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In reply to the discussion: Scientists to Hold Bake Sale for NASA Saturday [View all]Posteritatis
(18,807 posts)The list of candidate countries that are stable, open to that sort of thing, and have access to good launch sites close to the equator with easy overland access to the facilities where much of the pretty large and often fragile hardware is getting built isn't exactly a huge one.
You can't just launch from anywhere; you need a safe location as close as you can get to the equator. There's a reason NASA tends to launch from Florida, and Russia launches from southern Kazakhstan, and the ESA launches from Kourou. If you're casting a wider net you end up in places with much more problematic weather, or no useful infrastructure, or currently-insurmountable security problems, or where you have to deal with airspace issues for several countries (which often themselves have additional security problems, mind).
There's a reason that German attempt never went anywhere - if I had the resources to try to set up a spaceport somewhere I'd need to take a whole load of stupid pills to try to do so in central Africa.
The initial X-prize was not a competition to win a NASA contract; it was the initial attempts for private enterprise to try to get something with a person in it outside of the atmosphere, and that attempt could not be made on US soil until doing so was legalized around '04 or so.