x prize cup

Dont count the Rocket Racing League out just yet. After a lengthy delay and intimations of its demise, the league has finally announced exhibition flights. Pending FAA approval, a ten-minute flight will take place the first weekend of August at this summers EAA Airventure festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Granger Whitelaw made the announcement this morning at a press conference in New York, admitting that the news was coming some fifteen months later than he had hoped. I will take full responsibility for the delay, he said.

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

On day two of the 2007 X Prize Cup, between dealing with Armadillo Aerospaces faltering attempts to win the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and serving as master of ceremonies for the days events, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis took a few minutes to talk to PopSci about the future of his organizations marquee event. Read the interview after the jump.—Seth Fletcher

Image Courtesy Zero-Gravity Corp

The Wirefly X Prize Cup kicked off Thursday with the exclusive X Prize Executive Summit, a high-powered brainstorming and networking event that brought together a distinguished group of the world's most influential entrepreneurs, astronauts, heads of NASA and the FAA, tech-industry experts and visionaries to talk about the future of the emerging personal-spaceflight industry.

Peter Diamandis is at it again. I'm sitting in a room at the 2006 International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, where Diamandis is announcing his latest prize to spur entrepreneurial space innovation. (Diamandis, as you'll probably recall, is the impresario behind the $10-million Ansari X Prize, which spurred a race to develop a privately-funded suborbital spaceship that culminated in the successful November 2004 flights of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne<.) This time, in conjunction with NASA's Centennial Challenges program, he's got his eye on the moon—specifically, landing on it. His Lunar Lander Challenge will award cash prizes in two categories, to be demonstrated and judged at this year's X Prize Cup in New Mexico. Build a lander that can successfully rise to a height of 50 meters, stay aloft for 90 seconds while traveling 100 meters, land without incident on a flat landing pad, then repeat the feat, and you'll score $350,000. Upping the ante a bit, if your lander can stay aloft for twice as long and land on a surface that simulates the moon's surface, you're looking at a $1.25-million payday. You'd better get working, though, because time is tight: The X Prize Cup runs from October 18 to 21.  —Mark Jannot

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.