Allen first met with Burt Rutan in September 1996 in Mojave, Allen recounts in the book. “Burt had already begun thinking about a supersonic plane that could fly above the atmosphere,” Allen writes. Two years later, in Seattle, this idea took the form of a crewed suborbital rocket. At the time, Allen said he had a relatively narrow goal: “I wanted to do something in rocketry that no one had done before.” He was attracted to Rutan because of his perfect safety record, noting that for space tourism to be viable, it would have to have safety “comparable to the airline industry.”

At that time the project didn’t go forward since Rutan hadn’t come up with the “right design”, Allen writes. When Rutan did—the air-launched system with the feathered wings that provide the vehicle a “carefree” reentry—they reached an agreement in 2000, and by 2002 signed a contract creating Mojave Aerospace Ventures (MAV). They were initially not interested in the X PRIZE because it wasn’t funded, but when it became clear shortly after establishing MAV that it would, they changed the design of the vehicle to increase its crew capacity from one to three in order to meet the prize rules. That, Allen said, increased the system’s cost from a projected $9 million to $19 million. “Based on what I’d heard about bleeding-edge aircraft, I expected SpaceShipOne to come in overweight, underpowered, over budget, and behind schedule,” he writes.

While competing for the Ansari X PRIZE, Allen writes that Rutan in particular didn’t think that they had any competition from other teams, calling The da Vinci Project, the Canadian team that eventually made a last-ditch, but futile, effort to beat out SpaceShipOne, “especially far-fetched.” Curiously, Allen writes that they were concerned about “rumored covert efforts in Eastern Europe”, without offering more details.

Much of the rest of the chapter then discusses the development and test flights of SpaceShipOne. Allen was present for the first powered test flight on December 17, 2003, where test pilot Brian Binnie landed SS1 too hard on the runway, causing it to tumble off the runway but without significant damage. That incident, he said, set back their testing schedule by about two months, as they’d hoped prior to that to make the prize-winning flights in the summer of 2004; they instead took place in late September and early October.

After SpaceShipOne’s initial flight into space in June 2004, where the vehicle just barely made it above the von Kármán line (100 kilometers), Allen recalls there were concerns about whether SS1 could do the X PRIZE flights with a heavier load (it had to carry the mass equivalent of three people, although all the flights had only a single person, the pilot, on board). “In fact, SpaceShipOne hadn’t been pushed as close to its limit in June as it had seemed,” he writes. The vehicle was remarkably sturdy, with aerodynamic safety margins of 2.1 to 3 for various components (compared to 1.6 for a typical airliner), and engineers were able to reduce the vehicle’s weight to improve its performance. They also found they could put more nitrous oxide in the vehicle’s oxidizer tank by reducing the ullage, or empty space, that wasn’t needed since the oxidizer didn’t heat up and expand as much as first thought, in part because they took off in the early morning and quickly climbed to higher, colder altitudes.

Allen writes that a month before the June SpaceShipOne flight, Richard Branson approached him about licensing the SpaceShipOne technology. That led to a contract signed in September 2004 “that could net me $25 million over the next fifteen years.” Branson was at the prize-winning flight on October 4, and, as SpaceShipOne was ascending towards space, said to Allen, “Paul, isn’t this better than the best sex you ever had?” Allen didn’t respond, but according to his book he did think, If I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn’t enjoy it very much.

Allen could enjoy it, though, when SS1 safely returned and captured the prize. When he heard the roar of the crowd that had assembled in Mojave for the flight, “it struck me that SpaceShipOne was more than some momentary spectacle. It offered hope to everyone who aspired to journeys beyond the Earth.”

In the end, he writes, SpaceShipOne did come in over budget: he said the program’s total cost was $28 million, in the ballpark of previous estimates of its cost. He added that he achieved a “net positive return” on that investment by 2006, thanks to the prize money (he split the $10-million prize with Rutan), the Virgin licensing fees, and also the tax writeoff from donating SpaceShipOne to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “For a time I was tempted to stay involved in the effort to commercialize space tourism,” he writes, but made a decision to step back several months before SS1 won the prize, letting Virgin Galactic take the lead. As he told Charlie Rose earlier this week, he is now considering getting back in.

While Allen has a financial involvement with space tourism ventures, he’s not interested in flying himself. “But seeing up close what’s involved in spaceflight gave me pause. I’m not an edge walker.” What the SpaceShipOne experience did do, though, was restore his “boyhood sense of wonder” he had when he looked at the night sky. “It was good to get it back.”

The big announcement Monday was the news that the Southwest Research Institution (SwRI) has purchased seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx vehicles for research missions. SwRI bought a total of eight seats—six on Lynx and two on SS2—with an option for nine more. (XCOR actually announced its part of the deal last Thursday, while Virgin waited until Monday.) Three SwRI researchers will fly on this missions, conducing several experiments. SwRI associate vice president Alan Stern, one of three who will fly, said at a press conference Monday that the experiments include a biomedical monitoring harness, a microgravity physics experiment to study asteroid regolith, and an astronomical imaging sensor. (For some additional background on this, see my article in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, incorporating some of these developments.)

On the vehicle side, five suborbital vehicle developers—Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin, and XCOR—presented in a panel session at the conference. All but Blue Origin presented at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation conference earlier in February, and are summarized in my TSR article linked to above, so there were not much in the way of new developments (Blue Origin, not at the FAA conference, didn’t offer much in the way of vehicle development updates.) Armadillo’s Neil Milburn did say that Armadillo is currently performing cryo load tests on its “Tube” (aka “STIG”) rocket this week; if those go well they plan a first flight test as soon as March 9 from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

One other development of interest: in his plenary talk Monday morning, FAA associate administrator of commercial space transportation George Nield revealed that the FAA’s 2012 budget proposal includes a $5-million “Low Cost Access to Space” prize. Few other details about the proposed prize are available, although Nield said the FAA would work with other agencies, including NASA and the Defense Department, on implementing the prize.

“In support of its mission to broaden public awareness of the benefits of space exploration, the Aerospace Research & Engineering Systems Institute, Inc. is giving the public the opportunity to take the ride of a lifetime to the edge of space! We have established an innovative contest giving any U.S. citizen age 18 or older the chance to purchase tickets at $10 a piece to be placed into a raffle,” read the opening paragraph of the ARES Institute press release, emailed late Friday by the organization’s executive director, Matthew Travis. Later, the press release notes: “The contest will end when either the required number of tickets have been sold to cover the prize costs or on December 31, 2012, whichever comes later. This ensures that sufficient funds are raised for the spaceflight and that everyone will have an adequate opportunity to purchase tickets.”

Both the explicit charge for the tickets and the requirement that a certain number be sold, though, appeared to run afoul of Florida law. Section 849.0935 of the Florida Statues does allow nonprofits like the ARES Institute to carry out “drawings by chance” like this one, but with several conditions. One of them is that it is unlawful to “require an entry fee, donation, substantial consideration, payment, proof of purchase, or contribution as a condition of entering the drawing or of being selected to win a prize.” (It does go on to state that organizations are allowed to suggest a minimum donation.) It’s also unlawful to “condition the drawing on a minimum number of tickets having been disbursed to contributors or on a minimum amount of contributions having been received”.

The current rules make no mention of an entrance fee or a number of tickets sold. “No purchase is necessary to enter the drawing, but donations are accepted and encouraged,” the rules now state. A $10 donation, for example, will get you an entry as well as a DVD and a six-month subscription to access portions of the Spaceflight News web site, valued at about $40. The rules now also explicitly state, “There is no maximum number of tickets that may be issued.” (There’s no mention of a minimum number, either.)

That’s a change from the old rules, a screenshot of the cached version of which is below. “The price of a ticket is $10,” the rules state, with 20% of the cost going to the ARES Institute for overhead costs associated with the competition and to support the organization’s other activities. The next rule states: “A minimum of 30,000 tickets will be sold before a winner is selected.” And the following rule: “Contest deadline is either when 30,000 tickets are sold or midnight, December 31, 2012, whichever occurs last. Under no circumstances will fewer tickets be sold than are required to award the prize unless the contest must be terminated for reasons beyond the control of ARES Institute.”

A screenshot of the original competition rules, as they appeared on the ARES Institute's web site on November 13.

ARES Institute made no announcement about the changes, or why they were made. Over the weekend I emailed Mr. Travis asking him a couple of questions about the competition, including that state law appeared to prohibit a mandatory charge on entries. I received no response from him, but by Wednesday morning at the latest the updated rules had been posted. (There’s no evidence, though, that my inquiry led to the rules change, only that I never heard back from the organization and only later found that they had since changed the rules.)

There’s one other change in the new rules worth noting. The current rules mention only that the winner will get “a commercial passenger spaceflight experience on a passenger aerospace vehicle supplied by commercial provider”, generically referred to in the rules as a “Spaceflight Provider”. The older version of the rules, though, specifically mentioned Virgin Galactic as the spaceflight provider (“a commercial passenger spaceflight experience aboard an aerospace passenger vehicle owned and operated by Virgin Galactic (e.g. SpaceShipTwo).”) Other elements of the original rules prohibited Virgin Galactic employees and their families from participating, and also noted that “Virgin Galactic is the sole operator of the spaceflight and has sole discretion over legal and contractual obligations between Virgin Galactic and the prize winning participant.” While those rules also noted that the ARES Institute is not affiliated with Virgin, it appears that either the organization is hedging its bets about availability of suborbital spaceflight operators or was asked not to explicitly identify Virgin in the rules.

• Funding – 20 possible points – Measures how far along the teams are in their acquisition of funding based on their publicly stated estimated mission costs
• Innovation – 10 possible points – Measures how much innovation is being used across the entire project. This includes new inventions and clever reuses of existing resources and technology
• Social Savvy – 10 possible points – It’s 2010 and connecting with people will require the use of social networks and other avenues in order to gain mindshare of both influential thinkers and the “people on the street”
• Connections – 10 possible points – Measures how connected are the people involved in the team leadership to the outside help and expertise they will need to execute their mission.
• Progress – 10 possible points – Measures our perception of their progress to being able to launch.
• Feeling – 10 possible points – Measures just our gut feeling about the team. Things like that look in a leader’s eyes when they speak.
• Inspiration – 10 possible points – Measures the ability to inspire others.
• Rover/Lander Completion – 10 possible points – How complete is the actual build.
• Participatory Exploration – 10 possible points – Measures the teams involvement in involving others. People need to feel directly connected to the exploration of space in order to have a long term impact on their thinking.

It’s certainly a comprehensive examination of the teams, and Michael Doornbos deserves credit for putting it together. However, if the goal is to measure which teams are closest to winning the prize, the categories and their weighting should be reconsidered. Some comments:

1) While the scorecard weights funding more than any other category, it’s still not weighted heavily enough. Getting enough funding to carry out a mission is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the competition, given that none of the teams are independently wealthy or (with, perhaps, the exception of new team Rocket City Space Pioneers) have the backing of major corporations. You can have a great concept, an impressive social media strategy, and inspiration oozing out your virtual pores, but without money you’re never getting off the ground.

2) Similarly, hardware development should be weighted more: it’s a key differentiator between teams making serious progress towards going to the Moon versus those with flashy web sites and gorgeous illustrations, but nothing else.

3) Several of the other categories should be weighted less, or even combined or eliminated: social savvy, connections, feeling, and inspiration among them. Social media is nice to have, but beyond the requirements set forth by the competition it’s not essential. And some of the metrics are admittedly extremely subjective (see “feeling”).

4) Since progress is captured in other areas, such as funding and hardware development, having a separate progress category seems redundant.

A simplistic alternative would be to give one-third weight to funding, one-third to hardware development, and one-third distributed among the other categories. Even that, though, may underweight funding and hardware.

The $10 million per year FY 2011 request for Centennial Challenges will allow NASA to pursue new and more ambitious prize competitions. Topics for future challenges that are under consideration include revolutionary energy storage systems, solar and other renewable energy technologies, laser communications, demonstrating near-Earth object survey and deflection strategies, innovative approaches to improving the safety and efficiency of aviation systems including Next Generation Aeronautics efforts, closed-loop life support and other resource recycling techniques, and low-cost access to space. Annual funding for Centennial Challenges allows new prizes to be announced, addressing additional technology challenges that can benefit from the innovation of the Citizen inventor.

In addition, NASA is planning a one-day technical symposium this Thursday featuring winners of several of the recent Centennial Challenges. That will be followed Friday by a recognition ceremony for the winners, featuring NASA administrator Charles Bolden. There’s also talk that NASA will use the event to announce one or more new prizes.

The bad news was that there was a problem with the engine: a glitch in the cooling system caused some damage to the engine chamber and, instead of risking further damaging the engine and perhaps losing the vehicle, they elected not to make the return flight. They do have two more flight opportunities in October, and believe they’ll have new engine chambers ready to go by then to make another attempt.

You’d think the team might be a little down because they couldn’t make a complete Level 1 flight, but instead they seemed quite satisfied with the effort. Note that this was only the second free flight for Xombie, and the first was just late Tuesday afternoon. This flight was also much higher and longer than yesterday’s, and other than the engine problem everything went well.

I took some photos of the flight and will get some up this evening (I’m back at the conference for the remainder of the day), along with any additional notes. I suspect soon Masten and/or X PRIZE will also have some photos and videos of the flight posted online.