Slashdot Mirror
X-Prize Overview: To The Edge Of Space, Cheap
_randy_64 writes "The X-Prize competition has gotten a lot of coverage on Slashdot - either because it's cool and geeky or because John Carmack is involved. The Baltimore Sun has a decent background/overview article on the contest in Sunday's edition."
Enough of the overviews. When will I get to travel like I'm on Star Trek? And yes, I don't want to see borg.
Oh well, tick tick tick.... I wonder how much it would cost to buy a ticket to travel on one of these machines when they come out?
Despite how many people will clamor that this is good because NASA has dropped the ball lately, this is good for the scientific community because eventually we will need to find a vessel to replace the aging Orbiter.
I predict that soon, a group is going to fulfill the BARE MINIMUM requirements for the X-Prize competition, and we will see the death of non-governmental rocketry/space-travel. I mean, can't we just use Russia for space tourism?
Seriously, though, once one group has succeeded, what is the immediate benefit to other groups who may succeed afterwards? No $$ usually leads to seriously reduced efforts.
I'm curious about the X-Prize Foundations finances.
:)]
They filed their last Form 990 for 2001 late, and their 2002 990 hasn't shown up yet so I'm assuming they requested an extention for the last year as well. As a confidence builder the fact that they can't close their books by March or so for the previous year is not super postiive.
In 1998 we had this quote:
"The X PRIZE Foundation already has raised more than half of the $10 million purse and anticipates having the remaining funds within a year."
According to their 2001 990 at the end of the year they had $3,000 in cash and $1,000,000 in liabilities.
If someone has already looked into the situation (ie, status of insurance, supporting organization holding funds etc) do let me know, otherwise I'll work to pull together some relevant information.
As I get it I'll stick relevant info up at http://augustz.com/xprize. [Nothing up at the moment and maybe nothing will ever show up...
The innovation around these projects is so cool however. Looking forward to the results!
100k for a 15 minute trip to nowhere is not
worth it.
100k for a two hour suborbital flight
from New York to Tokyo...the economics look
far more appealing. Right now people pay somewhere in the range of 12000 for a first class seat from New York to Tokyo and still have to endure an 18 hour flight. There are plenty of superwealthy people whos time is worth more than their money.
100k for the two hour delivery of a custom fabricated part to keep a factory running that has an idle cost of 10 million a day. Now you see
there is a market.
Now Same-day package delivery from Australia/Japan/China to the US might be worth something.
The comparison of the current technology level of space travel to the beginnings of air travel does have points, but so far we're missing a very important one:
Where are we going to go?
There are no orbiting space stations (no, the currently 2 person ISS doesn't count), no lunar base, no asteroid mining, no space colonies
When avation was beginning, there was an entire world it could open up to new travel opportunities. What is space travel going to give us?
Help find a cure for Gidget.
Think about it. Let's take a 5-year eligibility period. In the first year, XPrize Co. pays out an initial premium and upfront policy load. XPrize doubts anyone can hit that mark, and they really figure it will be more like year 5 or beyond that a winner will emerge (and that is proving true thus far). In the meantime, the insurance company does some investment wizardry with its risk pool, to make best use of the time with the money. The insurance company has probably made money on half a dozen contests where contestants need to peer endlessly into the bottom of their Mountain Dew cans, to determine if they have won, because some prizes go unawarded, or are delayed enough (by a bump-up system) that the investment has been more than recovered before a pay-out, which is still a reduction from the total exposure, since only single-slot winners can be bumped up to the next level (once there are more than one Nth prize winners, they are cut off), and there is no payout at position N, only N+1 up to the Grand Prize.
Applying this effect back to XPrize, they have forecast some probabilities, and minimums. It is only in this year that XPrize has even started to look for a spaceport. Every time there's a governing juris diction (like the FAA) involved, that creates useful delays. It gives the insurance companies time to make more investments. XPrize creates reasonable hurdles that folks need to clear in order to win. One can engineer only so quickly. A pay-out in year 3 would really hurt the insurance company. A pay-out in year 6 means it cost XPrize Co. an extra year's worth of premiums. And that really is the greatest risk of all. Can they afford to keep paying the insurance premiums? If they cannot, well, the insurance company just made a monstrous load of cash.
If you live in a US State with a lottery, can you imagine what the contest would be like if people put money in, and rather than winning an obscene sum, won a trip into space? Sure, it goes to the schools or the environment now (Johnny, this new computer lab was brought to you on the backs of poor people who have a gambling addiction), but what if those untold millions went to space exploration instead? Insurance is just highly organized gambling, which translates to organized crime.
Anyone who gets hurt or killed has only themself to blame. {I'm assuming no collateral damage here - time will tell how valid that is. My guess is that a rocket probably will break up into chunks that are too small to do much harm to anything else}.
For instance, back in the early days of steam transportation, people were quite unafraid to sit astride a tank of water over a coal fire. A few burst boilers later, people began to fit manometers and pressure relief valves to steam powered machinery as a matter of course. Nobody was forcing them to be steam pioneers. They were merely following their own morbid curiosity. [side note: does any religion consider curiosity a virtue?] It cost them their lives, but you have to put that into context. How many people died in experiments with steam transportation? And was the eventual benefit to society worth it? Like it or not, the computer on which you are reading this most probably is powered by some sort of steam engine. Should we have stopped experimenting after the first time someone died? But why stop then? Perhaps we should have stopped messing about with fire the first time someone got a nasty burn. Perhaps we should never have stepped down from the trees {or out of the sea, if you believe some theories} just in case someone stepped on something nasty.
You need to grow up and deal with it. People make mistakes, they die and get hurt. It's up to the ones that are left to sort out how to really achieve the effect their predecessors were aiming for.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I saw Rutan at Oshkosh this weekend . He said he was amazed at how expensive his program turned out to be. While he couldn't reveal the exact dollar amount only that it was as expensive as one Hour of science on the ISS. Oh and for those of you who were wondering the sigificance of N328KF. 328,000 feet is the goal. IMHO he is close, real close. If I had to pick a date it would be 10:35 AM December 17th 2003.
I bet that inter-continental trips will be shortly behind the X-prize (i.e. 5-10 years) for business execs that don't want to ride in a plane for 36 hours and want to write off a thrill ride with a zero-g lay-over as a business expense. Heck, some of CEOs with large saleries might actually show "good business sense" by cutting a day or two of traveling out of a 3-5 day business trip (they make $300,000/per day at $100 million/year saleries).
science is a religion
Go up, land halfway around the Earth.
X-Prixe-3 - Land having circled the Earth. (not orbit, but parabolic boost + glide)
X-Prize-4 - Orbits + return.
After all when someone won the first Kremer Prize and did the figure-8, there was a new prize to cross the English Channel.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.