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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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Hey! They should be offering a prize to the best low-cost, low-risk tech to save Hubble.