Slashdot Mirror
X-prize Award paid
daveywest writes "According to the AP, "SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan accepted the Ansari X Prize money, along with a 150-pound trophy, as a chase plane flew over the ceremony in a field adjacent to the St. Louis Science Center.""
The folks who made this prize award real, the folks at the St. Louis Science Center, the leadership of St. Louis, Peter Diamandis and the Ansaris are real heroes in this. They deserve as much recognition as Rutan's team.
Seastead this.
He accomplished what the X-Prize was meant for. All criticisms aside, he won the prize fair and square. I hope his team makes good use of their design in the future.
I guess it won't happen since a VC company would very likely be concerned about X-Prize Spinoff Inc.'s 5-year-return (basically, the way it works is that VC companies focus on return-on-investment; as a rule of thumb that should happen in a 3-7 year timeframe (5 being the median), at least if you want to be taken seriously). That's unless you have plan to develop new technology that you could use to make money in a licensing deal (eg. license your technology to the government/NASA). Or if there were some serious tax incentives.
And this actually is one of those areas were tax breaks could, at least in my opinion, significantly stimulate growth.
Spaceship one only cost something like $20 million. How much money do you think the Soviet Union spent on in 40+ years ago? I don't know the figures, but I'm guessing its far far more than $20 million.
The amount of money was pretty small. Thats the point of privitization, the price goes down due to neccessity
I hope the a similar thing to the x-prize continues. The next big thing is getting into orbit (far more difficult than the sub-orbital flight, which was still very difficult).
The winning of the x-prize is step one. Hopefully, we'll see more progress in the years to come.
But yeah, it is a shame this hasn't happened sooner.
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
Burt Rutan is a brilliant airplane designer, and SpaceShipOne is a great rocket-powered airplane (as was the X-15, in 1951), but I don't think he'll even attempt to gain Robert Bigelow's "America's Space Prize" for a 7-passenger orbiter. Orbiters are in a nearly completely different design domain than space-planes, needing about 10 times the total impulse (energy), and much more critical management of reentry-generated heat. Rutan's not a daredevil. He's cautious and thorough. Orbiters are innately more risky than space-planes. I don't think he'll be able to come up with a way to reduce the risk to something he can accept.
There is nothing easier in the world than being a critic, a doubter, a pessimist, a naysayer. Such as those on this forum who cast doubts that spaceship one concept would work and who now doubt that Rutan can even make an orbital vehicle. Well sir, nothing great is ever accomplished by such thinking. I celebrate the crackpot tinkerers and inventors who toil on despite critics and deriders and continue to think outside the box to bring forth "Impossible" wonders. Burt Rutan is a brilliant engineer and those who work for him are equally so. If you watched 'Black sky: the race for space' you will have seen that he already has an orbital vehicle on the drawing board.(at least) I for one will not bet against his eventual success