Amateur rocketeers reach for space

[Yeo]

A bulbous four-pod vehicle takes flight in New Mexico

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico (Reuters) -- Aspiring rocketeers launched themselves with rocket boosters and sent solar-powered vehicles climbing up a tether on Saturday in a contest that tests the viability of low-end commercial space flight.

The engineers and amateur rocket scientists from California to New York were competing for $2.5 million in cash prizes at this year's Wirefly X Prize Cup held over two days at the Las Cruces Airport in southern New Mexico.

Passionate inventors blasted bulbous four-pod vehicles into the air in a $350,000 lunar lander contest sponsored by NASA and Northrop Grumman.

Competitors had to send their craft, about the size of Volkswagen Beetle and powered by jets of oxygen and ethanol, to an altitude of 50 meters and then land it on a target 100 meters away after a flight of at least 90 seconds. (Watch some of the rocketeers in action -- 1:31)

Other innovators waited for a lull in winds over the remote desert strip to use solar power to move crafted vehicles 50 meters up a cord within one minute in order to claim $400,000 in prize money in the space elevator games.

The competition drew thousands of curious onlookers to Las Cruces to gawk at the futuristic craft and snap up souvenir T-shirts and even rubber balls pitted like the surface of the moon.

Competitors and organizers of the X Prize Cup are looking beyond its playful side and hope the contest will develop low-cost aerospace technologies to put access to space within the grasp of ordinary people.

Make space more accessible
"The only way to make spaceflight cheaper and safer is to do more of it," said Gregg Maryniak, director of McDonnell Planetarium and former executive director of the X Prize Foundation.

"We want spaceflight to become dramatically cheaper and safer because we want to solve some of Earth's problems by reaching beyond the biosphere," he said.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson toured the competition on Friday and has taken every opportunity to promote the desert state as the base for private companies reaching for the stars. He has pledged more than $100 million to develop Spaceport America, which is scheduled to be fully operative by 2010, outside Las Cruces.

British tycoon Richard Branson said last year he would use the site as a base for his space tours firm, Virgin Galactic, which plans to blast tourists into suborbital space by the end of the decade.

Among passengers to sign up are actress Victoria Principal, former star of the "Dallas" television series.

Despite the high hopes, the first commercial rocket launched from Spaceport last month failed to reach space. The UP Aerospace vehicle went off course shortly after lift-off and fizzled out a few seconds into the flight.

Because of last month's failure, officials scrapped Saturday's plan to launch a rocket at the spaceport carrying the ashes of the late "Star Trek" star James Doohan, who played the burly flight engineer "Scotty" in the 1960s show.

"We had calls from people as far away as South Africa who wanted to attend the launch so it was disappointing for them," said Susan Schonfeld of Houston-based Space Services Inc., who planned to blast the ashes into space.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/10/23/rocket.xprize.reut/index.html
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