Mon, Jan 25, 2010
On October 4th, 2004, the X PRIZE Foundation made international
headlines when they awarded the Ansari X PRIZE to Scaled Composites
for the successful launch of their craft, SpaceShipOne.
Inspired by the Orteig Prize, won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927
for the successful completion of the first non-stop flight from New
York to Paris, Peter Diamandis formally announced the X PRIZE
competition in 1996. The competition offered the largest incentive
prize in history, a stunning $10 million dollar award, to the first
non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft
100 kilometers above the earth’s surface twice within two
weeks.
26 different teams representing 7 nations around the world
competed for the prize. Finally, on the 47th anniversary of
the Sputnik 1 launch, the Tier One Project, led by Scaled
Composites' aerospace designer Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft
co-founder Paul Allen, successfully completed the second of the two
necessary launches.
Though $10 million dollars was awarded to the winning team, the
26 participating teams invested more than $100 million dollars in
total towards new technologies in pursuit of the prize. Since
the success of the Ansari X PRIZE, more than $1.5 billion dollars
has been invested towards the private spaceflight industry.
Today, the X PRIZE foundation remains committed to incentive
prizes in the hopes that such competition will spur innovation as
seen with the Ansari X PRIZE. The foundation has announced several
other X Prizes promoting further development not just in space
exploration, but other technological fields including the
Progressive Automotive X PRIZE and the Archon X PRIZE for
Genomics.
Join Aero-TV as Peter Diamandis reflects on the last five years
since the Ansari X PRIZE win and what the next five years might
hold for the foundation.
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