Prize Has Ups, Downs

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Look! Up in the sky! It’s film director James Cameron and the winning eBay bidders on a zero-gravity flight.

The special flight, scheduled for Oct. 9, was organized by Playa Vista’s X Prize Foundation, a non-profit group that uses contests to promote technology. The group auctioned three seats aboard G-Force One, a Boeing 727 modified to simulate space flight by creating short periods of weightlessness.

Suzanne Nichols, a former teacher from Cinebar, Wash., and John Raymonds, an investor from Warren, N.J., were the two highest bidders in the eBay auction for the flight. Nichols bought a seat on the plane for $10,000. Raymonds bought two seats for $20,000 total; he’ll take his 16-year-old son along for the ride.

Part of the attraction was the chance to fly with Cameron, famous for “Titanic” and “Avatar.” Also on board will be Fox Films Chief Executive Jim Gianopulos and author Tim Ferriss, who bought tickets at the standard rate, a little cheaper than the auction bidders paid. The flight leaves from Van Nuys Airport.

Raymonds has flown on a zero-gravity flight before and said the experience was worth repeating.

“It was a blast,” he said. “You do a push-up and you hit the ceiling. It’s like a dream.”

The money from the auction will go to X Prize to fund future events.

The non-profit organized its first contest in 2004, when Scaled Composites, a Mojave aerospace company, won a $10 million prize for a plane that flew into space twice in a two-week period. The goal was to promote private-sector space travel.

“X Prize tries to stimulate new technologies,” said Alex Capecelatro, X Prize project manager for the zero-gravity flight. “We set up these competitions to give people incentive to solve problems that no one is going after.”

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