Space shuttle Endeavour lit up the predawn sky above Florida's
Space Coast on Monday with a 0414 EST launch from NASA's Kennedy
Space Center. The shuttle's last scheduled night launch began a
13-day flight to the International Space Station and the final year
of shuttle operations.
X PRIZE Foundation Celebrates Five Years Since the Ansari X PRIZE
Win
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 headlines read "Bolden Denies Abandoning Human Spaceflight,"
but the budget for NASA says otherwise. Beware of politicians who
rip apart national icons while offering undefined goals without
deadlines. It is much the same as saying "we're going to bulldoze
the Washington Monument, but don't worry, we're going to replace it
with something really terrific sometime later." That is the same
message that the new NASA Administrator and his immediate
underlings are pandering to the spaceflight community when it comes
to President Obama's new budget and NASA's place in it.
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