"From Mashhad to the International Space Station"
was the title of Anousheh Ansari's address to the "Super Science Friday" middle schoolers at the University of Michigan (Flint) campus, May 15, 2009, where I was one of two presenters for "CSI: Flint."
 Anousheh Ansari came to the USA in 1984 and majored in electrical engineering and computer science at George Mason University. She completed her master's at George Washington and then went to work at MCI in 1991. Two years later, she persuaded her husband, Hamid and his brother, Amir, to put their savings and retirement into a new company. In the deregulated telecom markets, they developed call switching via software for voice-over-internet. Anousheh holds several of those patents. She also served as CEO of the company. They sold their enterprise for $550 million and went on to explore wider horizons.
On September 18, 2006, she lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Today, the X-Prize Foundation offers rewards in excess of $10 million each for innovations in Energy & Environment, Exploration, Education & Global Development, Life Sciences. Their partnerships include the $30 million Google Lunar Prize for the first privately funded robot to travel 500 meters on the Moon. On May 4, 2009, they sponsored an eBay auction for the naming of Human Genome Sequences.
Some people are wary of private funding and competitive prizes, and on its website, the X-Prize Foundation carries one such caveat from The Wall Street Journal. Nonetheless, the Foundation asserts that such prizes are efficient and "result in unexpected and unconventional approaches to problems without a clear path to solution."
Their initial award went to Scaled Composites for launching the first privately funded space mission.
X PRIZE Foundation
5510 Lincoln Blvd. Suite 100
Playa Vista, CA 90094-2034 U.S.A
T 310-741-4880
F 310-741-4974
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