High-tech financiers in race for space

She comes from Iran; he's from Australia. But Anousheh Ansari and Kevin Kalkhoven have a lot in common: Both are entrepreneurs who got rich during the tech boom and started venture capital shops. They also share a passion for space travel and have become the two biggest contributors to the X Prize Foundation -- a group offering $10 million to the first team to build and send a piloted, privately funded spacecraft on a suborbital flight twice within a two-week period.

"I've seen the brilliance of independent science and finance building the most comprehensive technology base in the world in Silicon Valley," says Kalkhoven, 60, a former chairman and CEO of communications equipment company JDS Uniphase, who became fascinated with space while growing up in Adelaide, Australia, and pledged about $1 million to the foundation earlier this year. "I believe the same kind of brilliance will result in the same kind of developments in aviation." He cashed out more than $100 million in stock when he left JDS in 2000 and now runs Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kalkhoven, Pettit & Levin.

Ansari, 38, co-founded network switch developer Telecom Technologies in 1994 and sold it to Sonus Networks in January 2001 for $440 million in stock; today she runs Richardson, Texasbased venture firm Prodea. She donated several million dollars to the X Prize Foundation in late 2001, and the award is now called the Ansari X Prize. Her funding also paid for a so-called hole-in-one insurance policy that will cover the cost of the prize if it is claimed this year.

Twenty-seven entrants from seven countries are competing. The front-runner is SpaceShipOne, a $25 million craft financed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, and designed by Burt Rutan, who in 1986 co-piloted the light aircraft Voyager around the world in nine days without refueling. Their team is planning the maiden launch of SpaceShipOne from a test center in California's Mojave Desert for June 21; if it reaches an altitude of 62 miles, it will go on record as the first commercial manned space vehicle.