It has certainly been a good news/bad news couple of days.

Bad news: NASA announced that because of damage from the recent hurricanes, the return to flight of any space shuttles will be delayed. They had hoped to launch in March 2005 and now expect it will be somewhere in May to July. And former Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper died yesterday.

Good news: SpaceShipOne has won the $10 million Ansari X Prize. (See image below.) The prize spurred competition over the last few years to develop spacecraft that could be used for commercial space flights. Learn more at http://www.xprize.org/ and at http://www.scaled.com/. And entrepreneur Richard Branson has licensed the technology announcing plans to begin offering flights into space within three years. (The initial cost is expected to be nearly $200,000 per person for maybe seven minutes outside the earth’s atmosphere. And you thought seven minutes in heaven was thrill when you were in junior high….)

Posted by Tim