« Election time | Main | "Jumpers" at ACT »

SpaceShipOne to make X-prize attempt soon

I'm sitting in a talk at Microsoft Research by David Moore, from Vulcan Inc. He just announced that Scaled Composites, the people who earlier made the first civilian space flight, are going to be making their first official attempt at the X Prize in just a couple of weeks!

The first flight is scheduled for September 29th, with the second to follow just five days later, on October 4th. The X-Prize rules state that the second flight must follow within two weeks of the first flight, but apparently it only takes five days to turn SpaceShipOne around.

There are several other teams finally coming out of the woodwork with their own X-Prize milestone announcements. The prize itself expires at the end of the year, so things should be heating up. What fun...

SpaceShipOne's flight date was announced back in July, but I missed it then. Maybe you did too.