It's official. Burt Rutan has announced that Scaled Composites will make a bid for the X-Prize on September 29th and October 4th. The prize will award $10m to the team which can take 3 people (or weight equivalent) over the 100km (62.5 mile) frontier into space, and repeat the exercise within two weeks.

Rutan's dates are significant, as usual. His planned second trip is within 5 days of the first, well inside the two-week deadline, giving him time for another throw if one is aborted. More to the point is that October 4th marks the dawn of the space age with the launch of Sputnik One.

Now, making a private manned flight to win the prize some 47 years after that flight, Rutan is telling us that this is the dawn of the private space age. He is the favourite, but others are on his heels, including the da Vinci project whose balloon-launched rocket will be unveiled in August and fired soon thereafter.

Very soon there will be private customers (including me) paying money for space trips to non-government builders and operators of spacecraft. This money will act as a spur to develop new vehicles, and to bring spaceflight within the domain or more and more people. It is the market's next frontier, as well as mankind's.