Friday, May 14, 2004

The real X Games. Light blogging, as I have been at a GIS conference in Portland here. Been talking to people about GIS stuff and how big XML is growing to be in the world of data transfer. More on that later.
For now here is an article on the latest from the X-Prize. For those of you who are unaware, the X-Prize is a $10M prize that will be given to the first private sector launch of a re-usable space craft. The designer must put it into space (defined as 100 kilometers) and then re send it into space within two weeks.
Paul Allen has financed the space ship in this article. The implications of this are huge! Not only are we not using tax dollars to research and test new and cheap ways of launching vehicles into space, but once we do that going to the moon or Mars won't be such a difficult thing.
The 10 million dollar prize is funded by the X-Prize foundation, a private foundation (that you can help fund). The website gives overviews and current status of all the teams competing for the prize.

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