$10 Million Ansari XPRIZE
OUR FIRST XPRIZE.
The Ansari XPRIZE for suborbital spaceflight. A $10 million competition designed to lower the risk and cost of going to space by incentivizing the creation of a reliable, reusable, privately-financed, manned spaceship that finally made private space travel commercially viable. The Paul Allen-backed, Burt Rutan-led winning team, Mojave Aerospace Ventures proved it could be done. And with that, our first XPRIZE made us what we are today and rekindled interest in the incentivized prize model to drive innovation the world over.
LAUNCHING A BRAND NEW SPACE INDUSTRY.
The Ansari XPRIZE did more than just leverage talent. It leveraged investment in an industry that started from nothing. The competition began with $2.5 million in seed money, which led to a $10 million prize purse. Over the course of the competition, 26 teams invested over $100 million in aggregate for research and development in suborbital space flight. Breakthroughs made as a result of this successful competition led to a private space industry worth over $2 billion today.
Much like the Orteig Prize competition that launched today’s $300 billion commercial aviation industry, the winning technology from the $10M Ansari XPRIZE was licensed by Richard Branson to create Virgin Galactic and a new era of commercially viable space travel is born.
http://xprize.org
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ABOUT XPRIZE
XPRIZE is an educational (501c3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, thereby inspiring the formation of new industries and the revitalization of markets that are currently stuck due to existing failures or a commonly held belief that a solution is not possible. XPRIZE addresses the world's Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself. It motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital.
