Has anyone heard about the X-Prize contest taking place tomorrow? If not, the mission of the contest is to send a manned spaceship into outer space without government sponsorship. Furthermore, if more than one spaceship is successful, then the builders of such spaceships have two more weeks to send another one into space. The point of the whole thing is to establish a profitable way to send people into space.
Bert Rutan (featured, with a plane he built, in Popular Science - the January edition, I believe) is entered in the contest with SpaceShipOne, an aircraft very much similar to the one he designed before. It consists of a main aircraft, which helps to propel another that is connected to it into space (pretty spiffy design, I must say
).
This came as very interesting to me when it was on the news. What are your thoughts on the contest as a whole, or Rutan's designs?