Ansari X Prize

Anousheh Ansari (Persian: انوشه انصاری‎; née Raissyan; born September 12, 1966) is an Iranian American engineer and co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI). The Ansari family is also the title sponsor of the Ansari X Prize. On September 18, 2006, a few days after her 40th birthday, she became the first Iranian and first female Muslim in space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space tourist, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. Her memoir, My Dream of Stars, co-written with Homer Hickam, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

Peter H. Diamandis (/diːʌˈmændɪs/; born May 20, 1961) is a Greek-American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur best known for being the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, the co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University and the co-author of the New York Times bestsellers Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think and BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World. He is also the former CEO and co-founder of the Zero Gravity Corporation, the co-founder and vice chairman of Space Adventures Ltd., the founder and chairman of the Rocket Racing League, the co-founder of the International Space University, the co-founder of Planetary Resources, founder of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, and vice-chairman & co-founder of Human Longevity, Inc.

Amir Ansari (Persian: امیر انصاری‎) is an American Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Prodea Systems.

Black Sky: The Race For Space is a 2004 Discovery Channel documentary about Space Ship One, and how a small team backed by Paul Allen achieved human suborbital spaceflight and won the Ansari X Prize. It contains insights about how the rocketplane was built, the challenges they faced when they flew it, the vision of Burt Rutan about the future of this technology (tier two and three), and his thoughts about NASA and government. It won a Peabody Award in 2004.

Starchaser Industries is a privately-owned space tourism company based in the UK. Formed in 1992, the company designed and built several prototype rocket systems for space tourism vehicles. Starchaser's rocket NOVA 1 launched in 2001 from Morecambe Bay. The vehicle holds the UK record for the biggest successful rocket launch fired from the British mainland. Starchaser operate an Educational Outreach Programme that aims to take areas of physics and chemistry and explain their use in rocket building.

The Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X Prize Foundation offered a US$10,000,000 (equivalent to $20,048,801 in 2024) prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable crewed 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.

Bristol Spaceplanes (BSP) is a British aerospace company based in Bristol, England, who has designed a number of spaceplanes with sub-orbital and orbital capabilities. The company's stated goal is "to realise low-cost access to space", primarily through reusable launch vehicles, claiming the cost of human space travel has the potential to be reduced by a factor of 1,000.

Starchaser Industries is a privately-owned space tourism company based in the UK. Formed in 1992, the company designed and built several prototype rocket systems for space tourism vehicles. Starchaser's rocket NOVA 1 launched in 2001 from Morecambe Bay. The vehicle holds the UK record for the biggest successful rocket launch fired from the British mainland. Starchaser operate an Educational Outreach Programme that aims to take areas of physics and chemistry and explain their use in rocket building.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight is a 2016 non-fiction book by journalist Julian Guthrie about the origins of the X Prize Foundation and Peter Diamandis, the first X Prize, the Ansari X Prize and Anousheh Ansari, the entrants into that suborbital spaceflight competition, and the winning team, Mojave Aerospace Ventures of Vulcan Inc., Paul G. Allen, Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan, and their platform of Tier One of SpaceShipOne and WhiteKnightOne.

Space Transport Corporation, or STC, was a company based in Forks, Washington whose goal was to commercialize space. The company was founded in 2002 by Eric Meier and Philip Storm. The company planned to provide small payload launch and space tourism services. The company liquidated its assets in February 2005 and was completely defunct by late 2006.