Richard Campbell Blogs Too

Just finished recording a new episode of .NET Rocks! My second as co-host.

On this week's show we interviewed Chris Maxwell and Randy Kim from who work at NASA's Ames Research Center on a product called WorldWind. Its similar to Google's Keyhole, but its free (well, paid for by the US taxpayer), and its got a stronger educational bent. Essentially they've gathered together lots of different bits of satellite data that you can use to explore the planet with. Very, very cool. And all written in C# and the .NET Framework 1.1!

The chat room tonight was really cool - plus the WorldWind folks have their own chat channel as well, so we had lots of intermingling between the groups.

Even Robert Scoble showed up and hey, we got Scobleized!

Burt Rutan has officially filed notice to the Ansari X-Prize folks that he plans to make an attempt with SpaceShipOne.

The first flight will take place September 29th, which means the second must occur by October 13th.

The goal is to fly the same spacecraft twice in two weeks to an altitude of 60 miles with a pilot and two passengers (or equivalent weight) on board.

If they succeed, they win a ten million dollar prize. Admittedly they've spent between 20-30 million on the spacecraft, funded by none other than Paul Allen.

The prize offer expires the end of this year, so things are really down to the wire.

SpaceShipOne has already made a space flight up to 60 miles, although not without some problems, making pilot Mike Melvill the first civilian astronaut in history.

Good luck guys!