A week after finishing her dissertation on the formation of the moon, Robin Canup danced the lead in Coppelia with the Boulder Ballet. “At the time, it felt like I had a wonderfully full and busy life,” she says, “but I can’t believe now I did it all.” Canup, 35, stopped dancing professionally five years ago. “By that age you’re an old dancer but a young scientist,” she says. Still, there’s an unexpected harmony to her career: Now she studies how moons glide around planets in 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."