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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> To entice Branson and his space ambitions, taxpayers in New Mexico funded the bulk of the costs for the $220 million Spaceport America.

This was not, to my understanding, connected to the X Prize. Also they didn't win the X Prize according this article [0].

[0] > A team led by Burt Rutan would [claim the X Prize eight years later](https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2004/06/3908-2/), barely within the deadline. Rutan’s team built SpaceShipOne, a small rocket-powered vehicle dropped from an aircraft.

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Or you know, you could just go to their website and confirm that in fact, they did win it[0]

There will always be naysayers, detractors, and people who will always question the value of exporation and human inventiveness.

Like in business, if it was obvious, it would have long been done. Yes, it does tak ea bit of brashness and self serving to do new things. and their practically is seldomly obvious at the beginning.

But this is EXACTLY how humanity moves forward!!! The crazy ones, the selfish ones. The ones that sometimes do it for the glory, or just because its' hard.

It's very easy to critique, but in the words or someone else... "what have you done that is so great?"

[0]https://www.xprize.org/prizes/ansari

oh, and the relation to virgin galactic...

" In 2004, it signed a deal with Virgin Galactic to develop the Virgin SpaceShip, a suborbital spacecraft, for space tourism. Virgin Group and Scaled Composites have subsequently formed a joint venture, The Spaceship Company, to manufacture the spacecraft."[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Aerospace_Ventures

I guess New Mexico put the money down so that it can get it back in taxes and jobs once it becomes a "space hub". We see this kind of gov/public offers all the time to auto-makers for example and that's a boring sector lacking any kind of innovation.

Thanks for the summary

I’ll use it against cynicism in the future!

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