GalacticMu

The Lunar X PRIZE (hoping to do for lunar landings what the Ansari X PRIZE did for civilian orbital capability) has announced their official contenders. The teams now have until December 31, 2012 to win the whole $30 million purse - late-comers will then have a further two years to win a lesser amount.

I’m a big X PRIZE supporter (minus the spelling and all-caps) (and also, not actually monetarily, just spiritually) and I encourage you to at least respect their endeavor enough to read up about it. The Ansari X PRIZE triggered unexpected emotions for me; I expected to be excited, but I didn’t expect to weep and then get a tattoo of the SpaceShipOne, which is exactly what happened. Seeing Mike Melvill emerge from the tubby little hero of a spaceship broke something loose in my black, dessicated heart, and that something is still floating around in my eyeballs - truly, I couldn’t even resize this photo without getting weepy.

In all seriousness, I’m a pessimistic person. For me, scifi apocalypse stories are where I find solace, because, strangely, they offer the most hope; they at least have a chance of coming true. SpaceShipOne is as close as I get to feelin’ churchly, particularly because it was just a few earnest nerds deciding to make something happen for real. I have true awe for the little man and the underdog, and while many would argue that Paul Allen is as far from those two descriptors as a human can get, I prefer to focus on the designer Burt Rutan, for whom money was not the motivating factor. Rutan was a life-long devotee of aviation culture, a rogue aerospace engineer who often followed his gut rather than established norms. The knowledge that SpaceShipOne now hangs next to Chuck Yeager’s “Glamorous Glennis” in the National Air and Space Museum is enough to make me break into alarming sobs - these are the people that would risk their life for the black, the great vacuum sea, the siren call of an entire universe.

Are you with us?