When aerospace designer Burt Rutan rolled out his manned suborbital spaceflight program and its centerpiece, SpaceShipOne (SS1), from its Mojave, Calif., hangar in April last year, reporters asked about his plans for space tourism. Rutan said he himself wasn’t interested in launching a space tourism business, but he hoped others would be able to use his technology “sometime in the future” to begin a new space industry.
Apparently that time is now. Even before Rutan’s SS1 made its two required 100 km-altitude spaceflights within two weeks (September 29 and October 4) to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group entered into an agreement with Mojave Aerospace Ventures, a company formed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that holds the licensing rights to the SS1 technology. Allen spent reportedly more than $20 million sponsoring the development of SS1, which was designed and built at Rutan’s Scaled Composites.
