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Teams Pursue Space Flight X Prize

Posted on: Friday, 30 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

Jul. 31--The da Vinci Project is the only all-volunteer effort among the X Prize entrants.

Brian Feeney is looking for money.

"We're rolling out our rocket Thursday (Aug. 5)," said the leader of the Canadian da Vinci Project, the Toronto-based commercial space flight team. "We need $500,000 to conduct launches, and we're short."

Feeney's da Vinci Project is one of 26 teams competing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

The prize is being offered by the X Prize Foundation of St. Louis to the first privately developed, three-seat spacecraft to soar beyond an altitude of 62 miles and repeat the feat within two weeks.

The goal of the X Prize is to change present realities -- that space travel is the province only of governments and traditional government astronauts.

The X Prize competition was inspired by the celebrated Orteig Prize of $25,000, which was offered for the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York. The Orteig Prize was won by Charles Lindbergh and his "Spirit of St. Louis" in May 1927.

Feeney won't say how soon his team's "Wild Fire" rocket will be ready to launch, but he is hoping that aviation pioneer Burt Rutan's American Mohave Aerospace Ventures LLC team out of Mohave, Calif., doesn't beat him to the punch.

"Twenty-four of the 26 teams have resigned themselves to the fact that they can't compete" with Rutan, Feeney said. "Right now, he has an 18-hour advantage on us. We're trying to get additional capital together because we've overcome every technical hurdle there is -- re-entry analysis, designing our own flight guidance software and reaction control system, one piece of the hardware and software after another."

Feeney, a designer of liquid rocket propulsion engines and systems and a member of the advisory board of the Canadian Space Exploration and Development Institute, said the da Vinci Project is the only all-volunteer effort among the X Prize entrants.

Rutan's SpaceShipOne, by contrast, is supported by billionaire Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, who has invested more than $20 million in the project.

"We were only able to bring in $350,000 in cash, and yet we've been able to stand side by side with one of the most accomplished aerospace pioneers of our day," Feeney said. "Nothing on a volunteer basis in this business has ever been tackled before. People have put aside eight years of their lives to do this.

"We are ordinary people doing extraordinary things in this effort."

On June 21, Rutan's SpaceShipOne flew to 62 miles on a test flight after being carried to its launch altitude of 50,000 feet under the belly of a jet-powered airplane. That flight didn't qualify for the X Prize because it flew with only the pilot.

But earlier this week, Rutan gave the X Prize Foundation his team's official 60-day notice that it has scheduled its first competitive flight from the Mohave Airport Civilian Aerospace Test Center on Sept. 29.

To win the $10 million, SpaceShipOne will need to make a second flight by Oct. 13.

Rutan could not be reached for comment.

Douglas King, president and chief executive officer of the St. Louis Science Center, which is the home and educational center of the X Prize, said that before Lindbergh, people who flew airplanes were called daredevils.

"Lindbergh flew the Atlantic 24 years after the Wright Brothers," King said. "Five years later, you could buy an airline ticket across the Atlantic.

"This is the golden era of space exploration. We have the International Space Station, robot geologists on Mars and the Cassini spacecraft that has landed on Saturn. There's a lot of promise in this for young people. It might be realistic that you could be living and working in space in the future."

The biggest hurdle to further space exploration is the cost of getting into orbit, which is about $10,000 a pound today, King said.

"If you could get it to $100 a pound, maybe I could afford to go," he said. "The object is to get a lot of people working on it, a lot of designs and activity. Who knows what you can do?

"The biggest problem of the space program during the past 30 years is there hasn't been a goal everybody could get excited about. You can go on and on about how many inventions and developments have come out of the space shuttle -- personal computers, cell phones, medical instruments -- but you still need an exciting goal."

Among the X Prize candidates is Rocketplane Limited Inc. of Solvang, Calif., which has a mailing address of 4300 Amelia Earhart Road at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.

Mitchell Burnside Clapp, Rocketplane's senior designer and engineer, could not be reached.

Rutan's team appears to be in the lead for the X Prize, King said.

Feeney's Canadians, however, believe they have a chance.

"It's never over until it's over," Feeney said. "As pure competitors for the prize, we're not going to give any ground. We're in it to the end."

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