X Prize

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X PRIZE

In the early twenty-first century, millions of people fly on airplanes between cities around the world. At any one time, an astounding 10 million people are airborne. But it was not always this way. Only 100 years ago, during the birth of aviation, flying in an airplane was a very expensive, risky, and infrequent activity, much the way spaceflight is in the early twenty-first century.

At the turn of the last century (1904-1930), one of the major activities that made aviation very popular, exciting, and affordable was a series of prizes or competitions. History has shown the amazing power of prizes to accelerate technological development. For example, in 1714, in response to a series of tragic maritime disasters, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, which provided a large financial prize for the demonstration of a marine clock that was sufficiently accurate to permit precise determination of a ship's longitude. Within twenty years of the announcement of the Longitude prize, a practical clock was demonstrated and marine navigation was revolutionized.

In the twentieth century the history of aviation contains hundreds of prizes that greatly advanced aircraft technology. One of the most significant prizes in the history of aviation (and the one from which the X PRIZE is modeled) was the Orteig Prize, an award for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, which was sponsored by Raymond Orteig, a wealthy hotel owner. Nine teams cumulatively spent $400,000, sixteen times the $25,000 purse, in pursuit of this prize. By offering a prize instead of backing one particular team or technology, Orteig automatically backed the winner. Had Orteig elected to back teams in order of their probability of success, as judged by the conventional wisdom of the day, he would have backed Charles Lindbergh last. Lindbergh achieved success, taking an unconventional single pilot/single engine approach. On May 20, 1927, Lindbergh flew his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, nonstop for thirty-three and a half hours across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris, and won the $25,000 Orteig prize.

The X PRIZE is a competition that was created to inspire rocket scientists to build a new generation of spaceships designed to carry the average person into space on a suborbital flight to an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 miles). This flight is very similar to the flight made by astronaut Alan Shepard on May 5, 1961, on the Mercury Redstone rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Shepard, who was the first American in space, did not actually go into orbit, as the space shuttle does, but instead flew a suborbital trajectory that lasted about twenty minutes.

The X PRIZE Foundation, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is offering a $10 million cash prize. To win the prize, vehicles must be privately financed and constructed, and competitors must demonstrate their ability to fly to an altitude of 100 kilometers with three passengers. Furthermore, competitors must prove that their vehicle is reusable by flying it twice within a two-week period. Since the announcement of the X PRIZE, twenty-one teams from five countries have registered to compete.

The suborbital flights of the X PRIZE are just the first step. The competition's goals are to bring about the creation of new generation of space- ships that will serve new markets such as space tourism and point-to-point package delivery (rocket mail). As X PRIZE teams gain experience and improve their technology, their ships will evolve from suborbital to orbital ships in the same fashion that one can draw the lineage from the Wright brothers' Flyer to the DC-3 and eventually to today's 747 aircraft.

The mission of the X PRIZE Foundation is to change the way that people think about space. Rather than viewing spaceflight as the exclusive province of governments, the foundation's goal is to transform spaceflight into an enterprise in which the general public can directly participate, much in the way that people can fly on airplanes today.

see also Launch Vehicles, Reusable (volume 1); Reusable Launch Vehicles (volume 4); Shepard, Alan (volume 3); Space Tourism, Evolution of (volume 4); Tourism (volume 1).

Peter H. Diamandis