Prodea Systems’ Co-Founders Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Ansari XPRIZE
MOJAVE, Calif. (PRWEB) October 03, 2014 -- Prodea Systems’ Co-Founders Anousheh, Hamid, and Amir Ansari are commemorating the 10th anniversary of the winning of the Ansari XPRIZE spaceflight competition in a private ceremony in Mojave, Calif. The Ansari’s provided the title sponsorship of the Ansari XPRIZE which offered a $10 million cash reward by challenging teams from around the world to build a reliable, reusable, privately finances, manned spaceship capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface into space, twice within two weeks.
“Ten years ago, my family and I wanted to invest in transforming civilian space travel and the Ansari XPRIZE competition provided a platform for us to disrupt the space industry,” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO and Co-Founder of Prodea. “The Ansari XPRIZE kick-started a $2 billion private space industry. Thanks to the winning entry, the technology used in the Ansari XPRIZE was licensed by Richard Branson to create Virgin Galactic, which will be flying commercial passengers to space for an experience of a lifetime. I look forward to continuing my involvement with the XPRIZE foundation and fostering innovation through competition to solve the most daunting challenges that face humanity.”
The competition launched in May 1996 and was won on October 4, 2004. The first qualifying suborbital flight, under the controls of test pilot Mike Melvill, rocketed to fame on September 29, 2004, soaring to 337,500 ft. The second undertaking piloted by Brian Binnie on October 4 reached 367,442 ft. Both pilots flew SpaceShipOne, the air-launched spacecraft designed by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan with the financial support of Paul Allen, which is the precursor to SpaceShipTwo, the world’s only commercial spaceline owned by Virgin Galactic. Altogether, 26 teams from seven nations competed for the prize, investing over $100 million in aggregate for research and development in suborbital space flight.
With the success of the XPRIZE competition, the Ansari family helped launch a new era in private space exploration. On September 18, 2006, Ansari herself blasted off into space for a nine-day expedition aboard the International Space Station and captured headlines around the world as the first female private space explorer. She also earned a place in history as the first astronaut of Iranian descent, the first Muslim woman, and the fourth private explorer to visit space. Ansari is also the founder of the "What If Prize Competition," designed to spark interest in space science with the goal of encouraging students to use their imagination for innovative ideas. Each year the competition presents unique space-themed challenges and gives students the opportunity to think, search and write their ideas on how to solve these challenges. Earlier this year, Ansari was named as one of the Shenzhen Space Technology Exchange Ambassadors by the Chinese government-sponsored space institute in Shenzhen.
Ansari will participate in a private ceremony on October 4 in Mohave, Calif. Following the ceremony, Ansari will participate in a webcast at 1 p.m. alongside the Chuck Beames, Brian Binnie, Sir Richard Branson, Mike Melvill, and Burt Rutan. The webcast can be accessed here http://bit.ly/ansari10.
About Prodea Systems
Prodea is the first company that delivered on the promise of the connected home while finally making a seamless connected life possible for everyone. The Prodea Residential Operating System (ROS®) is a unified platform of the Internet of Things that enables diverse Service Providers worldwide to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver autonomous, agnostic and easy to use connectivity and services between people, data and devices. Headquartered in Richardson, Texas, Prodea maintains additional offices in New York; Los Angeles; Mumbai; London; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Johannesburg. For more information about Prodea Systems, please visit: http://www.prodea.com/.
About XPRIZE
Founded in 1995, XPRIZE is the leading organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prizes in five areas: Learning; Exploration; Energy & Environment; Global Development; and Life Sciences. Active prizes include the $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE, the $10M Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, the $2.25M Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE and the $2M Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE. For more information, go to http://www.xprize.org.
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Marta Weissenborn, McGrath/Power Public Relations, http://www.prodea.com, +1 408-200-3762, [email protected]
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