At the Space Access ‘07 conference earlier this afternoon, Nicole Jordan and Will Pomerantz of X Prize discussed the 2006 X Prize Cup and plans for the 2007 event. The biggest news from their presentation is that, while an official final decision hasn’t been made, it is almost certain that the 2007 event will be held not at Las Cruces International Airport, home of the 2005 and 2006 events, but instead at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, about an hour’s drive northeast of Las Cruces. The base holds an air show every other year, and the X Prize Cup would combine with the 2007 air show, most likely on the last weekend (27-28) of October.

A big focus of the presentation was on this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge event, which is expected to attract more contestants than 2006, when Armadillo Aerospace was the only team that had a vehicle ready to fly. I asked Will how many teams had registered, but he said he was unable to give a number at this time. The event will be able to handle up to five vehicles each for the Level 1 and Level 2 portions of the challenge. In general, he said, the five vehicles that are the first to get experimental permits from the FAA will be the ones allowed to fly, provided that they actually have a completed vehicle associated with that permit. If they get that many vehicles, he said, “Wow, it adds a lot of work, but wow, what a show.” Team registration is open now: the “regular registration” deadline is the end of next week, with a fee of $2,500; a “late registration” period is open through the end of April, but with a $5,000 entrance fee.

A lot has already been said about the Falcon 1 launch earlier this week, so rather than recap and reanalyze the launch from a technical standpoint, I’ll make this observation. It was initially a little surprising to hear that SpaceX people were celebrating, having champagne toasts, and, in general, calling the flight mostly a success. After all, their rocket had failed to reach orbit, the one factor that counts in a launch. In the most binary sense, this was a failed launch: being 90-95% successful is no consolation to the customer whose satellite failed to make orbit.

Of course, though, this wasn’t a satellite launch but rather a test flight, where that 90-95% success is actually meaningful, something I (and others) explained in a news@nature.com article published today. It’s still a little odd to hear people celebrating a success even as the second stage lost roll control, but in any case the launch is a significant step forward in SpaceX’s long-term efforts to develop launch vehicles and spacecraft capable of eventually carrying people into orbit.

I’ll be arriving in Phoenix later today to attend the Space Access ‘07 conference, the annual conference that attracts a large fraction of the entrepreneurial space industry, including a number of companies in or planning to enter the space tourism market. I will not be liveblogging the conference per se, but will post from time to time (as events, technology, and caffeine levels in my bloodstream permit) on conference events, and probably write one or more articles about it for future issues of The Space Review.