X-Prize Progress Update

savuporo writes "The X-Prize organization has released a summary document (PDF), detailing the recent progress and immediate plans of 13 different competing teams, of those who have publicised information of significant hardware development (there are a total of 27 officially listed competitors from seven nations by now). Some details: quite a few teams are expecting to do full-scale or subscale powered flight tests soon, some as early as January 2004. Burt Rutan can still be considered as leading the pack, but others are not too far behind, and the winner is far from certain. Armadillo Aerospace states that some US teams are hindered more by regulatory hassles, than technical issues. Speaking of Armadillo, the team has just released a very special video, commemorating tomorrow's 100th anniversary of powered flight."

Comments

Is 10 million really enough?

[nertz_oi]

By the looks of some of these entries, is 10 million dollars really enough to compensate these guys? Sure, alot of them are doing it to live out some childhood dream, but wouldn't a prize >$20 mill give that extra motivation?

From the looks of their craft, 10 mill would hardly make a dent to recoup what some of these companies have put in already, and they haven't even made it to space yet!

Rutan is ready to flight-test the rocket motor

[Bruce Perens]

I've been following the test updates on the Scaled Composites site. It looks as if they are ready to flight-test the rocket motor. On the last flight, they tested the entire propulsion system with nitrogen flow. It sounds to me as if they could be ready to fire on the very next test flight.

I guess the first firings would be short, and would be designed to test the vehicle in the powered and high-speed-glide speed and dynamics envelopes rather than the lower-speed glide one which is now reasonably well characterized.

This is all very exciting.

Bruce

Re:This is what's needed

[Saeger]

I love the privateer spirit behind the X-Prize contest as much as the next guy, but I gotta say that ultimately, chemical rocket powered flight out of Earth's gravity well will never get cheap enough to bootstrap a new age of space exploration. Be it a non-profit, for-profit, or negative-profit beaurocracy, rocket propulsion is inherently energy wasteful and dangerous.

When we finally see sub-$1 per kg "launch" costs, it will be because we've finally built a series of space elevators around the equator, and that (unfortunately) takes a metric buttload of international redtape.

I admit that explosive phallic rockets are more exciting to dream about, though. I mean, who wants to take a cheap, practical, slow, silent maglev ride up a stationary elevator to geo, instead of blasting off scream'n "yeehaw!" all the way?

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