Subject: The Ansari/X-Prize has been claimed! Looks like our modern day space race has crowned a new champion. Yesterday, Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOnce successfully launched it's second 100km+ high mission within a week of the first (one week faster than the two week turnaround required by the X-Prize rules ) to be the first privately funded, commercially viable form of space travel. I'm not sure how I'll sneak a $200,000 space flight into the home budget though... The next most likely winner was the DaVinci project from Canada. Hopefully (they have no reason not to ), all of the X-Prize teams will continue their projects to launch. Exciting times indeed.
http://www.xprize.org/
-Frank |