckham disgracefully kicked over the bar at the EuroCup’s 2004 critical England-Portugal game. This famous ball will be heading to outer space to help out charity and space awareness.

GoldenPalace.com recently acquired the Ball for 18,500 pounds (€28,050) from an eBay charity auction last month. The online casino has mentioned its plans to include the “Beckham Ball” in the Canadian spacecraft’s crew for the $10m X-Prize Competition in outer space. The spacecraft (daVinci Project’s Wildfire) will be launching on October 2nd from the central Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

Additional to its proposed trip to outer space, it looks like the Ball will possibly be touring the UK giving all of its British fans a chance to take their own shot at a penalty kick using the same exact ball. Accustomed to performing outrageous publicity stunts, this is just another way for GoldenPalace.com to attract attention to itself.

Proud of the ingenious marketing plan, Richard Rowe (founder and chief executive of the online casino), could hardly contain himself. When asked about his thoughts on the subject, Rowe answered, "This is one of The Ball’s stops on a world tour to raise money for charity. We will be setting up promotional events so that people will get to participate in penalty shoot-out style competitions using The Ball. Now they will also be using the first football to have been in Space."

The unique competition, being used to continually raise funds for charity, is offering a handsome $10m prize to the team that creates its own spacecraft and sends it out to sub-orbital space (100km) with a three man team and returns safely back to earth before any other team does. The team, however, won’t be let off that easy and will be expected within two weeks to perform the same thing again using the same spacecraft.