The billionaires’ space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they’re important milestones

Less than two years later, I was in Mojave, Calif., covering an event that changed my outlook. On Oct. 4, 2004, a tiny craft called SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by demonstrating it could reach the edge of space twice in as many weeks. This dramatically reduced the time NASA normally needed to launch, recover, refit and relaunch any space vehicle in its inventory. A successor to that vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, was the craft that safely lofted Branson into the record books last week.