Aerospace designer Burt Rutan talks as Kern County fire chief Michael Cody looks on during a news conference near the site of an explosion. Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo 

An explosion at Mojave Spaceport in southern California claimed three lives yesterday and critically injured at least three more individuals. The blast occurred at 2:45 p.m. Thursday during a rocket-motor test being conducted by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites.

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.

When Brian Binnie piloted SpaceShipOne, the world’s first privately built spaceship, to 367,442 feet in October, he wasn’t just gunning for the $10-million Ansari X Prize. His flight was about the future of space tourism, and quite a few potential customers were watching on television. Just five days before Mojave Aerospace Ventures captured the prize—for reaching suborbital space twice within two weeks—billionaire Richard Branson announced he would soon begin selling tickets for the first-ever commercial space airline.

Mojave, CA

4/18/2003

Legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan unveiled Friday what is probably the leading contender for a manned, commercial space-launch system. SpaceShipOne was revealed to the public at Rutan's Scaled Composites headquarters in Mojave, California fully formed—a launch-ready prototype that will, within a few weeks, begin the series of tests that could send passengers into suborbital flight by early next year.