杏吧原创

The race to commercialise space, and to win the $10 million Ansari X prize, has intensified. The Canadian da Vinci Project announced on 5 August that it will try to launch its spacecraft Wild Fire for the first time on 2 October, and will do it again within two weeks, as the prize rules require. 鈥淲e are determined to win the X prize,鈥� says Brian Feeney, head of the project and the craft鈥檚 prospective pilot.

This pits Wild Fire against SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft developed by US company Scaled Composites, which is to make its attempt on the prize on 29 September from Mojave, California. The second flight is planned for five days later. To win, a craft has to carry a pilot and the weight of two passengers up to at least 100 kilometres twice within a fortnight.

Wild Fire will be lifted to an altitude of 24 kilometres by a helium balloon launched from the prairie around Kindersley in Saskatchewan, Canada. The 4-tonne, 4.88-metre-long spacecraft will hang 720 metres below the balloon with its nose angled upwards. When it is released, the craft鈥檚 engines will fire for about 100 seconds to reach a maximum speed of almost 4300 kilometres per hour and an altitude of 120 kilometres.

Meanwhile, two other low-cost unmanned rockets vying for the X prize have failed. A 1.2-metre-wide rocket designed by John Carmack, creator of the Doom video games, crashed about 20 seconds after launch in Texas on 7 August. The next day, a 1-metre-wide rocket designed by Space Transport Corporation of Forks, Washington, exploded after reaching a height of 300 metres.