Listen As He Talks About The Risks And Rewards Of Private Space Flight

It's hard to believe, but this coming Tuesday will mark one year already since Burt Rutan and his crew at Scaled Composites touched the heavens for the second time with the privately-funded SpaceShipOne, capturing the dreams of many while in the process winning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize. 

Yes, it's been one year since a bunch of hearty souls in the California desert launched the quest for affordable space flight on the wings of a gangly spaceship, elegant in its simplicity, sent rocketing into the sky fueled by many of the same compounds that make up the tires on your car.

(And as was perfectly befitting the pioneer vibe to the whole affair, afterwards they towed the thing around, in celebration, hitched behind an old Ford pickup. Ya just gotta love that.)

While Rutan and the gang may have indeed done the whole thing anyway, without any incentive other than to spite NASA, it can't be denied that the race for affordable space travel would not be as far as along as it is now without that original $10 million reward, as well as the cash incentives that still exist for other teams that complete their goals.

"Evolution through competition" is a Darwinian view that Dr. Peter Diamandis believes is the key to successful private space travel. It was Diamandis's idea to provide a hearty cash incentive for the first team to put a privately-funded vessel into space, and he found the financial backers necessary (the Ansari family) to pull it off.

Today, Diamandis (below) runs the X-Prize Foundation, dedicated to the continuing goal of rewarding those who come up with new and successful ways to put eager passengers into space. The success of the initial X-Prize can be measured not only by the accomplishments of SpaceShipOne, but also in the fact there are several teams competing to put their own vehicles into space -- and don't forget that Scaled is also hard at work, on SpaceShipTwo.

Interstellar altruism isn't the only goal -- those teams want the money, too, and Diamandis wouldn't want it any other way.

With the inaugural X-Prize Cup scheduled to be held October 6-9 in Las Cruces, NM, we thought now would be a good time to revisit a conversation ANN Senior Editor Pete Combs had with Diamandis three months ago.

ANN Talks To Dr. Peter Diamandis

Diamandis is an enigmatic speaker, who celebrates the pioneer spirit of the X-Prize competitors while also being completely unafraid to call NASA on the carpet for its risk-adverse attitude towards space travel. "The inability to take risk has made it extremely difficult" for NASA to go anywhere beyond low-earth orbit, according to Diamandis.

(We'll see if that attitude changes somewhat, now that NASA plans to return to the moon.)

Listen to our featured Aero-Cast, and then tell us what you think. Will the X-Prize continue to reach for the sky, or will it end up stuck on the ground, watching NASA blast off into the skies?

Aero-News Aero-Casts: If it's IN the air -- or space -- we have it ON the air!

FMI: www.aero-news.net/podcasts, www.xpcup.com