Mark your Calendars
One June 21, Scaled Composites will make a historic launch into space. They’ll be the first privately funded group to successfully build and launch a manned spacecraft. Very cool.
I wonder what this means to Space Adventures and the Russian space program. If Scaled is successful, they’ll have a relatively low-cost orbital launch vehicle. They’ll be able to offer the same basic adventure for a fraction of the cost.
Scaled isn’t the only group making an attempt at The X-Prize. Armadillo Aerospace, founded by John Carmack is also competing for the prize. They have a couple cute 3d animations of what they intend to do, complete with a cartoon armadillo. From the looks of their image gallery, however, it doesn’t look like they’ve made much progress. Perhaps Carmack is a bit busy trying to get Doom 3 released.
