The race for space heats up

It looks like a second party has announced an official attempt at the Ansari X-Prize, which will give $10 million dollars to the first team able to get a rocket able to carry three people 100km into space twice within two weeks.

We’ve all seen video of Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne and their first test launch, and we now know the first of their two required official flight attempts will be conducted on October 4th, which happens to be the anniversary of the launch of Sputnik.

A second team, the da Vinci Project has now announced that they will make their first of two official flights on October 2nd. The rocket, the Wild Fire, is interesting in that it’s launched from a helium balloon platform.