Airbus makes civilian craft for the aerospace and defence consortium EADS, which is owned by France, Germany and Spain.

BBC: Lion Air planes

Two years later a craft by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and aerospace designer Burt Rutan made two trips into space in 14 days and captured the prize. (Anousheh Ansari later got her wish, a flight to the International Space Station, in 2006.) Diamandis was finally launched.

FORBES: Peter Diamandis: Rocket Man

Jeff Greason, the president of XCOR Aerospace, a company that makes rocket engines for suborbital craft, worries that the X Prize, with its attached conditions, may not in practice lead to the right sort of craft being built.

ECONOMIST: Lift-off for enterprise | The