posted 10-15-2018 05:49 PM               

Speaking on behalf of Vulcan Inc., the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers, Stratolaunch Systems, the Allen Institute and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vulcan CEO Bill Hilf released a statement that read in part:

All of us who had the honor of working with Paul feel inexpressible loss today. He possessed a remarkable intellect and a passion to solve some of the world's most difficult problems, with the conviction that creative thinking and new approaches could make profound and lasting impact.

Millions of people were touched by his generosity, his persistence in pursuit of a better world, and his drive to accomplish as much as he could with the time and resources at his disposal.

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.

Allen ultimately spent $28 million to fund SpaceShipOne, which won the renamed Ansari X Prize in October 2004 after performing two suborbital spaceflights less than a week apart. Allen said in his book that his investment in the project earned a "net positive return" for him through the prize purse, which was split evenly with Rutan's Scaled Composites; licensing fees for SpaceShipOne technology from Virgin Galactic; and a tax writeoff for donating the vehicle to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, where it is on display in a gallery alongside Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis" aircraft and the Bell X-1 used by Chuck Yeager to break the sound barrier.

Allen returned to the space business in 2011 when he announced he was funding development of a new venture, Stratolaunch Systems, that would develop an air-launch system on a scale never before attempted. That concept involved the development of an aircraft with a wingspan longer than any other in the world that would be used as a platform for launching rockets.

"Stratolaunch will build an air launch system that will give us orbital access to space with greater safety, flexibility and cost effectiveness," he said at a December 2011 press conference to announce the venture. He said then he planned to spend about ten times as much on Stratolaunch as did on SpaceShipOne.