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.""
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?
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
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.
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
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.
In other words, you want to see Virgin Galactic get going.
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.