Wow!!!!! only another 100,000 feet to go! A privately built manned spacecraft has reached a record altitude of 212,000ft (64km) over California on one of its final tests before officially entering space. SpaceShipOne was built by aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan who hopes to win the Ansari X-prize of $10m (£5.7m) for the first private flight into space. The craft has to reach an altitude of 329,000ft (100km) twice in three weeks to win - and is expected to do so next month. Twenty-five other teams across the world are competing for the prize. More here I'd love to know how much this has cost to get the programme this far - It's going to be more than the $10m prize for sure, but it's still got to be a fraction of the cost of other launch systems.
What happened to the UK team that Dabs.com sponsored? I thought they were doing final prep tests last year.
What - Starchaser? Chasing their own arses. They seem to redesign their entry every six months... All they seem to do is test engines and fly non x-prize rockets. At least Armadilloaerospace, Canadian Arrow and Scaled are making progress.
I read that the avionic computer crashed and had to be rebooted, any coincedence that the projects being funded by Microsofts Paul Allen.
its a shame that the UK outfit gets alot less funding and sponsorship than the US team sponsored by M$ I bet M$ would give them well over the prize money to fund the US team to build that thing and chuck a huge Microsoft banner on the side
w00t armadilloaerospace! GOOOOO JC!! /rant Interesting how John Carmack can program games and design space shuttles... - tf
