X Prize

Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, had a successful launch and landing of their X Prize contender SpaceShip One. The X Prize is a $10M prize available to the first entirely privately funded organization that creates a vehicle that travels to 100km above the earth's surface (low earth orbit) twice within 2 weeks. Here is the press release from the Scaled Composites site: bq. Under the command of test pilot Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne reached a record breaking altitude of 328,491 feet (approximately 62 miles or 100 km), making Melvill the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere and the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings. bq. This flight begins an exciting new era in space travel,� said Paul G. Allen, sole sponsor in the SpaceShipOne program. �Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites are part of a new generation of explorers who are sparking the imagination of a huge number of people worldwide and ushering in the birth of a new industry of privately funded manned space flight.� bq. The historic flight also marks the first time an aerospace program has successfully completed a manned mission without government sponsorship. �Today�s flight marks a critical turning point in the history of aerospace,� said Scaled Composites founder and CEO Burt Rutan. � We have redefined space travel as we know it.� They are planning to make two more flights within the two-week time period. UPDATE: Fox News has a nice article