Source: SchaeffersReasearch.com

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Nov. 30 (UPI) -- Thirty-year-old Larry Clark, already an accomplished commercial airline pilot and flight instructor, is in line to become one of the world's first private astronauts.

Clark's company, Canadian Arrow, was among more than two dozen teams that competed earlier this year in a $10 million race to send a privately developed spaceship into sub-orbital flight. He is the only American among Canadian Arrow's six-member astronaut corps.

Clark had never even flown on a commercial jet before he left his small hometown in upstate New York 13 years ago, moving to Florida to go to college. His total time in the air, in fact, could be measured in minutes.

Then, at age 17, he had talked his parents into letting him ride on a Cessna introductory flight. Yet he moved to the Sunshine State to learn to be a pilot.

"On the flight to Florida, I remember buckling into my seat and they were applying power for takeoff and I thought to myself, 'I hope I like this, this is what I'm doing. This is my career. I hope I'm not scared to death,'" Clark said, in an interview with United Press International.

Canadian Arrow was a long-shot for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, lacking the financial resources and design experience of Burt Rutan's Mojave, Calif., company, Scaled Composites, which won the prize last month. Rutan's backer was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who contributed more than $20 million toward the development of SpaceShipOne.

The Canadian Arrow team, in contrast, has raised about $5 million in private and corporate donations.

None of that matters to Clark and the Canadian Arrow team, however. The real prize is the new space race and why it was created in the first place: to demonstrate that ordinary individuals, and not just government and government-backed entities, can build ships and fly people to space. That is something the Canadian Arrow team is very much pursuing.

"If I could fly tomorrow or choose to go and chase the investment, I'd probably not fly," Geoff Sheerin, head of Canadian Arrow Inc., told UPI. "If we're not working on the (space tourism market) than we may as well pack it up and go home. That's the real prize."

Full Story @
http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/commentary/news_detail.aspx?click=home&newsid=http://app.quotemedia.com/data/newsItem.htm? storyId=1477918

Artist's Rendition of the Canadian Arrow