It's a new frontier for Canada – and for the online gaming industry.
Toronto's da Vinci Project on Thursday unveiled its Ansari X Prize craft, called Wild Fire, and announced that it will try to capture the $10 million cash jackpot with flights in October.
Da Vinci project leader and Wild Fire pilot Brian Feeney said the first launch is slated from an airport in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, early the morning of Oct. 2. It will be Canada's first manned space launch.
The launch – made possible by a cash infusion from a last-minute backer, the GoldenPalace.com online casino – will take place just three days after a Southern California team led by aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan makes its first prize launch.
"This is the kind of sponsor I ultimately wanted," Feeney said in a phone interview after the public rollout of Wild Fire in Toronto. "This is about taking people into space, about doing new things, and that's what they're interested in."
And GoldenPalace CEO Richard Rowe, who has neither met nor spoken to the man whose flight he's bankrolling, said in a statement he's looking forward to seeing people in space.
"As this technology progresses, we want to set up junkets so players can enjoy our games from high above the Earth," Rowe said.
The amount of GoldenPalace's sponsorship was not immediately known, but Feeney said recently his team needed about $500,000 to launch Wild Fire this year.
As part of the sponsorship deal, Feeney will carry a laptop during his brief voyage so that he can play online casino games from space.
The Ansari X Prize requires privately financed teams launching reusable vehicles to make two flights within two weeks to win the $10 million. The flights are suborbital – they must attain an altitude of at least 100 kilometers (about 62.5 miles). In addition to a pilot, the flights must carry two passengers or their equivalent weight.
Rutan announced in Santa Monica, California, last week that his SpaceShipOne will make its initial flight Sept. 29. He hopes to make a second flight Oct. 4, the anniversary of the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik, the world's first orbital space mission.
The da Vinci Project's spacecraft is a spherical, windowed capsule riding atop a cylindrical rocket. Feeney says the red-and-orange combination looks like "a .45-caliber bullet" – one that measures about 25 feet long and about 6.5 feet in diameter.
The plan is for the bullet, with Feeney aboard, to be carried to an altitude of 70,000 to 80,000 feet above Kindersley, a prairie town about 250 miles east of Calgary, Alberta.
The rocket will hang about 750 feet below a 200-foot-tall helium balloon. When Feeney fires the rocket's engine, the ship will slip its tether and zoom to about 2,500 mph, 3.5 times the speed of sound. At an altitude of 50 miles or so, the capsule will separate from the rocket body, then soar to an estimated altitude of 110 kilometers, or about 70 miles. After a ballistic re-entry, the capsule is designed to parachute back to Earth.
Feeney has acknowledged that unlike Rutan's group, his team will not attempt a full run-through of the space mission before making its X Prize flight. Rutan's SpaceShipOne, developed with backing from Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen, flew to the X Prize altitude of 100 kilometers June 21 despite control problems and severe wind shear.
GoldenPalace spokesman Drew Black said Thursday that the company, which operates from an Indian reservation outside Montreal, made a quick decision to back the da Vinci group after Rutan's team turned down a sponsorship offer.
He said GoldenPalace hadn't heard about da Vinci and its need for money until sometime during the last week.
"How did we become aware? It was on TV," Black said. "I contacted Mr. Rowe, and we just couldn't believe it. He has always wanted to conquer space" for the gaming industry.
Feeney called Rutan "more than a worthy competitor" for the X Prize. But he also said he's looking forward to a contest between his own program, which he says was driven by 150,000 hours of volunteer labor from more than 600 people, and Rutan's, which has reportedly gotten at least $25 million from Allen.
"We're going to give them a run for their money, just like we said we would," Feeney said. "But it's pretty amazing to be taking on the third-richest man in the world."
