Florida and New Mexico Compete for X-Prize

N8F8 writes "Looks like the fight for the location for the first X-Prize competition is in the final stage. Florida and New Mexico are the finalists. New Mexico is courting the X-Prize officials heavily. Living in Satellite Beach, Florida, it isn't hard to guess where my vote is going! It's too bad Governor Jeb Bush isn't putting much effort into lobbying for Florida though other efforts may be under way. Getting in on the ground floor of private space entrepuraneurism would be priceless. X-Prize officials have delayed the final decision to April 16th."

Comments

Where actual launch may happen

[fembots]

Shouldn't the location be characteristically close to the future real launch venue? I don't think it'll help much if everybody test launch in antarctica :)

What is X-Prize

[robbyjo]

For the uninformed like I was, here's X-Prize's webpage. The news is summed up nicely in the following paragraph:

Hegler said Cape Canaveral was the first choice, even though the Kennedy Space Center is not directly involved, and Cecil Field in Jacksonville is an alternative location.

More information

[Ralph JH Nader]

You can find more information here.

Clarifications

[Long-EZ]

The X-Prize is $10M to the first non-government team to launch a three person ship to 100 km (the edge of space) and use the same ship to do it again within two weeks, while the X-Prize Cup is a race of sorts, to be run annually after the X-Prize competition is won. New Mexico and Florida are competing to host the X-Prize Cup event, not the X-Prize competition.

The X-Prize is like the Orteig prize that inspired Charles Lindberg to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The X-Prize Cup is like the annual air races (Thompson Cup, Bendix Cup, etc.) that fostered competition and quickly led to commercial aircraft industries.

The X-Prize competition will happen wherever the teams want to launch. BTW - Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, will be winning the X-Prize very soon. They're in Mojave California. Lots of info including pictures here.

And, please, no more references to "orbit". The X-Prize competition is for suborbital flight, which is essentially up and down, similar to the Redstone missions in NASA's early days. There is no requirement for a large horizontal component of velocity as would be needed to achieve orbit.

I found it interesting that New Mexico has a department responsible for space development. Finally, some government is actually looking to the future instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into it.