It sounds fictional but it's a real challenge. The X PRIZE is a $10,000,000 prize to jumpstart the space tourism industry through competition between the most talented entrepreneurs and rocket experts in the world.
The goal is to be the first of 25+ teams to:
- Privately finances, builds & launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles)
- Returns safely to Earth
- Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks
Keeping on the topic with space technology, Wil Wheatons interview with the operators of the NASA Rover tonight on TechTV was incredible. Equipped with a 20Mhz processor and 256Megs of Flash memory, NASA "uploads" a full days worth of instructions written in C once a day. Then the various 800+ commands are executed at set times during the day. Hopefully they will post this interview online.
Interest in Mars has generated 4.5 billion hits to NASA's website. More then all of last year.