Tag: SCALED COMPOSITES

At a press conference on Wednesday, a space tourism outfit known as Virgin Galactic showed off models of its privately developed spacecraft that will take paying customers on zero-G, suborbital flights in the next few years. The Associated Press reports that Richard Branson, a British Howard Hughes minus the neuroses, plans on flying customers approximately 62 miles above sea level – just ...

It wasn't all that long ago -- just about three years -- that aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, won the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for being the first private corporation to reliably launch a manned spacecraft twice in two weeks. It was a monumental achievement, but it turns out that the X PRIZE Foundation that awarded the $10 million exists solely to "create ...