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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."
What, you never saw 'The Fifth Element'? C'mon...get in the game already :)
Besides, tobacco farming and the fountain of youth have already been used as excuses to leave home...
If promoting space travel as a possible tourist activity can help develop the technology faster, I say do it.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Has it occurred to anyone that the reason the X Prize hasn't been won yet is becuase of the size of the prize? I mean, if I'm going to invest (and have others invest in ME) I think there needs to be a reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. 5, 10, 20 mil just doesn't seem to be enough to me.
Hopefully this doesn't spur on further developements such as the planned russian tourist space station...
Not that I wouldn't personally love to have a chance to travel in space myself, but NASA should be more concerned with keeping its astronauts and shuttles in shape.
The X Prize isn't about putting another man on the moon, or even putting another one in orbit. It's just about building a rocket that can get people above the atmosphere repeatedly, quickly, safely, and cheaply. Such a rocket doesn't need much in the way of performance compared to a real launch vehicle.
For that goal (especially the "cheaply" part), increasing the amount of prize money could actually be detrimental. An expensive winning vehicle in 2000 (which could have been done, if the prize money was enough to lure a big aerospace company into the race) would have been much less of a "return on investment" than a cheap winning vehicle in 2005.
A big part of the reason why space exploration is stuck in a rut is that when we started it, we had a post-war technology (expendible artillery rockets) that could be used to "get people to space, and damn the cost". Well, we've been using those sorts of rockets ever since, and "DAMN, the COST!" Rocket fuel is cheap, but rockets and rocket engineers are expensive, and when we throw away the former and hire armies of the latter to supervise a few launches a year it gets really expensive. There are a lot of people (myself included) who think that the only way to change this is with reusable, rapid turnaround launch vehicles, and who speculate that the natural way to develop those vehicles is from technology developed flying suborbital prototypes. Our previous strategy of "start with a huge orbital rocket, and try to make it cost effective" (the Space Shuttle) turned out to be so expensive that when it failed we couldn't afford to try again. Hopefully the alternate strategy of "start with a cost effective rocket, and try to make it orbital" will be more successful, and even when it does have failures it's a lot easier to repeat a multimillion dollar experiment than a multibillion dollar one.
The reason these Centennial challenges (and the X Prize) are so exciting is that there's a problem with our alternate strategy: revenue. There's a commercial market for orbital rockets, but not much of a market (except for tourism, war, and the occasional science experiment) for suborbital rockets, and nobody wants to start a multi-decade research program if it's not going to bring in any money until the end. If NASA can provide funding for those projects in such a way that they can't be "cheated" into paying for failures (like they were with the X-33), it makes that long term strategy into a short term opportunity.
Hmm... I didn't intend that to be so long; I should shut up now, find a link for anyone who's actually still reading this, and go to sleep. There's a large relevant discussion at Jerry Pournelle's website; Pournelle's opinions on this subject don't differ much from mine, he's had most of them longer than I've been alive, and he's better at articulating them.
NASA needs to concentrate on missions to deep space exploration (beyond Earth). At this point and in light of W's cutting the X-33, I am in hopes that he creates a 1-2 billion X prize for the the first craft to lift X amount to LEO and repeat it again within a week with a maximum price. This would encourage the space industry to truely form.
NASA should also continue its own work on building a truely heavy lifter (non-reusable) that can takes us well beyond earth's orbit with large payloads (or simply lift extraordinarly large payloads).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Are these funds really necessary? Aren't most companies that practice this kind of science already receiving government funding? There should definatly be a serious look taken at this option, as that's a LOT of money. Why should a company receive more funding than necessary, what, arne't plush pillows and cushioned chairs along with a multi million dollar house good enough for these... rocket scientists?
Pls No Negative Modding!
Today's medical research is conducted by companies, but also by education foundations like universities. Even though there aren't really grants for space research, perhaps the engineering developments for space travel should also be researched at universities. I'm sure there are lots of grants out there that are applicable to research in space technology, and this would get a lot of college students involved in the area for the future, when space travel becomes a more commonplace thing.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
It's so good to know that Columbus got it all wrong... Holiday Inn should have sent the first ships from Spain and built fine accomodations in the new world...
Since when did we become such spineless weenies!!! I can't even believe the silly crap wafting to my ears... we just spent enough money to freakin' move New York city to the moon, bombing the crap out of people who weren't bothering anybody but each other, all so that President Shrub could give his Daddy the most expensive Christmas gift in recorded history. Then we decide we haven't got the intestinal fortitude to pursue our destiny, our inspired future, because we haven't the will to generate the amount of money collected by The Starbucks Corporation during any given 45 minutes period of their business day. Oohhhhh, it's soooooo hard to save the kind of money needed to get into space, it's so expensive. Oohhh, let's suck up to the "spa class", and suggest maybe the best tan in the universe can be had on the moon! Then they'll build the future for us and we won't have to grow a friggin spine!
People... Suck it the FSCK up... our future is out there. It's not here. Here will go away. Here is dangerous... we got asteroids, and super volcanoes, and tsunamis big as mountains, we got global warming, we got methane in the sea floor, we got virii and ice ages, and it's just a very uncertain place to be... we need to spread our eggs to more than one backet. We need to get life to other places. We need to explore and grow into our universe. All of that takes guts. All of that takes commitment. It takes saying I will pay the price of admission to build a bold future, that mankind will have more than we have today.
I'm willing to contribute the price of a Grande Mocha Latte with a shot of hazzlenut, if I know that in ten years we'll have a sustainable access to the universe, and that in twenty years a half million people will live on the moon.
This is one of those time when somebody with a little vision and a lot of testoserone needs to stand up and say follow me, I'm going up there, last one there to join me is a BIG FAT WEENIE!!!
Genda Bendte
"The meek shall inherit the earth the rest of us shall receive the stars..." -- Isaac Asimov
My opinion of The New NASA(TM) remains unchanged. Until they have actually awarded prize monies in a fair and open competition ($20M in prizes is pocket change for what should be the _bulk_ of NASA's budget) I'm convinced this is just a way to inhibit politically embarrassing events, such as the private prize awards that actually opening up the space frontier in the place of NASA. No one in power really wants this to happen lest they lose control of the pioneering (and therefore unmanageably independent) American populations they have so recently destroyed with their economic and technology policies.
Seastead this.
A few years ago, the big thing at Nasa was micro-satellites and micro-explorers. Send up several dozen cheap, small explorers that were mostlly made from stuff already on the private market. NASA could send up dozens, knowing half or more would be destroyed or wouldn't work, but the end result would be a lot more exploration for a lot less money. With any kind of manned spaceflight--tourism or not--the multiple redundancies and zero (?) accepted risk, the costs grow astronomically and the actual science down drops. But former NASA administrator Dan Goldin--back during the mid-90s budget crisis at NASA--decided the only way to get Congress and US taxpayers excited was through manned travel--the Right Stuff stuff. The press doesn't get as excited about 40 football-sized explorers out there, most of which don't work. This is a shame. Forget the rich tourists, forget lunar colonies. Let's go back to small, cheap, expendable which also means a lot of good science.
Science with small, cheap and expendable unmanned probes and orbital labs is useful because it will help us to prepare for the manned flights which, to my mind, are absolutely essential for the future of the human race.
The owls are not what they seem
As safity goes, two or three reactors crashed to the ocean within a decade should not make any big difference with what we already have there. And I think nuclear reactor based engines should be much safer as there is no risk of self-ignition based explosion like we have on a regular basis with Shuttle boosters and similar ones. You cannot stop ignition in modern engine once it's started. If anything goes wrong the reactor can be stopped immidiately (as well as the water or waterver liquid vaporation process) and the whole thing can land safily on a parashute.
Did I say that nuclear engines will be multiple times usable? Ok, Now I've said that. And that's a big plus to make the whole orbital business cheaper.
Less is more !
There would be a risk of space travel getting a sleazy image, but that could be avoided by clever marketing.