The Winklevoss twins aren't the first 100 plus millionaires to sign up for a trip to space through Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, but they are the first identical twins, according to a Virgin press release. 

The Facebook-profiting (their court settlement of $65 million in 2008 is now worth around $120 million in stocks, according to Celebrity Net Worth), Olympic-rowing brothers (Beijing 2008) recently became passengers number 700 and 701 among a list that includes Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, Tom Hanks, and others willing to pay the $250,000 fee. The first flight is tentatively scheduled for late 2014.

According to a blog post rife with historical references to expeditions since Marco Polo's 13th century Silk Road voyage, Tyler and Cameron justify their trip as an ode to the explorers that came before them and to modern counterparts like "Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Satoshi Nakamoto" (creator of Bitcoin). 

"Today, we see an independent technological infrastructure being built that allows these courageous entrepreneurs to risk their greatest human resources - their time, intelligence, extraordinary energy, and hard-earned capital - in modern attempts to achieve the unachievable, unconstrained by the technologies and boundaries of generations past," they wrote. "It is in this vein that Cameron and I contemplate our tickets into space - as seed capital supporting a new technology that may forever change the way we travel, purchased with a new technology that may forever change the way we transact."

The Winklevosses might even consider themselves among today's modern explorers -- at the least one of their financial backers. They evidence their early and heavy involvement in Bitcoin (and the $11 million they've made buying and selling them, as per most reports), which, according to them, has the potential to change the world by saving it untold sums of money in transaction fees. Appropriately, they bought their ticket using digital currency, according to Virgin.

In his own post on Virgin, Richard Branson points to another related topic to the Winklevoss's purchase.

"My friend and NASA Shuttle Pilot Mark Kelly is also an identical twin," Branson wrote. "He and his brother Scott are performing a fascinating experiment while Scott is in space aboard the International Space Station in 2015. Scott will be participating in a NASA study, which will monitor the changes in his body resulting from space travel, and then compare his health to Mark's back on Earth."