Another day, another failed attempt to forward space technology. Less than a week after the Space Elevator Games concluded without a winner, the X Prize Cup followed suit. The much favored Armadillo Aerospace—the only one of nine entrants ready by the start of the event—dashed hopes when their lander exploded while still on the launch pad. Accordingly, no one walked away with the $350,000 Level 1 purse, leaving our LANDR proposition (trading in the mid-60s at the start of the competition) to close out at $0. Sorry space fans, better luck next time.—Abby Seiff

That tiny speck in the distance is Armadillo Aerospace's MOD 1 aircraft, right before not quite winning the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico on Saturday. To win Level One, the lander has to rise up to 150 feet in the air, hover for 90 seconds and land on a pad 100 meters away. Then it has to do the same thing in reverse. MOD 1 nailed the first part, but failed in the final stretch of its reverse trip. A nozzle failure knocked the lander off balance with only seven seconds to go, causing it to miss the landing pad. As a result, the $350,000 prize is still unclaimed. —Seth Fletcher

Update: Sunday morning's attempt failed, too, again on the reverse trip. Sounds like the problem this time was a crack in the MOD 1's engine—MOD 1's new engine, which the Armadillo team installed after yesterday's failed try. Word is they'll try it Level One again this afternoon.

Another update: No dice for Armadillo this year. Their afternoon attempt failed; there was talk earlier today of a possible third attempt this evening, but according to an X Prize spokesperson, Armadillo founder John Carmack decided against it. That means it'll be this time next year, at the earliest, before anyone wins the prize.

As the latest entrant into the rapidly-expanding space tourism field, EADS will face some stiff competition. Launch the gallery ["View Photos" at left] to see just how many companies worldwide will be vying for your space-tourist dollar

The Wirefly X Prize Cup was a three-ring circus of space-related entertainment for the thousands of spectators who filed in to experience rocket launches and flight simulations, meet astronauts and tech dignitaries, and watch teams of engineers vie for $2 million in NASA-sponsored prize money. But although the action was brisk, all three of the NASA prizes–the $200,000 Climber Challenge, the $200,000 Tether Challenge and the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge–went unwon over the course of the weekend.

The X Prize Cup, an annual rocket race and showcase set to touch down every October in Las Cruces, New Mexico, held its inaugural gathering on October 9. Founder Peter Diamandis, whose X Prize Foundation last year awarded $10 million for the first private manned spaceship, plans for the XP Cup to be a chance for space fans to meet the engineers and pilots of a new generation of commercial spaceships and to watch them compete in rocket races both in and out of the Earth's atmosphere.

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.

Even as they embraced him as amiably as suburbanites welcoming a newcomer to the neighborhood, leading X Prize contenders had a message for Burt Rutan: Bring it on.



"Many people seem to be overreacting," says John Carmack, a computer-game legend (Doom, Quake) and founder of Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas. "Burt is somewhat further along than we had hoped. But we still feel we have a solid shot of getting there first."