Space News by Jeff Foust — October 15, 2018
Paul Allen (left) stands with pilot Mike Melvill and designer Burt Rutan after the first
flight to space by SpaceShipOne in June 2004 in Mojave, California. Credit: Jeff Foust
Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft who backed the winning entry in a suborbital spaceflight competition and later funded development of a massive air-launch system, passed away Oct. 15.
In a statement, Vulcan Inc., Allen’s holding company, said that Allen, 65, passed away Oct. 15 in Seattle from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Allen announced two weeks earlier that he had been diagnosed with the cancer again after being treated for it in 2009.
Allen is best known for founding, with Bill Gates, software giant Microsoft. He left the company in the 1980s after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, and turned to various other business pursuits, including ownership of several professional sports teams. At the time of his death his estimated net worth was $20 billion.
Among those pursuits was an interest in spaceflight. “I wanted to do something in rocketry that no one had done before,†he recalled in his 2011 biography Idea Man. That led to meetings in the late 1990s with famed aircraft designer Burt Rutan, who was pursuing ideas for suborbital vehicles to compete for the $10 million X Prize. The two reached an agreement in 2000 to develop what became known as SpaceShipOne.
More:
https://spacenews.com/stratolaunch-founder-paul-allen-dies/
