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2009 was another trailblazing year for NASA as America's space agency reached a number of important milestones on Earth and in space. During the year, NASA upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope, discovered water on the moon, increased the number of people living on the International Space Station, and mapped our planet's location in the Milky Way galaxy with new precision. Here on Earth, NASA welcomed a new leadership team, made crucial findings about greenhouse gases, conducted an unprecedented survey of polar ice and launched a test rocket that will help with the design of future space vehicles. - X PRIZE Foundation

In our “Reporter’s Notebook” series, we feature first-person accounts of News Office writers on life at the Institute. Imagine flying all the way from coast to coast, completely guilt-free, in an airplane that doesn’t emit a single particle of greenhouse gas or air pollutants. That could happen someday, perhaps brought to reality thanks to the incentive of a $10 million prize that has been proposed by a team of MIT students. - X PRIZE Foundation

MANCHESTER, N.H. & CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - (Business Wire) FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a not-for-profit organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) today announced a global strategic alliance and a U.S. pilot program to promote the importance of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in K-12 education. Specifically, FIRST and the MIT Alumni Association will marshal resources to collaborate and promote K-12 STEM education through after-school FIRST robotics programs. - X PRIZE Foundation

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting. - X PRIZE Foundation

On a freezing evening in the Mojave desert this week, 800 people huddled under a swaying plastic tent to see the man hailed as the pre-eminent genius of the aerospace industry unveil his latest creation. As storm clouds darkened the sky, howling winds battered the tent, to the obvious alarm of some guests. But Burt Rutan, the engineering brains behind the Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, the craft Sir Richard Branson hopes will soon be taking paying passengers into space, barely noticed. - X PRIZE Foundation

Dean Kamen is the winner of the Popular Mechanics 2009 Leadership Award. His big idea? Transform medical technology while amassing more than 440 patents—and then remake American culture, one future engineer at a time. About 42,000 kids competed in Kamen’s FIRST Robotics competition in 2009, which culminated in a World Championship event in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome. PM editor in chief Jim Meigs and deputy editor Jerry Beilinson joined the inventor in the office of DEKA Research and Development to discuss innovation, Kamen’s hope for the future of America and his hands-down favorite piece of technology ever. - X PRIZE Foundation

LOS ANGELES — After five years of secret construction, the cloak is coming off a privately funded spacecraft designed to fly well-heeled tourists into space. The long-awaited glimpse of SpaceShipTwo, slated for rollout Monday in the Mojave Desert, could not come sooner for the scores of wannabe astronauts who have forked over part of their disposable income for the chance to float in zero gravity. "We've all been patiently waiting to see exactly what the vehicle is going to look like," said Peter Cheney, a 63-year-old potential space tourist from Seattle who was among the first to sign up for suborbital space rides marketed by Virgin Galactic. "It would be nice to see it in the flesh." - X PRIZE Foundation

Google CEO Eric Schmidt breaks down the president's job summit. - X PRIZE Foundation

While NASA frets over a looming hiatus in its ability to launch people into space, a commercial company is poised to unveil the first spaceship for private passenger travel. The formal presentation of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is scheduled for Monday afternoon in California's Mojave Desert, the home base of legendary designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites. - X PRIZE Foundation

#20, Will Wright Image: Kevin Winter / Getty Images Field: Game Designer Position: Leader of the Stupid Fun Club, former designer, Electronic Arts Why He Was Nominated: Wright, 49, revolutionized how people entertain themselves—an alter ego became a tangible way to have fun. In 2000, building on the success of earlier versions, Wright launched The Sims—100 million units were sold, making it the bestselling computer game of all time. His vision for an open-ended design and world-unto-itself style blurred fantasy and reality. At the end of the decade, Wright designed Spore, a game involving species creation that combines role-playing, action, and strategy. This last year saw Wright leaving his home at Electronic Arts to found a think tank for entertainment, the Stupid Fun Club. - X PRIZE Foundation

How Google Can Help Newspapers Video didn't kill the radio star, and the Internet won't destroy news organizations. It will foster a new, digital business model. By ERIC SCHMIDT It's the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load. Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right - X PRIZE Foundation

Segway creator Dean Kamen’s obsession for the last few years has centered on creating a bionic arm with enough electronics to make it one of the most sophisticated devices around. The Luke arm from Deka, a company founded by Kamen, crams electronics, batteries and motors into a package the size and weight of a human arm. It has 18 degrees of freedom, a little short of what a human arm can offer, but still far more than anything we have currently. Its motor control allows wearers to do pretty much most daily functions — shake hands, grab a doorknob, pick up the keys. - X PRIZE Foundation

Fifty thousand feet over the California desert, the world is a vast expanse of blue with a drab carpet of khaki far, far below. Pilot Peter Siebold sets the craft’s trim to 18 degrees, pushes the stick forward, and counts down: “Three. Two. One. Release.” - X PRIZE Foundation

Yesterday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just steps from the White House, a 6-foot-tall rectangular robot whirred to life. Neon balls shot from a compressed-air tube past the President. "Uh oh," President Obama said, taking a step back. "What are they aiming at right now?" - X PRIZE Foundation

This week, CNET's Tom Krazit and Molly Wood interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This is a transcript of their conversation. CNET (Molly Wood): Hi, I'm Molly Wood. Welcome to another edition of CNET Conversations. Today, I'm joined by CNET senior writer Tom Krazit. And we are here at the Google Campus, where we're very excited to be speaking with CEO Eric Schmidt. Thank you so much for having us! Eric Schmidt: And thanks for having me on. - X PRIZE Foundation

He’s created the longest running Role-Playing Game (RPG) series, explored the farthest corners of the Earth and traveled into the vast reaches of the universe. From his elaborate Texas home, Richard Garriott discusses growing up with NASA as a neighbor, his many expeditions, and even space skydiving in an exclusive to Brilliant. - X PRIZE Foundation

Innovation Pays: Inspired by the Spirit of St. Louis, Peter Diamandis started the X-Prize Foundation with a $10 million prize for the invention of a private spaceship. Now, the X-Prize is inspiring designers of a lunar lander and research into genetic diseases. - X PRIZE Foundation

Leaving it to the last minute, the team from Masten Space Systems has made a come-from-behind effort to win the $1 million prize after successfully flying its lunar lander last week. The team flew a new ship, called Xoie, to qualify for level 2 of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. - X PRIZE Foundation

A NASA competition to stimulate commercial space projects has a winner -- Masten Space Systems of California is being awarded the top $1 million prize for demonstrating a lunar lander. The race literally came down to the wire, reports the California-based X Prize Foundation, which oversaw the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge for NASA, part of the agency's Centennial Challenges program. - X PRIZE Foundation

The TEDMED conference gave 400 people a glimpse at the future of healthcare last week, bringing together an eclectic group of innovators, from photographers to stem cell experts, each with a different point to make. Here are some of the highlights. Craig Venter said he has spent the last twenty years digitizing biology. Now, the genomics pioneer is doing something with all of that data. His lab has been transplanting entire genomes from one microorganism to another, building synthetic life forms with machines, and decoding a random soup of genes from seawater using high speed sequencing machines. - X PRIZE Foundation

FIRST : ® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen : to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology, and The LEGO Group today revealed the FIRST ® LEGO ® League : (FLL) 2010 season Challenge: “Body Forward ™ .” - X PRIZE Foundation

Can prize competitions propel energy and climate technology the way they have space technology? The recent proliferation of contests with ample rewards suggests that many people think they can. - X PRIZE Foundation

Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation, wants to use our competitive instincts to make the world a better place. After handing out $10 million to the first private team to achieve suborbital space flight, he's extended his X-prize concept into earthly realms such as automotive engineering, genomics and health care. And while he still sends billionaires to the International Space Station as managing director of the firm Space Adventures, he's lately teamed up with futurist Ray Kurzweil to create the Singularity University, where young entrepreneurs are trained to think about global issues. Ivan Semeniuk spoke with Diamandis about his ongoing ventures on and above the planet. - X PRIZE Foundation

In pursuit of a prestigious prize, people often push the boundaries of what is possible. Discuss COMMENTS (0) The $10 million Ansari X Prize proved that to be true five years ago, when its winners launched a private manned vehicle into space. The prize spawned a resurgence of high-profile competitions, with private foundations and companies putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to solve technological challenges as urgent as building more efficient cars, and as trivial as predicting what movies people would like. - X PRIZE Foundation

Everything is better with a little competition: sports, free markets, and now, rocketry. No, we're not talking about a new space race between China and the USA. Instead, we're talking about a new era wherein entrepreneurs try their hands at building rockets large and small, pitting their best ideas against each other in an effort to win contracts from NASA as well potentially lucrative tourist and scientific customers. Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william... - X PRIZE Foundation

One year ago, Richard Garriott was in Russia, having just returned from a trip to the International Space Station that fulfilled the ambition of a lifetime. These days, Garriott identifies himself as a "private astronaut" as well as a game developer, the pursuit that made him famous and wealthy. - X PRIZE Foundation

Thirty years ago today, Sergey Brin, a 6-year-old Soviet boy facing an uncertain future, arrived in the United States with the help of the society. Now Mr. Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, is giving $1 million to the society, widely known as HIAS, which helped his family escape anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and establish itself here. - X PRIZE Foundation

Five days from now, a bunch of no-longer-amateur rocketeers are going to be at least $1.15 million richer, thanks to a NASA-backed contest for lunar lander prototypes. But the identity of the winners is still up in the air. You need a scorecard to keep track of what's happening in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, which ends this year's launch season on Saturday. Here's a roundup that touches upon the four - oops, make that three - teams in the competition: - X PRIZE Foundation

IF PEOPLE are to explore the moon again they will need ways of travelling across the lunar surface and also of digging holes in it. But because America’s space agency, NASA, spends most of its money on the space station and the shuttle, little is left over for the innovative research and development in areas such as these that many people think it should be carrying out in the first place. - X PRIZE Foundation

Two rocket teams will compete in back-to-back tests this week for what remains of the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge prize for pilot-less vehicles that could take off and land vertically on the moon. They have until Saturday to prevent the top prize of $1 million going to Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Texas. - X PRIZE Foundation