Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Own X Prize?
Roger_Explosion writes "NASA has announced that its 2005 budget includes 20 million dollars allocated to what it calls 'Centennial Challenges.' These are described as 'a series of annual prizes for revolutionary, breakthrough accomplishments that advance exploration of the solar system and beyond and other NASA goals.' The article on the X Prize site seems to suggest that this was a collaborative effort between the X-Prize organisation and NASA. You can read the story on the X Prize site."
Although I am happy that funds like this are reviving the human desire to develop more space bound technology, this x prize is to jumpstart the space tourism industry.
I see in my mind's eye several hawaiian shirt and sunglasses wearing citizens doing limbo and playing shuffle board on a double decker space bus. It just feels tacky and it is far removed from my utopian Star Trek TNG tendencies of space exploration.
Is humankind so pathetic that the only reason we want to go into space is to expand the tourism industry?
Seems like a way for NASA to capatalize off of geeks with big ideas
Finally NASA realizes that the best way to produce innovation fast is to put it into the private sector! I am looking foreward to more programs like this, though this one will probably have limited success because of the small amount being put in compared to NASA's total budget.
The $20M is just icing.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
2004 is already shaping up to be a banner year for space exploration. I can hardly wait to see what kinds of advancements come next. Competition is healthy, let's hope for a very competitive exploration of the cosmos.
www.lonseidman.com
The money recieved for the X-Prize would be nothing compared to what a successful space tourism industry could make, especially if you own the only company that can put tourists into space on a regular basis. Everyone's seen the polls where people say they would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hours in space, and this is what the companies are aiming for; this is why people are investing in X-Prize.
"Those 20 million should be spent on AIDS/Cancer research" replies!
Really, I never saw the X-Prize being a real big deal technology wise. The same goes for future prizes. Sure, the technology is great and all, but couldn't NASA do something similar on its own? Absolutely (though it would probably take more time and money). The point is the same as the aviation prizes a few decades back, while there might be a couple good "breakthroughs", they won't be revolutionary. The point is to get the "common man" excited about space travel. Remember the Simpson's when Homer goes up on the Shuttle? Same concept, different angle. People feel disconnected from the space program in the same way they feel disconnected from the military. That needs to be fixed. The Bush administration has made a wonderful decision to use the tools of the past (the prizes) to increase interest in space. Once the public is interested, NASA will have to get its act together better, and start making results, otherwise the public is going to demand the heads of the administrators. Also, we'll see more corporations entering the fray to profit off of this increased interest. And the end result is better and cheaper space travel and more R & D. Looks like everybody wins.
Sure, it won't cover the cost of the development, but it is still a rather hefty prize, and as such, it gets quite a bit of exposure. Whichever company wins the X Prize is going to be getting a lot of media exposure and probably a lot of consideration in terms of companies wanting to develop commercial space programs.
The Navy can make a ship that generates 40 megawatts (50,000 HP).
The Navy can make a ship that is completely self contained.
The Navy can make a ship that generates oxygen and scrubs the CO2 (and doesn't fail either).
The Navy can make a ship that can stay on self-sustained 6 month missions with a crew of hundreds.
NASA can't do more then seven crew for two weeks.
The Navy says "Can do!" and builds the Seawolf class submarine.
NASA says, "huh?"
(picture Conan O'Brien doing his Bush impression)
And if one is at all curious one should ask one's self this question: "When has a military power ever allowed a civilian agency to have more advanced technology than they do?"
Hmm?
I thought so.
Happiness is asking the right questions.
There is no energy crisis. Never has been, never will be.
First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created, nor destroyed.
First law of business: Make the consumer believe the product is scarce, then package and sell it in a format that can be controlled (ie. barrels of oil can be controlled, solar roofs can't).
The captured solar energy of a 150 mile by 150 mile square area of Nevada desert would provide the United States with all its energy needs: consumer, residential, transportation, commercial and industrial; oil, gas, coal, electric, etc. combined. Yes. It's a fact.
And we don't need any new technology to do it either. A simple coal, gas or oil fired plant can be retrofitted with a different heat source.
Do you know how many of these we could have built for the over $100 billion spent on securing middle east oil? 10? 100? No, _1000_. Yup! Ouch.
But we _are_ running out of oil. And we're running out of it much faster than anybody cares to inform you.
How much did you spend on heat this winter? On hot water? On AC last summer? On $2/gal gas for your Camry and SUV? It's time we had Open Source Energy, don't you think?
Your friendly neighborhood,
JSMS III
p.s.
For every four barrels of oil we burn, we're only finding one new one.
Again, for every four barrels of oil we burn, we find only one new one.
And again, for each new barrel of oil discovered, we're burning four from the old fields.
Who was the greatest exporter of oil to the United States last year (2003)?
Saudi Arabia? No. Venezuela? Nope. Iraq? uh-uh.
Who was it you ask? Canada! How 'bout that, eh?
Now ask yourself, why? How's that? What the heck is going on?
look what it did for the internet! better than space tourism i think
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Hey! They should be offering a prize to the best low-cost, low-risk tech to save Hubble.
Um, that's nice. Wake me when we have 100% efficient solar cells, so that we can actually have total "captured solar energy". Oh, and when it's possible to manufacture 22,500 square miles of solar panels without utilizing massive quantities of some very nasty materials. Oh, and when the things will install and maintain themselves. Oh, also, and when we cease to have power loss in transmission. Oh, and when we have retrofitted our entire economy to use one power source (alternating electric current), instead of the variety we currently use.
But we _are_ running out of oil.
No kidding. Like they told me in grade school, we'll be bone dry by 1985! Time to hit the panic button.
It's time we had Open Source Energy, don't you think?
Energy which is distributed so that its source code can be freely examined and modified by the end user?
Who was it you ask? Canada! How 'bout that, eh? Now ask yourself, why?
Because they're closer than everybody else?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Not so much anymore, but about ten years ago when Russia and the United Space were regularly sending people up into space for research, or bragging rights, or whatever they did it for, it was shown that the Russian system was a lot more efficient, and cheaper.
Actually, the Russian system for sending non-people up into space is more efficient and cheaper, too, despite the fact that even the USA is using expendibles for that.
But I'm not arguing with your main point. It's cheaper to design expendible rockets than reusable rockets because the requirements aren't as strict, and it's much easier to design expendible rockets well because you can fly prototypes rather than being economically forced to depend on your first multibillion dollar white elephant. There is no appropriate comparison between the Space Shuttle, our first partially reusable rocket, and the mature expendable boosters of the time; the Space Shuttle is more analogous to the earliest prototype expendibles, and it's stuck in that state because we weren't willing to call the first design a "sunk cost" and start improving it. We've been able to redesign expendables again and again, whereas with the Space Shuttle we've mainly fixed the SRB O-rings and started using new alloys in the external tank.
Does this mean the solution to cheap space flight is to stick with the mature expendables? I doubt it. In the long term, R&D budgets get swamped by operating budgets. Tweaking expendable rocket technology is a low-risk route for commercial companies, so that's what they've all done, and so they've pushed the limits of cost savings about as far as they'll go for expendables... and it doesn't look like they'll ever go much farther than $1000/kg prices to orbit.
What the commercial companies aren't willing to risk (and so what government funding should risk in their place, if we have aspirations beyond tiny satellites and probes or if we're going to get serious about this "people on the Moon and Mars" stuff) is applying that same type of development (repeated design improvements with modern materials, flying the designs over and over again to learn how they can be improved) to reusable rockets as well.
This sounds horribly expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Even when it failed with the X-33, they didn't waste 10% of the Shuttle's regular operating budget. Private companies trying to do things similarly have failed for lack of funding, because they couldn't get investors to raise half of what they needed, which amounts to about 5% of what NASA spends each year operating a decades old prototype.
The problem is that (as the X33 showed) large private industry can't do it either - too much government supervision leads to designs like VentureStar that try to pack half a dozen bleeding edge technologies into one package, and too little government supervision leads to companies like Lockheed coming hat in hand for more money when one of those technologies fails. If you try to strike a happy medium, then you just end up losing on both counts. Back when the X-33 proposals were made, we should have funded all four of them, flipped Lockheed the bird when their project screwed up, and then awarded the big full scale contract to any of the groups which succeeded. Private industry only works better when there's competition for your dollar; otherwise it's just like a government project but with profits skimmed off the top. Unfortunately we've seen mergers down to two big aerospace companies, neither of which has much of an incentive to lower launch costs, and so we probably couldn't get much competition out of them today.
It sounds like the conclusion is that we're probably screwed and I'm just ranting about it for no reason, but this "prize money" mode of funding might be an exception to that. Unlike traditional R&D projects, prize offerings are zero risk for the government - if someone attempting to earn your prize fails, they do so on their own dollar. Unlike traditional R&D projects, prize of