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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.""
until he's got the proposed orbital prize? I bet 2010.
Simon.
Make the thing fly with the trophy in it...
Was it one of those big checks? I always wondered how you're supposed to get them in the tiny deposit envelopes.
After the Ansari X-Prize, the next big prize to watch is the Ralph Kramden Prize.
One of these days, Alice... to the moon!
As for the $10m prize, how is it all going to be split? I assume Rutan won't get to keep all of it?
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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.
This is great news. However, we all know that the X-Prize works based on donations. I hope that they still have money for daily operations and for future pricez. The X-CUP will require a lot more money than the X-Prize. However, I'm sure that corporations will turn the white space crafts into race cars (full with ads), which should pay for most of the expenses. The SpaceShipOne has the Virgin logo on it.
This is the kind of thing all us hard-core geeks who grew up reading the Real Heinlein (from the '40s and 50s, before he got too preachy to tell a story) have dreamed of. A lot of really good geeks have died wanting to see this day.
Maybe a Mainframe Terminal of the Unknown Geek can be built for them. Instead of an eternal flame it could have an eternal Estes engine on it.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
"Paul Allen will split the $10 million prize with inventor Burt Rutan, with Rutan making payments to each of his employees who helped design, build, test, and fly SpaceShipOne.
thestranger.com
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
I'm sure we here on
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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 looks a bit like Zefram Cochrane, doesn't he? :-)
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Is to convince his bank manager that spending 25+ million to win 10 million was actually a good idea.
It was an excellent achievement but I think the real challenge is to get people to actually hand over their cash as easily as they pledge it and create a viable space tourism/haulage business.
To be honest once the novelty and rich morons exclusivity factor wears off I cant see it happening.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
OK... It was something between a flamebait and a troll, but I do have to answer, anyway.
If we leave space travel and exploration to NASA or ESA, next time a big rock fall from the sky, we will join the dinossaurs.
What we need are cost-effective ways to get to space and back. We need cost-effective general-purpose vehicles to carry probes, people and cargo around. We need simple and reliable systems that can be assembled in orbit to form larger structures. No government agency, no matter what it does, will ever want a cost-effective way to do something because it means less money for them to spend.
If you factor in all the costs involved, you will realize your nose-hair-trimmer took more than a million years in developing. First, we had to learn how to use our thumbs, next we had to learn how to make and keep fire, then learn how to work with metals...
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I'm wondering how they will spend that money - I realize their development costs were well over 10 mill in the first place, but I hope some of that goes back into new ventures.
...should be enough cover his gas costs.
;)
I'm a huge Rutan fan, but it's gotta be orbital or bust.
Creating a huge reverse bungee-jump looks like a hoot, but until you go orbital you are not demonstrating real economic value (over just fun).
Perhaps the industry can survive for several years on 90-minute tourist rides, but I don't know. 1-hour delivery of packages and executives anywhere in the world will change the future.
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.
spending $25 million to make $10 million
Q: Know how to make a small fortune in space travel?
A: Start with a large one.. ;-)
In all seriousness, nice going folks. You won that fair & square; hats off!
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
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
Yeah, he's optimized the number of pieces at reentry to O(N^2) pieces, where N is the number of pieces that were launched.