A major step towards space travel

Very exciting news for space enthusiasts: Today - on the 47th anniversary of the launch of the first manmade satellite "Sputnik" - Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne made a successful second flight to the 'official' borders of space and won the 10 million dollar X-Prize. If you've not been following the X-Prize news here is the story in brief.

The ANSARI X-PRIZE was an award of $10 million (£5.7 million) to the first private organisation to build and fly a ship that could carry three passengers 100 km into space, return safely to Earth and repeat the launch with the same ship within two weeks, with both flights completed by January 1st, 2005. The competition had the vision to jump-start the commercialisation of space travel and industry the same way Orteig Prize in 1927 inspired and encouraged pioneers such as Charles Lindberg to undertake his solo trans-atlantic flight, an action that lead to today's commercial airways.

More than 20 teams from different countries announced that they would join the space race, amongst them was Scaled Composite of Burt Rutan. Being an space and computer enthusiast I was lucky enough to get to know about him in the early years of my undergraduate studies: a genius and creative engineer who has a brilliant record of innovation in his CV including the Voyager, the first aircraft that circled the earth non-stop non-refuelled. Of course designing and building a private spaceship needs a lot of money, and this is where Bill Gates’ best pal - Paul Allen of Microsoft - came in: he funded Burt Rutan's company to build SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnight and his support made them the fore-runners of the X-Prize competition.

Another interesting fact that makes me feel proud is that the ANSARI X-Prize is named after the Iranian-American entrepreneurs and millionaires the Ansari family (Anousheh and Amir Ansari). Anousheh Ansari was recognised by Working Woman magazine as the winner of the 2000 National Entrepreneurial Excellence award, and was chosen as the winner of the 1999 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

It assures you that the high flying dream of the Ansari family has come true when you look at the last ring in this chain: Sir Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur and the owner of the Virgin group will be the first private company to offer space flights to wealthy passengers. Virgin has set-up a new venture dubbed "Virgin Galactic" (sounds similar to the airline Virgin Atlantic) and signed a deal with Scaled Composite based on which the aerospace company will initially build 5 spaceships for Virgin, each with the capacity to carry 5 passengers in comfortable luxury seats to the borders of space, each for around 100,000 Pounds Sterling.

On we go: a new era has begun in human history, along with a vast domain for creativity and of course countless business opportunities for our generation to explore and exploit.

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