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THE X PRIZE.
Ian ParkerAbout six years ago, not long after Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, had begun to think seriously of building a plane that could leave the Earth's atmosphere, he woke up at his desert home, a few miles outside the town of Mojave, California, and said, "I've got an idea." As Rutan's wife, Tonya, recently recalled, "We had been dead asleep--it was three in the morning. He ran to the bathroom with a sketchpad, came out waving a sheet of paper, and said, 'I know how to configure the spaceship! A shuttlecock.' " Her husband, she said, was "real close to ...
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