Few people thought about going to space as tourists several years ago but the age of commercial spaceflight started to take off when SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in Oct. 4, 2004. Key players of the commercial spaceflight industry celebrated the milestone's tenth year at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Launched in 1996, the Ansari X Prize is a competition that challenged teams from all over the world to build a reusable manned spacecraft with the capacity to carry up to three passengers to space. It was organized by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation, an educational non-profit organization that seeks to spur technological progress through public competition.
Among the 25 teams that joined and competed in the contest was Mojave Aeropace Ventures, which was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aircraft designer Burt Rutan, who founded Scaled Composites in 1982. Mojave developed a 28-foot long vehicle called SpaceShipOne, which was carried by a lifter called White Knight to an altitude of about 50,000 before it was released into suborbital space.
The Spacecraft created history when it became the first privately made manned spacecraft to reach space in June 21, 2004 eventually winning the Ansari X Prize when it repeated the feat on Sept. 29 and Oct.4 that year.
Ten years later, the concept of commercial spaceflight is no longer considered as science fiction. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), has in fact, just awarded Boeing and SpaceX $6.8 billion in contract in September to develop commercial space taxis that will not just carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS), but space tourists as well. Experts believe that the Ansari X Prize has played a pivotal role in commercial human spaceflight.
"I think it was tremendously important," said Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides. "It showed that a small, nongovernment team could carry off a major human spaceflight program. And that was a really important existence proof for a lot of the work that has come in those intervening years."
SpaceshipOne now hangs in the confines of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum but its legacy lives on in the aerospace industry. Sir Richard Branson has licensed the technology behind SpaceshipOne for his space tourism company Virgin Galactic.
The company's SpaceShipTwo, which was designed to bring tourists to pace, is built on the foundation of the original Rutan-Allen spacecraft. The ship already goes through tests in preparation for the suborbital spaceflights of the likes of Justin Bieber who can afford the $250,000 ticket price.
