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Playboy capitalist Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic will take your $200,000 to book a brief trip to space. But when offered $1 million cash upfront to let an unnamed pornographer film some zero-gravity, superatmospheric nookie with the futurist-fetish SpaceShipTwo cabin as a backdrop, the space-tourism startup declined. Which leaves us here at Valleywag nothing to look forward to on the smut market once Hustler Video debuts the company’s hardcore ode to Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin (Warning: Boobies and such). [Slashdot] (Photo by Getty/Daniel Berehulak)

San Francisco’s Kink.com operates just like any other startup — young folks everywhere, DJ booth in the break room, plucky office vibe — except there’s way more ass-fucking. That’s the story from inside The Armory, the imposing 200,000-sq. ft. “castle” at Mission and 14th Streets. The Armory’s dungeonlike interior is the base of operations for CEO Peter Acworth’s fetish-porn production company. What began as a shy British boy’s experiments — building “fucking machines” and getting girls from Craigslist to ride them — has bloomed into a business that allowed him to buy his own playland for $14.5 million. Kink.com is the cover story for this week’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. If you’re not up to speed on the whole fucking-machine scene, here’s a one-minute SFW text primer:

• “On first glance inside, the place is almost disappointingly tame.” Watching porn performers and support staff breeze around prepping for a shoot, in flip-flops and ponytails, is probably the only breakout fetish genre yet to have a site devoted to it. Kink actually did produce a behind-the-scenes show, BehindKink.com. The name was prone to misunderstanding.
• “The models aren’t actors.” Don’t kid yourself — anyone paid-to-play for a camera is performing, even if the end product is billed as “reality.” Even if the actors involved have that same kind of sex off the clock. Despite the Bay Area’s fetish for overdocumentation, very few people have an actual fetish for the camera itself. You want to watch a performance, even if you also want to believe the folks on screen “really are having a good time.” Call it Porno’s Paradox.
• “Kinky.com: Following the Web 2.0 trend of user-based content, Kinky.com will allow members and models to maintain user profiles, interact with one another on message boards, blog, and even date.” It sounds like the obligatory social network that even less-ambitious porn companies feel oblige to hitch to their content wagons. At best, it’ll give members a way to connect in person and live out the scenes they could previously only see on pay-per-view. Why sit home and poke when you can yes yes we know, we’re done with that joke, too. Plus like we’d imply you shouldn’t get laid for free.

It says a certain sad something that there’s a whole consulting market in explaining how to use Twitter. They see the microblogging tool as just another outlet for “deep brand penetration.” None more penetrating than adult-entertainment consultant Callie Simms, who’s able cut to the quick of how Twitter is being used to inform and annoy. It should be mandatory for all future “new media” webinars to include her advice: “Talk about things in your industry. No, I don’t care what dildo was up Tera’s ass, talk about trends.”

Flight attendants are the latest group looking to put the kibosh on in-flight porn, which they say is polluting the airways thanks to the new American Airlines in-flight wireless network. Taking a page from Focus on the Family, the 19,000-strong union is looking to filter the content web surfers can access in the air. But is the air really getting polluted with porn? As is the case most of the time, Association of Professional Flight Attendants reps couldn’t produce specific examples of “alternative” in-flight entertainment, but did say “a lot of complaints” were raised by attendants and passengers alike.

It’s also worth noting there’s nothing new about passengers viewing offensive materials during a flight. Said Tim Smith, a spokesman for AA, “Customers viewing inappropriate material on board a flight is not a new scenario for our crews, who have always managed this issue with great success.”

So let’s throw this out to the community today. Is porn on planes a problem for you? Should flight attendants have to become “moral policeman,” as they fear they will become in the Bloomberg article? Should people who can’t go without porn or violent imagery for the duration of a five-hour flight really be allowed to go on airplanes to begin with? By all means, dish. Just keep it, ah, clean. [Bloomberg via Wired]