The X Prize Foundation, as anticipated, issued a press release Sunday evening reviewing the past two days of the X Prize Cup. The release plays up the fact that Armadillo nearly won the level 1 prize Saturday afternoon despite a busted engine; the release cites fuel line contamination for the igniter problems experienced by Armadillo on Saturday. There’s not much new information about Sunday afternoon’s hard start and fire, which still eludes an explanation. “This weekend, we’ve had more problems that [sic] we’ve had in the last six months,” Armadillo’s Neil Milburn says in the release. “We know what went wrong, but not why.” The release also revises the attendance upwards to “more than” 85,000.

Brett Alexander, the executive director for space and X Prize Cup for the X Prize Foundation, brief the media a little while ago about the status of Armadillo’s final, failed flight. Some key points:

• There’s still little in the way of technical information about the engine failure this afternoon. There was not a catastrophic explosion but instead a fire that burned for about a minute or so. “Pieces” came off the vehicle, such as cables, but the overall structure appears to be intact. The vehicle will be moved to a hangar shortly.
• There don’t appear to be any plans for any further official briefings about the accident or event in general, although there will be a closed technical debrief with the judges, Armadillo team, and others this afternoon. The X Prize Foundation plans to publish a statement later today/tonight with more details.
• There were no injuries caused by the fire. The closest people to it were an Armadillo team in a van an unspecified distance away; at the time of the fire they walked away from the site. Fire engines were called in, but the fire put itself out before the trucks arrived.
• Alexander said that despite Armadillo’s failed bids to win a prize purse, the event in general was a success. Armadillo showed considerable flexibility in trying to win the prize, and the static displays by the other LLC teams and other exhibitors got a strong message about the industry out to the public.
• Holloman AFB officials estimate the combined attendance over the two days of the show at 80,000, twice the size of the last air show two years ago, and higher than the 60,000 X Prize estimated would attend. In addition, the education day on Friday attracted 6,000 people.
• Northrop Grumman, who has a two-year deal (2006 and 2007) to sponsor the competition, was “very pleased” with the event even though no one won; they have yet to decide whether to renew their sponsorship. Wirefly, who sponsored the overall Cup last year, pulled out rather late because of financial problems with the company, Alexander said, citing publicly-announced developments regarding that company.
• The combination of the LLC with a conventional airshow worked well, he said. The airshow events helped fill in what would otherwise be dead time between prize events during the day (although there were still quiet periods with little going on, particularly during the times Armadillo was preparing its vehicle for flight.) X Prize is looking at options for next year’s event, which include returning to Holloman; a decision will be made in the next few months; they are obligated under their agreement with NASA to hold an LLC competition once a year through 2010, in one manner or another.
• Two or three other teams came close to participating this year, although none got to the point of doing untethered flights, like Armadillo has been doing for a year. Alexander believes that more than one team will be ready to participate next year.

I just got out of some press events associated with the Google Lunar X Prize announcement this morning here in LA (where I discovered I created a little heartburn among the X Prize folks by linking to the HuffPo piece earlier this morning.) I’ll have more later, but some highlights from the announcement:

• This is indeed a lunar rover prize, with the goal of soft-landing a spacecraft on the Moon, roams at least 500 meters, and returns two “Mooncasts” (hi-res panoramic photos and video);
• The prize is $20 million for the first to achieve the feat, and $5 million for the second; there is also $5 million in additional “bonus” prizes for things ranging from discovering water ice to having the most “ethnically diverse” team;
• Google is providing the $30M in prize money, but will allow other sponsors to come in and support additional bonus prizes;
• The prize expires on December 31, 2014, and the grand prize decreases to $15 million if the prize is not won by December 31, 2012;
• SpaceX will provide Falcon launches “at cost” to competition participants, a savings of about 10 percent from list prizes (according to Elon Musk, who also spoke at the press conference);
• The SETI Institute and Universal Space Networks are also providing communications support for competitors;
• As for why do a lunar lander prize, I asked Peter Diamandis about this after the event. Their top two choices for the next big space prize they wanted to do was a lunar lander prize and a human orbital spaceflight prize. Google was particularly interested in funding the lunar prize (and a human orbital spaceflight prize would have required at least $50M, he said) so that’s the direction they took.

I’ll have more on this later, and also probably in Monday’s issue of The Space Review, as my schedule permits (I have a redeye back to the east coast tonight…)

Later today the X Prize Foundation is scheduled to announce its next major prize competition, which has been billed as “the largest international prize in history” with a Fortune 500 sponsor. However, there is already one credible report about the prize. According to a blog post by Esther Wojcicki on The Huffington Post, today’s announcement will be the $30-million Google Lunar XPrize. the competition will be for the first privately-developed mission to place a robotic rover on the surface of the Moon. The post includes a link to the prize web site, which currently returns a “404 Not Found” error message. (There’s a typo in the link in the HuffPo post: it should be googlelunarxprize.org, not googlelunarprize.org. The googlelunarxprize.org domain is registered to the X Prize Foundation, according to whois.) The article also references a space section of the Google web site; that, too, also returns a 404 error message early this morning.

If this report is correct, then it is not that surprising. A “real” lunar lander competition had long been discussed as a potential long-term prize, either for the X Prize or NASA’s Centennial Challenges program. (NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale will participate in the prize announcement today in Los Angeles, NASA announced yesterday.) And it’s also not that surprising to see Google taking a lead sponsorship role, given that Google co-founder Larry Page is on the board of trustees of the X Prize Foundation and that Google has hosted some X Prize-related events in the past. It does sound more credible than some of the other ideas that have been floated about, like a point-to-point suborbital space prize.

And why should you trust Esther Wojcicki anyway? She’s a high school journalism teacher in Palo Alto, California. She’s also the mother-in-law of Sergey Brin, the other co-founder of Google, so she’s something of an inside source.

The X Prize Foundation announced yesterday that Brett Alexander has joined the organization as its executive director for space prizes and the X Prize Cup. In that position, according to the press release, he will “work to secure financing, create rules, recruit teams, develop rollout and media plans and investigate international partnerships for all future space-related prizes” run by the foundation. He will also “create and manage content” for the X Prize Cup. Alexander, a former space policy analyst in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was previously a vice president for corporate and external affairs with t/Space (he is now a senior advisor with the company). Alexander is also president of the Personal Spaceflight Federation, a position he will retain.

A couple of former X Prize teams plan on appearing, albeit not competing, at the X Prize Cup next month. Via the Lunar Lander Challenge blog is a press release from the da Vinci Project announcing that they plan to participate in the Cup and “show casing a new design”, and well as planning some “major announcements concerning our commercial manned space flight business initiatives”. (Unfortunately da Vinci’s web site is down as of this writing, so you can’t see what progress, if any, they have to show off at the moment.)

Meanwhile, the Romanian group ARCA plans to participate at the X Prize Cup and the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight immediately preceding it, discussing the progress they’re making on Stabilo, their balloon-launched manned vehicle. Stabilo has an unconventional design, looking like an escape rocket mounted on one end of a dumbbell. ARCA believes that they will be ready for manned flight tests of Stabilo by the spring of 2007; presumably they’ll share more details about their test schedule at the Cup.

Finally, SPACE.com has an update about those teams competing in the two Centennial Challenge lander events at the Cup. “We are looking pretty good,” John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, one the Lunar Lander Challenge competitors, said. Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems later told the Lunar Lander Challenge blog that his company is also still planning to participate in the event.

Tickets are now available for the X Prize Cup in New Mexico next month. (Well, maybe not available at the moment I write this Thursday morning: the X Prize cup server was down.) Tickets cost $10/day for adults and $5/day for children and students; two-day passes cost $15 for adults and $10 for students and kids (children under 3 get in free). Active military personnel get free passes with ID, and VIPs (or people who want to spend like VIPs) can buy a $250 two-day pass that includes gourmet food and an open bar.

The press release, not surprisingly, plays up the Centennial Challenges events being held there, including the Lunar Lander Challenge and Space Elevator Games. Also on tap: high-powered rocket launches, “Earth shaking” static engine firings (hopefully not as explosive as last year’s Starchaser engine test), T-38 flybys, and a variety of terrestrial activities.

Today is the second anniversary of the first flight into space by a piloted, privately-developed spacecraft: SpaceShipOne. That flight, as well as the two X Prize-winning flights that followed in September and October of 2004, were witnessed in person by thousands in Mojave and many more on television and online–many of whom were probably interested in flying in SpaceShipOne, or another suborbital vehicle like it, soon.

The good news is that, two years later, you can buy a ticket, or at least put down a deposit for one, through the likes of Virgin Galactic (for SpaceShipTwo), Incredible Adventures (for Rocketplane Kistler’s Rocketplane XP), and Space Adventures (for the Explorer vehicle being developed in Russia, although the company has been signing up suborbital customers for several years now.) Moreover, there are a number of other ventures out there developing suborbital vehicles, with varying degrees of funding and technical progress. Overall, awareness of, and interest in, suborbital commercial spaceflight grew considerably because of SpaceShipOne.

The bad news is that, two years later, you still can’t fly to space yet on a commercial suborbital vehicle. SpaceShipOne was retired after it won the X Prize, and has been hanging from the rafters inside the National Air and Space Museum for nearly nine months now. The end of the X Prize competition also took away an incentive for the other competing teams: one of the flaws of the competition, many of its supporters now acknowledge, is that there was no prize for second place. A couple years ago, the general belief was that whoever won the prize would put their vehicle into commercial service shortly thereafter, making some money and perhaps funding the development of a better next-generation vehicle. Instead, Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites decided to skip ahead directly to a larger vehicle, which won’t be ready for passenger flights for a couple of years, and no one else has stepped into the vacuum that has been created. If you had told most people who journeyed to Mojave two years ago that by 2006 you’d still have to wait perhaps two more years before taking a suborbital flight, you may well have been dismissed as a skeptic and naysayer because, goodness sakes, there’s a suborbital vehicle flying today!

There are, of course, good reasons why things have taken longer to develop than one might have anticipated two years ago: there’s a move to larger vehicles rather than the three-seaters required to win the X Prize, the not-uncommon technical difficulties associated with developing new vehicles, the challenges of financing, and the fact that, in retrospect, Scaled Composites was simply so far ahead of the rest of prize competitors (despite the effort by the X Prize in mid-2004 to drum up a “competition” between Scaled and the Da Vinci Project). Still, I’ve noticed a bit of nervousness among some advocates of commercial suborbital spaceflight because of this gap: it’s been two years and we still can’t fly? C’mon, hurry up!

In an article that I published literally hours before SpaceShipOne’s historic flight, I briefly examined the issue of how historic the flight would be: would it be on the same level as, to use an oft-used example, Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic to win the Orteig prize, opening a new era in aviation; or would be like the human-powered Gossamer Albatross crossing the English Channel to win the Orteig Prize, a notable accomplishment but, in the long run, a stunt? “It will take years–maybe decades–before we truly know how significant Monday’s flight could be to the future of space development,” I wrote at the time, and that assessment still holds. There’s enough activity going on to lead one to believe that someone, at some point, is going to start flying suborbital passenger vehicles commercially, and hopefully make some good money doing so. If, three or five years from now, there’s no such service in operation (or, worse, one or more such ventures started but failed, either technically or financially), there might be legitimate cause for concern about the viability of this market. Until then, those anxious to fly will have to wait a little longer.

In an ISDC presentation Saturday afternoon, Ryan Wilson of the X Prize Foundation described some innovative marketing efforts the organization is planning to promote this October’s X Prize Cup in New Mexico. In the next few weeks, he said, they play to start releasing a series of 30-40 “viral videos”: clips one to two minutes long promoting the event and some of the companies that plan to participate in it. The videos will be uploaded to sites like Google Video and YouTube, where the X Prize people hope people will see them and tell their friends about them, encouraging them to either attend the event or watching the webcast. On that last point, Wilson said that the foundation’s goal is to make the X Prize Cup the “top live streaming event of 2006″. The SpaceShipOne X Prize flights in 2004, he noted, attracted 2.7 million viewers, making it one of the largest online video audiences in history. At the show itself, he said that they’re planning on 20,000 people attending, up from the roughly 12,000 who went to the 2005 event.