After innovative aircraft designer Burt Rutan unveiled SpaceShipOne and the White Knight, the tandem he hopes will win the X Prize, there was speculation that billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen provided the seed capital. Employees at Allen's investment company, Vulcan Ventures, won't comment on his involvement, and representatives of Rutan's Scaled Composites have stayed mum. But Allen would actually be conspicuous by his absence from the New Space Race, given the stream of other Silicon Valley and Seattle high-tech moguls rushing in to stake their claim to outer space.