X-PRIZE... PRIVATIZING SPACE

It's funny that I ran into this article. I remember the X-Prize when I lived in St. Louis for a year doing the Coro Fellowship. My colleague, KP, was doing a consulting project for them during their initial year, and had no clue they are still chugging along. The energy and excitement was tangible back in 1996, but I wonder how they kept it going this long. Kudos to them.

Fans of space tourism, and commercial space flight in general, were very excited at reports that Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites had been issued the first license for a manned suborbital rocket flight. There's been talk of such things for years, and space insiders had wondered whether the FAA would issue a license to Rutan in time for him to compete for the X-Prize, a $10 million private award for the first team that:

"Privately finances, builds & launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles); Returns safely to Earth; Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks."

The X-Prize approach is based on the historic role played by privately-funded prizes in developing aviation (Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize). Its founders and organizers hope that private initiative, and lean budgets coupled with clear goals, will produce more rapid progress than the government-funded programs organized by space bureaucrats over the past five decades or so. (full article)