Jeff Bezos of Amazon is financing Blue Origin, a space tourism venture - and most minimal web site. Blue Origin could be a contender for the X-Prize - which will be awarded to the first private manned spacecraft to launch twice in 2 weeks. Neal Stephenson of Snowcrash fame is also a Bezos friend and confidant.
Another Dot Com Billionaire backed X-prize venture is SpaceShipOne, above, from Scaled Composites - backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Spaceship one made its firt glide from its White Knight mothership on 7 Aug 03.
Scaled have been using a Beechcraft Starship , above, as a chase plane.
