A Mars Odyssey

Guest speaker, Julie-ann Amos has written an excellent article on “Space Tourism & Space Travel - How Far Off Are We?”

************************************************************************************************************ “There was very little known about space tourism until the late 1900s with a major impact on the media developing about five years ago. Space shuttle launches have always caued a media frenzy, however, and more and more commercial space enterprises have recently developed, largely in part due to the excess prize amounts given by the Ansari X Prize to stimulate private sectors.

But it is nothing new to mankind, who have had a long-time love affair with outer space exploration - going to the Moon and Mars. Space travel for the public sector is the hot thing in the world for those who can and cannot afford it. The Ansari X Prize was a $10 million dollar plus award in which the X PRIZE Foundation sought the first NGO (non-government organization) able to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space.

The goal had to achieved not once, but twice within a two week timeframe. This mimicked the 1919 contest of the $25,000 Orteig Prize, originated by another hotel man, Raymond Orteig, to a pilot who could fly “non-stop” from New York to Paris. As we all know, Charles Lindbergh won it in 1927. The prize was actually won on October 4, 2004, (which was a signifcant date because it was also coincidentally the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch), by the Tier One project designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, using the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. $10 million was awarded to the winner, but more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize. Another such prize going on at the present time is the Google Lunar X PRIZE, listed by Google as “a $30 million competition for the 1st privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.

The prize requires that each team is 90% privately funded with a deadline of December 31, 2010 to register for the competition.” Considered a class in itself, the Ansari X Prize has the ability of “framing a challenge” and then providing some sort of stimulus for the solution. Google’s stimulus will award the first team to land on the moon and complete its objectives $20 million dollars, available until December 31, 2012. From that moment on, the prize amount will drop–first prize will be $15 million, the second team which can accomplish this will receive $5 million with another $5 million in bonus prizes. The absolute final deadline for the competition is December 31, 2014. (For more on Space Tourism & Space Travel - How Far Off Are We?)

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