About: Anousheh Ansari is CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Ansari, along with her family, sponsored the organization’s first competition, the Ansari XPRIZE, a $10 million competition that ignited a new era for commercial spaceflight.
Detail: The Ansari X Prize originally required that a team privately build, launch, and finance a vehicle capable of carrying three passengers to 100 km (approximately 62.5 miles) and safely returning to Earth. A recent modification in the rules for the prize allowed test flights to be made with a single pilot and added ballast to compensate for the weight of hypothetical passengers. In order to claim the prize, the same vehicle had to repeat this trip twice within two weeks. According to the rules and guidelines of the competition, no more than 10% of the vehicle’s non-propellant mass could be replaced between the first and second flights as a demonstration of economic reusability.
