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Space Science

Florida and New Mexico Compete for X-Prize 398

Posted by CowboyNeal from the two-states-enter-one-state-leaves dept.
N8F8 writes "Looks like the fight for the location for the first X-Prize competition is in the final stage. Florida and New Mexico are the finalists. New Mexico is courting the X-Prize officials heavily. Living in Satellite Beach, Florida, it isn't hard to guess where my vote is going! It's too bad Governor Jeb Bush isn't putting much effort into lobbying for Florida though other efforts may be under way. Getting in on the ground floor of private space entrepuraneurism would be priceless. X-Prize officials have delayed the final decision to April 16th."
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Florida and New Mexico Compete for X-Prize More

Florida and New Mexico Compete for X-Prize

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  • Where actual launch may happen (Score:5, Informative)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:32PM (#8675478) Homepage
    Shouldn't the location be characteristically close to the future real launch venue? I don't think it'll help much if everybody test launch in antarctica :)
    • You would not test fly a new Boeing at DFW during the evening rush, would you. Not that the X-prize winner will be flying out of a typical commercial airport, but you get my drift. Other than a launch and recovery facility, i.e., a long runway, describe to me what you think of as "characteristically close." Also, this won't be head to head, and the launches may be weeks and miles apart, unless they wait until the deadline, which they are not doing.

      On anouther note:
      I'm really bummed that Las Escaleras a
  • "I think all they really need is a hug from the governor," said Kenneth Haiko, vice chair of the Space Authority board, and accounts manager for Sun Container Inc.

    You don't want a hug from Jeb Bush. Go New Mexico!

  • What is X-Prize (Score:5, Informative)

    by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:34PM (#8675506) Homepage

    For the uninformed like I was, here's X-Prize's webpage [xprize.org]. The news is summed up nicely in the following paragraph:

    Hegler said Cape Canaveral was the first choice, even though the Kennedy Space Center is not directly involved, and Cecil Field in Jacksonville is an alternative location.

    • Re:What is X-Prize (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Cecil Field use to be a Navy base that had f18 fighter squadrauns. Cecil field closed down in '95 after budget cuts. Its still pretty much unused till today, really hurt the westside economy of Jacksonville. LAUNCH THE SPACESHIPS FROM THERE! THANKS! (Orange Park is a nice place to live)

  • I know who I'd vote for... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by surprise_audit ( 575743 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:34PM (#8675514)
    I think I'd have to go for Florida - anything launched from New Mexico would pass somewhere overhead, and if it didn't achieve orbit, might possibly land in my backyard...
    • I think I'd have to go for Florida - anything launched from New Mexico would pass somewhere overhead, and if it didn't achieve orbit, might possibly land in my backyard...

      Yeah, but if it did land there, think of the eBay value!
      Maybe you could get Taco Bell to set up a target in your yard?

    • Re:I know who I'd vote for... (Score:4, Funny)

      by TrueBuckeye ( 675537 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:46PM (#8675682) Journal
      Actually, you raise a good point. Both locations are near enough to the equator to have postive benefits, but the fact that most craft launched from Florida would pose more risk to dolphins than humans is a postive. Unless you are a dolphin of course...then you are all about New Mexico.
      • I don't know, be careful of the dolphins. You wouldn't want to piss off Snorky.
      • Nah, remember why the dolfins are smarter than people: They don't worry about things like that, they just have fun and play in the water.

      • Easy to fix. Strap a dolphin to the ship. If it crashes, the dolphin is sure to die, so the flight then poses more of a risk to dolphins than to humans, even if launched from the middle of the desert.
      • Actually, you raise a good point. Both locations are near enough to the equator to have postive benefits, but the fact that most craft launched from Florida would pose more risk to dolphins than humans is a postive. Unless you are a dolphin of course...then you are all about New Mexico.
        Yes... And no. Their alternate Florida location (Cecil Field) is in the middle of a heavily urbanized area and some miles from the sea.

    • Doesn't Vandenburg California worry also? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by aauu ( 46157 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @11:09PM (#8675876) Homepage
      Most of the path of a space vehicle to orbit is vertical. New Mexico starts several thousand meters higher in the atmosphere reducing the length of travel and density of air when starting. White Sands Missile base would be a good starting point for a space port. We already launch missiles from White Sands. A electromagnetic vehicle accelerator could be run up the face of the Sandias in Albuquerque giving an initial vehicle free flight beginning at 3,000 meters. Located along the spine of the Rocky Mountains so shipping from California and points east are averaged. We dropped a shuttle on Texas and nobody got hurt except the passengers. Florida is quite crowded compared to eastern New Mexico and Western Texas. I vote for New Mexico. (My love of good mexican food may be biasing my decision ;))
    • Your saying you don't want a spaceship to crash land in your backyard? Dude you would be the coolest geek in the state if you had a burnt spaceship in your backyard! I would totally come and visit it, and you would be all like, "yeah, I was just sitting here and then crrrrrraaahh sshh BOOOMMMM, and there was a spaceship in my backyard", and I'd be all like "whoa, cool".

      You're not fooling me. You are really from florida and are trying to get New Mexicans scared so they launch in florida and you can watch.
      • Your saying you don't want a spaceship to crash land in your backyard? Dude you would be the coolest geek in the state if you had a burnt spaceship in your backyard!

        I wonder if you could claim salvage rights, and then eBay the sucker?

        "Oh, you want your craft back, well, bid like the rest of them! Unless, of course, you want to give me a ride? Preferably later on in the program, when it's NOT crashing into peoples' back yard."
    • I'd like to point out that unfortunately Columbia broke up and scattered stuff across New Mexico and western Texas and no one got hurt from debris.
      • See, now, from the context, I'm not quite sure whether you're suggesting that it's unfortunate that Columbia broke up, or that none of the Texans/New Mexicans got hurt.

        Try telling that one to Billy Jean down the road; he'll beat your ass so quick..

    • Re:I know who I'd vote for... (Score:4, Informative)

      by GileadGreene ( 539584 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @12:51AM (#8676577) Homepage
      ...if it didn't achieve orbit...

      Given that the X-prize competition is (currently) geared towards suborbital launch vehicles I'd say there's no "if" about it. Whether or not they'd be nice enough to land in your backyard is separate question.

  • More information (Score:4, Informative)

    by Ralph JH Nader ( 765522 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:35PM (#8675538) Journal
    You can find more information here [space.com].

  • Re: NASA Gets Left Behind? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seaswahoo ( 765528 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:37PM (#8675564)
    The $10 Million cash prize will be awarded to the first team that privately finances, builds and launches a three-person spaceship to 100 Km (62.5 miles), returning safely to earth and repeating the launch with the same ship within two weeks.

    It seems that non-governmental groups are a little less squeamish about taking risks and heading off this hunk of rock we call Earth.

    Still...they're doing it for the sake of commercial interests, not simply for the sake of exploration and gathering knowledge, like NASA, the ESA, and the space agencies of other countries including, yes, formerly Soviet Russia.

    I realize that for us as humans it's inevitable that we'll break free of Earth and go out...it's something characteristic of our species. Take the discovery of the Americas for example.

    Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?
    • Hmm... That's interesting, every time Bush proposes any NASA activities these days everybody here just says it's for military purposes.
      I can also assure you that the Soviets were just as interested in the military uses of space as they were in scientific exploration.
      As an aside to how 'evil' companies cannot innovate anything, imagine if NASA was in charge of creating computer chips, and nasty companies like Intel were outlawed from any involvement in creating processors... do you really think modern comput
      • imagine if NASA was in charge of creating computer chips, and nasty companies like Intel were outlawed from any involvement in creating processors... do you really think modern computing would be anything more advanced than an Apple II? *shudders at the thought* I suppose commercial interests are good because they drive science and technology at a much faster pace than the government, burdened with rules and regulations and bureaucracy, can ever hope to do. I'm not anti-business, but it just leaves me wo

        • I suppose commercial interests are good because they drive science and technology at a much faster pace than the government, burdened with rules and regulations and bureaucracy, can ever hope to do.

          Actually, what industry is not burdened with is reliability and predictability requirements. Intel can push super-fast, super-hot processors out the door because, for the market that buys them, failures are not truly catastrophic (they're not meaningless -- we had a server crash at work this morning, and it wa

      • Re: NASA Gets Left Behind? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by edhall ( 10025 ) <slashdot@weirdnoise.com> on Thursday March 25, 2004 @11:19PM (#8675945) Homepage

        The first customer for ICs was the military (for the Minuteman Missile project, IIRC). Later, NASA was another early adopter of the technology. The government is often the only one with deep enough pockets to buy expensive but unproven technologies. And it almost always contracts with private industry to develop them. Your "computer chips" might not even have been developed without the Air Force and NASA, since who else would have paid Fairchild, etc. to make them? A simple logic gate once cost over a hundred pre-inflation dollars...

        That said, the bureaucratic monstrosity known as "NASA" is a pale, bumbling and bloated organization with little resemblance to the group that ran the Apollo project.

        Sad, sad, sad...

        -Ed

        • Your "computer chips" might not even have been developed without the Air Force and NASA, since who else would have paid Fairchild, etc. to make them? A simple logic gate once cost over a hundred pre-inflation dollars...

          Right... but the point he was making, I think, is that the government funding in those fields eventually reduced the risk to the point where commercial entities were willing to enter the field and drive further development. NASA and other space agencies have, in some sense, accomplished t

        • That said, the bureaucratic monstrosity known as "NASA" is a pale, bumbling and bloated organization with little resemblance to the group that ran the Apollo project.

          There's only ever been one Von Braun.

          The guy had the whole Apollo program in his head- he expertly guided the program through to completion. Then he retired- right after launching Skylab.

          Once he went... NASA built the space shuttle.

          Nuff said really.

    • Re: NASA Gets Left Behind? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:58PM (#8675813) Homepage
      Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?

      I fail to see how "commercial interests" are the anthesis of space travel and colonization. What is so terrible about making money that it needs to be banned from space? It's not like they're sending the XPlanes up there to block out the sun in an act of cartoonish supervillany.

      If someone can make money escaping the atmosphere in an attempt to speed up intercontinental flight, good for them. If someone can make money carrying satellites into space, or running experiments in zero-G, good for them. Profitability equals the survival of a venture... It's why profitable but socially negative corporations are difficult to get rid of. We want that kind of tenacity on our side. The spreading of mankind outside of our little planet is a good thing, and so long as the companies that do it are behaving in an ecologically responsible fashion, more power to them.

      Theoretically, the only reason going into space would be profitable is if there was something sufficiently valuable up there that we should go. The more space travel there is, the less expensive it will be. The less expensive space travel is, the more experiments, manufacturing, and living can take place up there. There must be all kinds of ludicrously dangerous Xtreme sports for our grandkids to discover.

      And, in case you haven't noticed, there are already commercial space operations out there. Far more often than NASA they're the ones putting up the satellite phone satellites and the flying transponders we rely upon. Except for the problem of junk in orbit, there isn't anything wrong with that.

      • Nothing's wrong with commercial interests going up to space, but...let me put it this way: would you rather have a company spearheading space travel technology that operates like AOL, SCO, or Microsoft? or perhaps Google?

        • Re: NASA Gets Left Behind? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by WolfWithoutAClause ( 162946 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @11:23PM (#8675973) Homepage
          I'd go with google. They're not perfect, but compared to Microsoft they are.

          But a more sensible question is whether you want really want NASA to do it.

          I mean are you one of the NASA selected 'elite'? If not- sorry, no space for you.

          Atleast commercial launches are somewhat egalitarian- you have the cash, you get to go. And commercial pressures tend to push down on price, with NASA there's far less pressure to do that- that's a really bad thing. The price is way too high right now, particularly in NASA land. NASA is way too risk adverse; paradoxically, I think that caused Columbia and Challenger.

          • NASA is way too risk adverse; paradoxically, I think that caused Columbia and Challenger.

            You may be right on that. I read an article yesterday (forget the source) about a recent maintenance check on the shuttle Discovery in which NASA engineers discovered that one crucial part had been installed backwards. For close to twenty years, since originally manufactured!

            Fortunately, it was part of several sets of that particular part, and the specific part that wasn't installed properly would not have caused ano
        • Actually none of the companies you mention are particularly heinous. The solution here is to create and maintain a competitive market.
    • Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?

      And what exactly do you think motivated "the discovery of the Americas"?* Or for that matter precipitated the colonization of the Americas?** Very little in the way of exploration and eventual colonization has been done for other than commercial interests (albeit sometimes indirectly).

      * Answer: the search for a faster route to the spice wealth of

      • I have nothing against commercialization of space, but what does make me nervous is the same type of "commercial interest" run rampant during the age of discovery...

        In the process of colonization, European settlers reduced to almost nothing the inhabitants of a continent. There were some pretty crappy things done in the name of colonization.

        Basically, I'm all up for viable commercial space projects, but let's try not to just trash a planet, or, should we encounter an intelligent life form, just wipe 'em o
        • Basically, I'm all up for viable commercial space projects, but let's try not to just trash a planet, or, should we encounter an intelligent life form, just wipe 'em out or take 'em down without second thought.

          The days you're speaking of seem very far in the past. I can't imagine anybody doing something so horrible today. If nothing else, the news media would report it and the angry masses would be out for blood. I'm not worrying until I see something more concrete to worry about.

    • Still...they're doing it for the sake of commercial interests, not simply for the sake of exploration and gathering knowledge

      There is at least one team [armadilloaerospace.com] doing it for exactly those reasons. Go John Carmack!
    • Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?
      And why should space be any different than any other colonization or long distance travel endeavor across human history?

  • Methuselah Mouse Prize - successor in technique (Score:5, Interesting)

    by exratio ( 548823 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:37PM (#8675581) Homepage
    The Methuselah Mouse Prize (rewarding scientists who manage to extend healthy life span in mice) has some of the same names involved as advisors, and is in many ways an attempt to further evolve the fundraising methodology used so successfully in the X-Prize.

    http://www.methuselahmouse.org [methuselahmouse.org]

    I think that progress to date since the launch last year is pretty impressive. $50,000 raised and $300,000 in pledges is far greater progress than the X Prize managed in the same period of time after launch - learning from the past and improving on it is a good thing. Check out The Three Hundred as well as a good example of how to get a certain set of people involved:

    http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/threehundred.a sp [methuselahfoundation.org]

    Why are prizes for research so good? Take a look at this piece on how they work and why they work so well:

    http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/research_prize s.cfm [longevitymeme.org]

  • [off topic] Holy Shit... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shadowcabbit ( 466253 ) <cx AT thefurryone DOT net> on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:38PM (#8675593) Journal
    I saw "4 of 79 comments" on the main page and thought it had to be a mistake... as it turns out, somebody's been testing a bot. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
    • There have been quite a few of these lately. Kinda annoying when you have mod points and are browsing at 0.

      It sure would be nice to have a facility to just delete these. Maybe just delete all but one of them to get around the censorship issue.

  • My backyard is available! (Score:4, Funny)

    by woobieman29 ( 593880 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:44PM (#8675667)
    I'm pretty sure the wife and neighbors won't mind.

    I get to keep all hardware that doesn't make orbit though... :-)

  • what happens to the losers. (Score:3, Funny)

    by itsdave ( 105030 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @10:47PM (#8675704)
    do they die?
  • this has been there for months (sorry it is news but it is a bit stale).
    • Slashdot is more a source of entertainment that actual news on slow days. But you're still here.

      It's like there isn't enough going on in the world to fill a 30 minute TV newscast, so they have to tell us that the Weazeldip 5000 isn't all it's cracked up to be so don't buy it.

      I would argue that inspite of this, it is Stuff that matters, to us. Maybe we can convince them to make a heading "Olds", instead.

      --
      I have never met anyone IRL who even knows what Slashdot is. Not that it comes up alot.

  • Stupid diamond-less moon. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by c.emmertfoster ( 577356 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @11:18PM (#8675938)
    The New Mexico Office of Space Commercialization was created in 1994 by legislation to coordinate the promotion and marketing of New Mexico's space-related resources and to develop and operate a regional Spaceport in New Mexico.

    Just reading the word "Spaceport" outside of a Heinlein novel is nearly enough to bring a tear to my eye. The saddest part of all of this is that they have to offer a prize to get anyone to try this... I keep hoping for news of mineral resources somewhere in the solar system, that would make space travel profitable. There has to be a way to make money off of outer space, but what is it?
    • Advertising in the sky!
      There was a recent story on slashdot about how somone patented Ads amongst the stars.
    • I keep hoping for news of mineral resources somewhere in the solar system, that would make space travel profitable.

      The prohibitive cost of this would make it unprofitable though. Say there's a huge repository of gold somewhere out there. The cost of going there and lugging it back would be so expensive that it would have to be a really *huge* amount of gold to make it worthwhile. Then the problem becomes liquidating that much gold on the market -- it would create such a glut that gold prices would fall
    • I keep hoping for news of mineral resources somewhere in the solar system, that would make space travel profitable. There has to be a way to make money off of outer space, but what is it?

      Diamonds are relatively common. Artificial scarcity is created by the DeBeers monopoly and market manipulation. It's such that DeBeer's executives can't step foot in the United States without being subject to arrest. However, given the pro-corporate enviroment with this administration, they could get off the hook.

      I digre
      • I'm surprised that nobody has brought up manufacturing in space. No, not manufacturing for consumption on Earth, but manufacturing for consumption in SPACE. After all, given the costs to loft up a pound of consumables or equipment to orbit, doesn't it make sense to manufacture solar panels, station-keeping fuel, re-entry shielding, and other items in space to save on the costs of having to haul all that crap up with us?

        Especially stuff like consumables - life-support water/oxygen, re-entry shielding, a g

      • I was always interested in the fact that Heinlein's worlds were separate. That people hardly ever communicated between them because of the time delay. Instead, planets tended to be populated by like-minded people.

        I think that colonization will ultimately be the value of space.

      • Ahh yes, but how about infinte supply of galactic grade alchohol [bbc.co.uk]?

        Come on, don't let all that stuff go waste! All we have to make sure is that the Irish run out of their stuff, and point an arrow up in that general direction ;-)
    • Mining asteroids could be very profitable. We could find an asteroid with a large amount of an expensive/rare metal, gold, gallium(used in GASFETS, a transistor), pretty much anything. What makes it so profitable is that its extremely concentrated. You can run into huge chunks of metals which make it less like mining, and more like ripping a chunk of the asteroid off to take home. But again, since no one has pioneered this methodology, it has remained a theory noone is willing to test.
    • Quoted from 'The High Frontier' byGerard K. O'neill, 1976. 3rd edition c2000 Space Studies institute. Apogee books ISBN 1-896522-67-X www.cgpublishing.com Chapter 4 page 35 "A typical Apollo sample contains by weight, more tha 20% silicon, more than 12% aluminum, 4% iron, and 3% magnesium. Many of the Apollo samples contained more than 6% titanium by weight. ... Finally, the lunar suface is more than 40% oxygen by weight." end quote. Also, as we know from the Clementine missions, on the moons' south pole
    • On the moon, there is plenty of room to place large arrays of solar panels.
      Using a "laser", one could possibly transport the energy from the moon to earth [google.com].
      How do we get the solar panels there ? Well, the moon is largely a brick of silicon, which could be very well used to produce solar panels [usra.edu].

      Enough motivation wouldn't you think ?
      • It's a cool idea, but does "cost effectiveness" ring a bell? There are much cheaper ways to get energy, and the materials for relatively inefficient photovoltaic cells aren't free---they cost money and it pollutes to produce them. It will cost more on top of that to get them to the moon (unless you can produce them on site, which would be really cool), and then you have the transmission losses. Finally, some trigger-happy country with more military power than it has a reasonable use for will probably try to
        • Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I missed the bit about how the moon has a lot of silicon. In that case, two of my objections go down the toilet... but you're still going to have to figure out how to produce lots of solar panels on the moon. Good luck, honestly.
          • Research being done already, apparently :)

            But I agree that 1 MW in 1 year doesn't really seem attractive. Yet that didn't stop our ancestors from creating a crude vehicle that drove on petrol - grossly inefficient at the time.
            • The crude petrol vehicle may have been crude and not all that useful, but it had some usefulness. It had a niche to occupy and keep development going. I can't see beaming power from the moon being useful enough off the bat to do the sort of large-scale construction and R&D necessary to make it anything more than a white elephant. If, however, you had other facilities on the moon that needed power, I'd say you have a chance, since you can get started and keep going at a small scale and slow but steady pa
              • ..is that it requires some vision of things to come. Sure the start is highly unpractical, but in theory could end up being very profitable indeed. I for one would not be surprised to see a 'Shell Moon department' in a hundred years or so.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • wasn't that a cartoon or something?

  • Wish New Mexico luck. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BCW2 ( 168187 ) on Thursday March 25, 2004 @11:54PM (#8676181) Journal
    I grew up in Las Cruces. On the other side of the mountain is White Sands Missle Range, the place where space flight started in this country. Werner von Braun and his group of scientists were taken there after WWII to start their research in this country. Every rocket this country has had flew there first(except Saturn 5 and shuttle). The lake bed at Northrup strip is where all shuttle pilots practised there landings for 10 years, and where one shuttle landed when Edwards was flooded. That place is the history of space and weapons reseach and innovation.

    • I grew up in Las Cruces. On the other side of the mountain is White Sands Missle Range, the place where space flight started in this country. Werner von Braun and his group of scientists were taken there after WWII to start their research in this country. Every rocket this country has had flew there first(except Saturn 5 and shuttle).

      And the Saturn I and the Saturn IB, and the entire Atlas and Titan families, not to mention the Minuteman and all the SLBM's, and the Thor/Delta family, and the Vanguard, and

      • Thats why everything launched at White Sands land in Utah, Nevada or the Pacific. Including every air to air and surface to air wepon in history.

        • Thats why everything launched at White Sands land in Utah, Nevada or the Pacific. Including every air to air and surface to air wepon in history.

          Nope. The Navy tests at China Lake, or Pax river, or AUTEC, or a variety of other places. (Sidewinder was first tested at China Lake for example.)

          Or, to put it simply; Your claim that every AAM and SAM missile in history was launched from WSMR is as false as your claim that every rocket except for the Saturn and Shuttle was first launched there.

          • Every engine in the saturn 5 stack was fired at The NASA test facility on the Las Cruces side of the Organ Mts. on a test stand before the first 1B or stage was ever assembled. From prototypes to the production versions. All AAM and SAM have been tested and are still tested at White Sands. Thats why they keep so many drones for targets there. It is still the birthplace of our space program like it or not.

            • Every engine in the saturn 5 stack was fired at The NASA test facility on the Las Cruces side of the Organ Mts. on a test stand before the first 1B or stage was ever assembled.

              Which is considerably different from your claim that 'every rocket has flown there first'. And it's *still* not true, as the Saturn series engines were tested at the Marshall Spaceflight Center (formerly Redstone Arsenal) or in California at the Rocketdyne facilities. (The LEM engined were however tested at WSMR.

              From prototypes t

  • Quit it, and let The Man finish up Doom3.

  • Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)

    by Long-EZ ( 755920 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @12:27AM (#8676432)
    The X-Prize is $10M to the first non-government team to launch a three person ship to 100 km (the edge of space) and use the same ship to do it again within two weeks, while the X-Prize Cup is a race of sorts, to be run annually after the X-Prize competition is won. New Mexico and Florida are competing to host the X-Prize Cup event, not the X-Prize competition.


    The X-Prize is like the Orteig prize that inspired Charles Lindberg to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The X-Prize Cup is like the annual air races (Thompson Cup, Bendix Cup, etc.) that fostered competition and quickly led to commercial aircraft industries.


    The X-Prize competition will happen wherever the teams want to launch. BTW - Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, will be winning the X-Prize very soon. They're in Mojave California. Lots of info including pictures here [scaled.com].


    And, please, no more references to "orbit". The X-Prize competition is for suborbital flight, which is essentially up and down, similar to the Redstone missions in NASA's early days. There is no requirement for a large horizontal component of velocity as would be needed to achieve orbit.


    I found it interesting that New Mexico has a department responsible for space development. Finally, some government is actually looking to the future instead of being dragged kicking and screaming into it.

  • Living in Satellite Beach, Florida, it isn't hard to guess where my vote is going! It's too bad Governor Jeb Bush isn't putting much effort into lobbying for Florida though other efforts may be under way.

    Just get Diebold involved and I'm sure things will go Jeb's way.

  • What about the spelling? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 26, 2004 @09:23AM (#8678767)
    Won't somebody please think of the spelling?

    entrepuraneurism?

    That is the most tortured, mangled, fucked up attempt at an English word I have ever been privileged to see.

    Kids, if you are that confused about a spelling, wouldn't it be worth a quality moment with your dictionary to try and sort things out so that you and the word can coexist in some kind of harmony?

    "entrepreneur"
  • Ok, so this morning I drive to work from Satellite Beach, after staying up late reading "Space, the Free Market Frontier" by Edward Hudgins, and yes, I also saw the article on this in the Florida Today yesterday... and then I see this on the Slashdot frontpage.

    D8F8, are you spying on me? ;)

    I never knew Satellite Beach had a webpage. Sadly enough, the counter told me I was visitor number 1. I suspect some mighty fine coding. For those of you who have never visited, yes, our beaches do have as many coqui

  • Jules Verne's opinion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Friday March 26, 2004 @08:29PM (#8685904) Homepage
    According to this [astronautix.com] website, Jules Verne also considered Florida to be an ideal spot for launching into space. This was from his 1865 novel, From Earth to the Moon [literature.org].

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