Ansari X Prize 10th Anniversary Shindig Set for Mojave
SpaceShipOne lands after its historic spaceflight on June 21, 2004. (Credit: Ian Kluft)
Burt Rutan, Paul Allen and Richard Branson are among those who will gather at the Mojave Air and Space Port on Oct. 4 to mark the 10th anniversary of SpaceShipOne winning the $10 million Anari X Prize, Parabolic Arc has learned.
X Prize Foundation Chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis will preside over the invitation-only event, which is expected to draw hundreds of guests. The foundation sponsored the prize for the first privately-funded vehicle to fly into space twice in two weeks.
Scaled Composites test pilots Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie teamed to win the Ansari X Prize. Melvill flew the first flight on Sept. 29, 2004, with Binnie flying the second mission on Oct. 4.
Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, which was funded by Allen. Branson subsequently licensed the technology for his Virgin Galactic company. The company has paid Rutan’s Scaled Composites to develop the SpaceShipTwo suborbital tourism vehicle.
The X Prize Foundation has invited the first 100 Virgin Galactic ticket holders who are set to fly aboard SpaceShipTwo to the celebration. This group is collectively known as the founders.
The celebration is to include a luncheon. Virgin Galactic will have a private event for its founders in the evening.
15 responses to “Ansari X Prize 10th Anniversary Shindig Set for Mojave”
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For those of us who remember this day and the euphoria of the VG annoucement, it’s been again, a long wait for so far nothing. Bit remeniscent of the STS and being stuck in leo. Promises, nothing but promises. 🙁
This is why SpaceX has devotees.
Cheers.
Gotta wonder if Mr. Branson wishes he’d never gotten into this. It’s Virgin’s fault for all the marketing speak and constant promises they can’t deliver on, but all that would have been fine actually – if the vehicle would have been ready.
If it was never going to be ready in 3 to, say, 7 years, Rutan and Scaled Composites should never have promised such to Virgin Galactic. Branson had no way of knowing – Rutan was the obvious world’s leading expert on winged, reusable suborbital spacecraft at the time, and Branson hired (contracted with) him, so you can’t even fault Branson for not getting an expert who could assess the project on a technical level.
I’m not saying Rutan’s a bad guy, but he’s never had a regular commercial success – his Beech Starship hardly had a King Air-like run, for example. He’s famous for wildly innovative niche products and one-off record breaking stunts (round the world unrefueled, Spaceship I). Branson is taking all the heat these days, but the trail seems to lead back to Rutan, who, encouraged by Branson’s enthusiasm and persistence no doubt, promised he could deliver a scaled-up commercial version of Spaceship I in 3 years! He’s since retired (only to start a new venture in a similar but bigger-n-better vein with Paul Allen), leaving Branson holding the bag (tap dancing wildly, hoping to distract the audience while stalling for time).
A fair and reasonable assessment. Personally, I have always placed most of the ‘blame’ on Branson, but surely he was promised something from the experts he consulted. Maybe I have been too fond of Rutan to accept his blame in this mess.
I’ve been a big Burt Rutan fan too – a real aviation hero and a genuine aeronautical engineering genius.
I think he got in trouble here because he is mainly concerned with aerodynamics, the four forces of flight, efficiency, the stall regime and spin avoidance, structural strength-to-weight — things like that. The main problem here however has seemed to be one of rocket propulsion (specifically, scaling up a composite motor), which isn’t within his area of expertise.
A comment on the Starship. The FAA had never dealt with a composite craft before and they added, in their ignorance a whole heap of weight into the structure as well as flaps IIRC that resulted in considerable loss of performance. In addition Beech was taken over during that time and the aircraft marketing was also abysmal.
Just saying this wasn’t a Rutan failure by a long shot. The aircraft was streaks ahead of it’s day but unfortunately it’s potential was never realised.
Other than that, your correct about Rutan in that he’s always really been a niche aircraft R&D specialist.
So far as SS2 goes, they’ve tried for ages to get the engine spec’s right and they’ve finally made the decision to change. Rumour has it the company was driven by marketers and not engineering. Oh well, I’m hopeful that they’ll eventually get it going but could end up as a spruce goose.
Cheers.
Spaceship One was the mad little plane that succeeded in an amazing, crazy, seat of your pants one-off adventure. It was a brilliant achievement.
With hindsight, it now has less significance than we all thought at the time.
Still, it deserves to be celebrated and remembered for what it was, not what it didn’t lead to?
Absolutely. It was a great accomplishment and an exciting, historical moment.
Sorry if I took away from that. The article just got me thinking, what with Mr. Branson there too and all.
Very concise. it was a good show, but suborbital flight is insignificant in the larger scale of things.
Where did you get this information? There’s not a link posted and I can’t find any info regarding the event anywhere, not even on Ansari’s website.
I have sources. It’s apparently invite-only, so there’s not much notice being given.
But you mentioned that tickets are going for sale for the reasonable price of $2,500. Where can we go to purchase our tickets before they sell out?
Contribute to the X Prize’s latest prize here: https://www.indiegogo.com/p…
Sorry for the confusion. I had linked to the wrong page in the story about the tickets. That’s been fixed now.
Thanks, Doug. I am impressed with where the money actually goes to. As much as I bash on these guys, I do think there is a strong potential for them to influence future space flight.
FWIW….
I remember being at the first SS1 flight into space in June 2004. From 10 years later, it’s very disappointing that none of these promises have come true yet. Mike Melvill gave a talk here in Mojave on the 10th anniversary. The talk was great, but I sat in the audience in an awful mood, thinking the future just ain’t what it used to be. Things were supposed to be so much further along by now.
My own take on this is that the Ansari X Prize pushed things a bit too fast. In the haste to win the prize, they ended up with a system that could barely do what it was designed to do. The weakest part of the system was the engine. It was dirty, prone to vibrations, and threw out chunks of rubber that if any of them had gotten stuck in the engine’s throat would have destroyed the ship.
To win the prize in time, SS1 was put through a very abbreviated flight test program. Then it was shipped off to a museum. The short flight test program was insufficient to uncover all the problems with the motor and the design.
Burt came out of SS1 over confident and probably having learned all the wrong lessons. He thought he could easily scale everything up for something 3x larger. The rubber hybrid somehow became the baseline for propulsion. He didn’t take the time to understand nitrous oxide, which cost three people their lives.
All those decisions set back the project for years. Replicating what the X-15 had done 40 years ago was an accomplishment. But if you do it in a way that’s not sustainable, then what have you actually accomplished?
A company of aircraft designed a rocket-powered vehicle with more thought going into the aircraft than the propulsion system. They had never dealt with the complexities of rocket propulsion and a vehicle was designed and built with the thought that they could plug and play a motor and it would just work. Look at all other rocket-powered vehicles and you will see that the aerodynamics come after the rocket is fully understood. It’s an unfortunate backwards method that I think they are realizing the problems of.