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 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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