New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is to declare today that October 4-9 will be declared as X Prize Cup Week.
Those are the dates for festivities to be held in Southern New Mexico – a follow-on event to last year’s back-to-back suborbital runs of SpaceShipOne from the Mojave, California spaceport and securing the $10 million Ansari X Prize purse.
At the October X Prize Cup events there will be demonstration flights from at least eight of X Prize Cup team competitors. Also to be previewed will be the Tier-1 X Prize Rocket Racer, according to X Prize Cup spokeswoman, Diane Murphy. In addition, in association with this year’s activities, there will be the staging of the largest-ever student space event in the days following the Balloon Fiesta in the Northern New Mexico/Albuquerque area.
Next year, the X Prize Cup will establish regular races, resulting in the presenting of the X Prize Cup for Rocket Racing.
Entertaining events
Other events announced for the “Countdown to the X Prize Cup” include:
n Static hardware displays of the X Prize team vehicles, flight simulations and opportunities to visit with astronauts, spacecraft designers, and X Prize team leaders and pilots
n Demonstration flights of reusable space vehicles by future X Prize Cup contenders at the Las Cruces International Airport
n Education Day at the Alamogordo Space History Museum for New Mexico's next generation of engineers, pilots, astronauts, and space entrepreneurs with more than 2,000 students participating
n During the event, Zero Gravity Corporation's G-Force One will conduct weightless flights
http://www.space.com/news/050413_xprize_cup.html