Ansari X Prize

Ansari X Prize
Awarded for	"build and launch a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface, twice within two weeks"
Country	Worldwide
Presented by	X PRIZE Foundation
Reward(s)	US$10 million
Last awarded	October 4, 2004
Winner	Scaled Composites
Official website	ansari.xprize.org

The Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a US$10,000,000 prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was modeled after early 20th-century aviation prizes, and aimed to spur development of low-cost spaceflight.

Created in May 1996 and initially called just the "X Prize", it was renamed the "Ansari X Prize" on May 6, 2004 following a multimillion-dollar donation from entrepreneurs Anousheh Ansari and Amir Ansari.

The prize was won on October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch, by the Tier One project designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, using the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. $10 million was awarded to the winner, and more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize.

Several other X Prizes have since been announced by the X Prize Foundation, promoting further development in space exploration and other technological fields.

The X Prize was inspired by the Orteig Prize—the 1919 prize offered by New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig that encouraged a number of intrepid aviators in the mid-1920s to fly across the Atlantic Ocean—which was ultimately won in 1927 by Charles Lindbergh in his aircraft Spirit of St. Louis. In reading the book, The Spirit of St. Louis during 1994, Peter Diamandis realized that "such a prize, updated and offered ... as a space prize, might be just what was needed to bring space travel to the general public, to jump-start a commercial space industry."

...
Wikipedia