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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."
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
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.
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.
Faster, Better, Cheaper? Pick two and toss out one. We all know that low cost and space are desirable, the only problem is that low cost and government aint gonna happen. By its nature government views the spending as a positive. Hell, government will spend the saving on something else. Its all pointless. I say spend more for less is probably the best solution :)
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.
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
is right here in PDF www.nasa.gov/pdf/55407main_24%20Exploration.pdf format.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
"Those 20 million should be spent on AIDS/Cancer research"
Monkeys are getting too expensive, lets launch people with AIDS or cancer in experimental vehicles! They are expendable, and renewable!
Furthermore, old people should be studied to determine wich nutrients they contain that might be extracted for our benefit...
You can't take the sky from me...
...post an article about the "X-Prize" right after I read about porn/X-rated movies...
Research prizes work so much better than many other methods of investment in progress that it's surprising you don't see more of them. On average, you'll see 16 dollars invested in progress for every 1 in the prize.
Here's a good article (plus links to other articles) on why research prizes are a great thing: http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/research_prize s.cfm
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey! They should be offering a prize to the best low-cost, low-risk tech to save Hubble.
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.
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