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The X Prize Gets WIRED

By Tina Beychok

Cashing in on the grand tradition of dot-com boomers wanting to find new and exciting toys to play with, the July issue of WIRED magazine featured an overview of the competitors for the $10 million X-prize, complete with Burt Rutan's latest flyer, White Knight, in full color on the cover. The article discussed Rutan's X-prize bid (widely thought to be the most likely to succeed) in great detail, as well as some of the other companies vying for the prize.

Rutan plans to use White Knight as a booster for his suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipOne. White Knight will fly to 50,00 feet with SpaceShipOne attached to its belly and then the two aircraft will detach. At that point, SpaceShipOne will fire its nitrous oxide motor for 65 seconds, reaching a top speed of mach 3.5. After 90 seconds, the spacecraft will reach its apogee and then start drifting back to Earth. The entire ride for three passengers is designed to last 80 seconds.

However, Rutan will have competition hot on his heels. A company in Great Britain, Starchaser Industries, fired a 37-foot long test rocket in 2001 that was designed to carry a human being up to a mile high. Canadian Arrow, out of Ontario, has a full-scale 57,000-pound engine ready for firing. And Armadillo Aerospace in Mesquite, Texas, has developed a unique system to stabilize the vehicle by jiggling the throttles on its four engines 200 times a second. However, there are other dot-com funded aerospace companies who, while not having officially thrown their hats in the ring for the X-Prize, are busy working on their own top secret projects. SpaceX, founded by the same businessman who started Pay Pal, is working on reducing payload launch costs, and another company called the Lifeboat Foundation is working on what it terms "space arcs," designed to support 1,000-member human colonies.

By far, one of the more intriguing of these other companies is Blue Origin, funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame and cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson. Last February, the two toured the Jet Propulsion Lab in order to garner some ideas. Blue Origin's tentative plans include a low-orbit spaceship called New Shepard, designed to take seven tourists up to space several times a week. It is rumored that the $30 million spacecraft will be a vertical take-off/lander, not unlike the DC-X.

Regardless of who actually wins the X-Prize, the whole reason for the competition was best summed up by Barry Thompson, who is one of the businessmen who donated money for the prize: "You're never going to beat Bill Gates at his own game, but if you own the first successful space-mining company, you'll make him look like a pauper."