Archive · Press release

Mojave: Absolut Icebar partners with Virgin Galactic

Press release, 7 December 2009. The world's first ice bar in the Mojave Desert, built for the premiere of SpaceShipTwo.

What it announced

Absolut Icebar built a temporary installation in the Mojave Desert in California to support the unveiling of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on 7 December 2009. Mixologists served a cocktail list developed specifically for the surroundings. The release names Sir Richard Branson and the aircraft designer Burt Rutan as hosts of the event.

The site's own home-page teaser for the same event also named the then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a host. The release itself does not. Both texts are in the archive; only one of them is a press release.

How the two brands ended up in a desert together

The connection was not the vodka. Icehotel had been named a Virgin Galactic Accredited Space Agent earlier that year — one of a small number of travel agencies able to take deposits for suborbital flights — and Absolut Icebar was invited to build a show piece for the launch on the back of it. Astrid Lundquist, head of communication, described the alliance as natural on the grounds that astronauts and their guests would be visiting Icehotel and the Icebar once flights began from northern Sweden, and called Mojave "the beginning of many exciting projects between the two brands."

The release also prices the thing it was celebrating: a seat on SpaceShipTwo at US$200,000, against the roughly $20 million it had cost to reach orbit privately until then.

A note on how that turned out

Space tourism did not begin from northern Sweden, and the further projects between the two brands did not follow. SpaceShipTwo's own programme ran considerably longer than anyone in this release expected. The archive records the claim as it was made in December 2009.

The Mojave bar, and the storm