I've been watching this story for a while and last night there was a special on the Discovery channel about it, but now the X-Prize contest is over. Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites has won the $10 million, given to the first privately funded company to send the same vehicle into space twice within 2 weeks.
Today is a historic day. The first privately funded vehicle has made it into space (100km up) and back to earth safely. Here's an article about it from MSNBC.
As you all should know, Nasa's mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been playing around on Mars for the past couple weeks. They have sent back some amazingly high quality images taken from the surface. But of course, when Spirit malfunctioned who did they blame first? The programmers! What up with that?
This quote officially wins the "no kidding" prize of the day. Steve Squyres, the Cornell University astronomer who serves as the Mars rovers mission's principal scientific investigator, says "Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre alien landscape. This is like nothing I've ever seen before."