Free Republic

Well this is the official live thread for the Wirefly X Prize Cup. Please post images for those who couldn't view the webcam (i.e. the cubies).

The future will take to the skies over New Mexico next month as teams compete in the Lunar Lander Challenge sponsored by NASA under their Centennial Challenges program. This effort uses prize contests to stimulate creativity and competition in solar system exploration, tapping the talents of non-traditional sources of innovation in academia, industry and the public. Teams of rocketeers are readying their vehicles for the Lunar Lander Challenge to be held live October 20-21 at the Las Cruces International Airport in southern New Mexico. The Vertical Lander Challenge (VLC) and Lunar Lander Challenge (LLC) presented by NASA are designed to...

Since well before SpaceShipOne captured the $10-million Ansari X Prize a year ago, the X Prize Foundation has been focusing much of its attention on its follow-on effort, the X Prize Cup. Modeled after the air races of the early 20th century, the Cup was intended to encourage X Prize teams not in running to win the prize itself to continue their efforts, helping promote a diversity of technical and operational approaches to passenger suborbital spaceflight. Such a competition, its backers hoped, would also provide a great deal of entertainment value for the public, bringing in sponsorship money and a...

LAS CRUCES, N.M. - Several thousand space enthusiasts swarmed to the city's airport for a glimpse of a future in which you might just as easily book a rocket to space as you would a plane to Las Vegas. The final day of X Prize Cup Week in New Mexico on Sunday drew a throng of would-be astronauts, entrepreneurs and curiosity seekers. They milled about the wind-swept airport grounds transformed for the afternoon into a Tomorrowland-type theme park. The organizers' goals were to show off what clever things entrepreneurs are doing to get into space, and to promote the X...

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico - – Despite its grand finale ending with an unexpected bang, the Personal Spaceflight Expo held here today as part of the Countdown to the X Prize Cup was a success, attracting thousands of onlookers who explored space capsules, rubbed elbows with astronauts and watched high-performance rocketry shoot through the sky. They even watched a few mishaps in what is billed as the emergence of rocketry for the masses and public space travel. The whole event, which ran from October 6 - 9, was organized by the X Prize Foundation and hosted by the State of...

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- Preparations are in full swing for the Countdown to the X Prize Cup—a celebration of a new generation of private passenger-carrying spaceships built for speed and to foster space tourism. An array of spaceship concepts will be spotlighted during a Spaceflight Exposition, to be held here October 9 at the International Airport-Las Cruces, along with entrepreneurs, engineers, and pilots involved in the projects. Peter Diamandis is the mastermind behind the Countdown to the X Prize Cup, and is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the X Prize Foundation.

At 3:00 PM on July 27, 2005, the past met the future in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I was standing in one of the huge grass parking lots of Wittman Field, the home of the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture fly-in, when I looked up to see Burt Rutan’s White Knight aircraft doing a flyby carrying SpaceShipOne. As I watched, the carrier aircraft and its famous payload turned and climbed like the high performance combination it is. The piercing scream of the jet engines drew the attention of anyone who had not yet looked up. With Mike Melvill at the controls the...

On June 21 of last year something extraordinary happened. A 63-year-old test pilot by the name of Mike Melvill took a small craft called SpaceShipOne to an altitude of 100 kilometers; he had reached the official edge of space. The flight was front-page news around the world, and was not without its share of drama. Seven seconds after launch a wind gust sent the craft on an unexpected 90-degree roll, and shortly after Melvill fired the craft’s hybrid rocket, a trim motor malfunctioned and sent him off course. Still, he was able to exceed 5 Gs of acceleration and reach...

A new twist in the X Prize competition to foster privately built suborbital spaceships is soon to be announced, Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation, said Wednesday. An X Prize Cup is to be staged, hosted at one of over a dozen spaceports now under development. Diamandis discussed the plan at The Next 100 Years, an International Air & Space Symposium and Exposition being held here this week in Dayton, Ohio. At present, some 24 teams around the world are attempting to win a $10 million X Prize purse -- a competition meant to spark a suborbital space...