THEY call it “the rule of the eight”. It took eight years between the announcement of the Orteig prize and Charles Lindbergh’s winning transatlantic flight in 1927. It took eight years for NASA to rise to JFK’s 1961 challenge and put a man on the moon. And now the Ansari X prize has kept up the tradition. Announced in 1996, the prize was won in October when SpaceShipOne made its historic double flight into space (New Scientist, 9 October, p 5).
That the prize obeyed the rule is a satisfying denouement: the X prize owed its inspiration to the Orteig prize and was set up to prove that the private sector was a match for government programmes. But continuing the tradition was more than symbolic. Just last year there were serious doubts that the prize would ever be won (New Scientist, 10 May 2003, p 12). SpaceShipOne’s success is testimony to the verve and potential of the private space movement, otherwise known as alt.space.
And SpaceShipOne’s victory has had exactly the kind of galvanising effect the X prize’s creators hoped for: the private-sector conquest of space appears to be well under way. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin group, has announced plans to build a fleet of tourist vehicles based on SpaceShipOne. Just a week before the first successful X prize flight, SpaceDev of Poway, California, signed up with the NASA Ames Research Center to design a commercial vehicle capable of reaching 160 kilometres altitude, significantly higher than SpaceShipOne. And the X prize winner itself, Mojave Aerospace Ventures of Mojave, California, is privately at work improving on SpaceShipOne.…
