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NASA Eyes Cash Prizes Of Its Own
joeldg writes "Wired is reporting that NASA is considering offering cash prizes for space innovation.
'Lembeck said NASA would consider offering $10 million to $30 million in prizes to encourage private investors to develop space vehicles. Such prizes appear compatible with the vision for space exploration released last week by a White House commission that studied President Bush's plan to send Americans back to the moon and possibly to Mars.'"
Obviously the $10M X-Prize got a few groups together to be the first. Most if not all of them have put in more money than the prize would bring in for winning, but there's something about our competitive nature as people... NASA should strongly consider this. If you want innovation, make it a contest. There's a ton of people out there who are that damn competitive that they'll sink their own money to win. I personally think it's great.
yes, this is exactly how research on high tech pie in the sky stuff like next generation space vehicles should be done.
then all NASA needs to do is sit back and let private companies do the engineering which means that they can send the rest of the ash over to propulsion research.
this works well because it helps mitigate the investments made by companies that win and the recognition of the win helps future sales of the products based on the new tech.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The question is, are prizes of 10 to 30 million USD enough for corporations to spend that much or more developing space tech? Would it be cheaper than NASA developing the same things in-house? Or would the prize money be better spent on NASA projects?
No. The X-prize hasn't been claimed yet, and there are other avenues and goals to reach.
Diversity is a good thing.
Maybe step one would be not to criminalize model rocketry
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http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/r
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http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2003-02-28/featur
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
... NASA wants some of this spotlight, and will gladly make hints of support and pose for the camera.
NASA has a budget of USD$16 Billion for this year alone. $10M to $30M?
Lets see prizes in the range of $100M on up. That would make the financial investment risks FAR easier to swallow, and we might actually see more serious commercial enterprises make the attempt.
Seeing SpaceShipOne's successes makes me dream of a brighter future. I'd love to see serious interplanetary space travel within my lifetime.
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Huh? How are a few fledgling attempts to break the 100km barrier anything close to a feasible manned Mars mission?
I guess its Lembeck's job to say nice things about NASA and those who control its purse-strings, but its a bit too optimistic to expect private industry to do a Mars launch anytime in the forseeable future. Heck, its hard to see NASA doing it, or any good reason to do it as a moon base would be safer, cheaper, and practical!
This sounds like damage-control after Scaled's success yesterday. Is NASA scared perhaps? Or maybe they don't want to look like a lumbering dinosaur to the tax payers.
Dunno, but the timing of this is very suspicious.
sounds to me like NASA has been slacking in the R&D dept. and after SpaceShipOne took off the otherday, they see it and scratch their heads about their R&D and say "Why did'nt we think of that"
DUH!!!
Considering the roughly $900 million that NASA spent on the X-33 shuttle replacement before simply canceling the project, or the $400 million that they spend on each shuttle launch, I certainly think they should be able to spare a hundred million or two as a prize for someone can develop a private, x-prize style orbital vehicle.
And this is different from the "real" business world how? Look at why different techs are adopted, not always because they are the best engineering, etc... Many times it is because they got to the market first.
And I don't think anyone would try to make a business out of the prize money alone. Spaceship One is costing around $20million with a prize of only $10million. The investers know this, but what it does give them is (if they win) a bit of a coupon for some of their R&D but mostly they huge huge publicity that this type of thing will bring.
I'm good with those. Really, I think those are not unrealistic values, if maybe a little low for the lunar trips. Either way, if a company can do it, while the $$ offered is probably minimal by comparison, its the competition and the science that are the point and science will benefit.
Presently here, but not there.
There's probably a few people at Nasa see the big light bulb coming on. Scaled has achieved sub-orbital capability on a budget rumored between 20 and 35 million dollars. This included the design, build, and test flight stages of the program. The same program running in the Nasa culture, using Nasa methodologies, would not be finished the preliminary design study before it had burned up 35 million dollars, and to achieve the result of 'successful manned test flight', the program would have burned up at least a billion dollars. the efficiency delta here is close to 2 orders of magnitude. that's very serious when you are talking the differences between millions and billions of dollars.
The smartest people are in the private sector
That's a pretty big generalization you got there, pilgrim.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
That's not really true, so I'll take it you haven't worked with NASA much at all. I've worked with NASA scientists on several projects and the scientists/engineers there are typically top-notch. Much more knowledgeable than most engineers I've dealt with from the private sector. NASA's problems primarily stem from its bureaucracy and red-tape, not from shortcomings of its engineers.
And to take your skepticism further, the smartest people I've encountered to date have been university professors (at least in physics). Usually more likely to collaborate w/ NASA than with the private sector, too.
make world, not war
It makes no sense to have the government effectively subsidize the development of a proprietary technology.
Where is the profit motive in sending probes to the outer solar system?
The parent post is pretty insightful, IMHO. NASA's biggest problem in the last 20 years has had nothing to do with engineering, but with public relations. Add to it two major accidents and you're left with a pretty unhappy public questioning (unfortunately) the need for NASA. Imagine the kind of hell NASA would have to pay if it suffered another accident. NASA is already under tremendous scrutiny by Congress; what would happen if Congress was given yet another reason to cut the NASA budget? How much worse would public opinion get? Now consider the alternative: NASA offers a monetary prize for private companies seeking a route to space. The risks are the same -- people may die, and unlike the parent, I believe that NASA cares about these people. However, NASA avoids the added risk of organizational self-destruction. I've been pretty impressed with NASA in past years. Unlike many governmental organizations, they don't seem to demand credit for everything that is done; if someone gets to space on their own, NASA will be cheering them on. A monetary prize just allows them to promote the exploration of space (with all the risks that it carries) while avoiding the one extra risk of permanently turning the tide of public opinion against it.
The Wired article uses information from this Reuters article by Deborah Zabarenko.
Reuters: "Within hours of the first private flight to outer space on Monday, a NASA official said the agency might offer millions of dollars in prizes..." This is misleading. NASA's Centennial Challenges program has been in the planning stage for quite some time now.
My opinion on prizes: Prizes are great, but they should complement grants, not replace them. An analogy: If we want to catch Osama bin Laden, we should put a big bounty on him. But that doesn't mean we should call off the military and the CIA. We should post a big bounty AND fund the military and the CIA. Same thing with space: Put a big 'bounty' on space achievements, but fund NASA too.
The thing is, Scaled has spent over $20M already. The $10M is obviously a big help, if they win- but it isn't the primary motivating factor. It couldn't be- you don't spend $20M to win $10M.
All you say is true, but this can be viewed as a retroactive subsidy towards R&D. If a company like Scaled has some plans to exploit this potentially lucrative market, the prospect of potentially spending 10 million if you win is much more palatable then a gauranteed expenditure of 20 million in R&D. Demanding success of the prize recipient also removes the risk of fraud by questionable contractors.
As has been mentioned, the aviation industry has progressed rapidly through such "contests", particularly the lockheed martins, et all. Stealth didn't become so common because private industry wanted it, or because government invented it. The government set the challenge, and let Private industry worry about keeping the margins low.
Finally, we've all,as you do in your post, griped enough about NASA expenditures to know this is a good idea. I'm inclined to think that a private company would not have come up with a re-entry shield that is composed of hundreds of ceramic tiles, all of which have to be inspected pre and post launch. It would simply not be cost effective. We already ran the crash program to space. Now lets run the slow, sensible one. Get private industry involved. Allow the profit motive in the lifting stage, not just the payload stage.
The sooner we ween space transport off of the government teat, the sooner we stop hearing about all the better ways government can spend money on this or that social program. If all that can be done is to remove that chestnut from the debate, I say it's worth it.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
I can't help but wonder if NASA would be more effective if it took on a model much more like NSF's or DARPA's. Instead of splitting up tasks between their own field centers and painstakingly managing everything, it could become more focused on providing funding to foster the nation's space infrastructure and using programs like Centennial Challenges to accomplish specific tasks. Existing NASA centers could compete for this funding just like other organizations like universities and private companies. Doing things in this manner would also limit NASA's PR liability in the event of catastrophe, keeping the space program from becoming completely paralyzed every time a disaster happens.
Of course, this would also limit the potential for pork-barrel spending, and would thus experience difficulties in actually becoming enacted.
What a load of tiresome, pretentious twaddle. The end of the Apollo program meant the collapse of American society, creating a plague of lawyers and real estate investors. Gotcha. Why, I remember thinking as I watched the Challenger explode in third grade, "Screw this, I was going to be a soybean farmer, but now I'll just get a job securitizing mortgages instead."
You see, there'd be these conclusions you could jump to...
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Presumably, in the near future we'll be seeing a variant of the X Prize for orbital flights; perhaps in the interim we'll see things like X Prizes for transcontinental flights.
I'm curious though: How can contestants be able to deal with all the liabilities which that entails? With the test flights of Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace, before being allowed to fly they've had to make various government official certain that in a worst-case scenario their craft would remain within the testing zone. With orbital (or even transcontinental) flights, their flight range will have to extend beyond the testing zone and into inhabited areas (even other countries). Governments are able to test things like this because they can deal with the liability, but what about private companies?
The government should not give $30 million dollars away for spaceflight when we have unemployment, poverty, unequal healthcare, violent crime, drug addiction, cancer, and AIDS - all of which would benefit *us* far more than space travel. Oh yeah and then there's also the fact that the market is taking care of the space thing already.
Quite honestly, I see this as NASA flat out admitting they can't do innovative development on the cheap.
Burt Rutan spent $20 million on his prototype. That's pocket change to NASA, yet I haven't seen anything come out of NASA that is even close to what Rutan designed. I haven't seen any NASA spaceplane prototypes even take off, let alone go sub-orbital.
He went sub-orbital on $20 million, I couldn't imagine what Rutan could do with a few hundred million. That's only a fraction of NASA's budget.
$1 billion to the first person to establish some sort of viable industry in orbit.
Um, I think that prize is already being offered by basic economics. Or something comparable, at least.
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Anyon else think this is nasa basically shitting its pants in the reaction of spaceshipone being successful?
you're damn right it is.
Now they wanna try getting innovators to innovate for them, since they're stuck, one catch though, they'll basically take your idea, give you half the money you deserve from it, and then they end up getting 10 times the funding and the control over space again. Just like any good monopoly over anything, they're trying to pull anything to ensure they keep their superiority and political rights over space. My science teacher did contract work for NASA and recalls it being the worst job he ever had, spending was horrible, and many people were underpaid, and only the higher ups made the most cash. it was a job you had to have a passion for, and NASA did a great job at killing a lot of people's passion for space. My teacher actually gets paid more for teaching than he did working for NASA. Sad as it is.
I dont think too many people will jump at this, because the x-prize is much more fun, and you get to keep your soul afterwards.
enterprises the next 20 or 30 years will see some major advances in space travel. If he doesn't get reelected, Kerry will divert that funding to social programs.
We will see soon enough either a space and tech boom or the end of the middle class.
By your definition, everything publicly funded is "coercive". The president's salary is "coercive". The financial aid for college students is "coercive". Unemployment benefits are "coercive".
The public is not forced to finance any specific project. This is not a case of taxation without representation. Congressmen and the President are your voice for how your money should be spent.
Each member of society, however, cannot be given a choice as to exactly what their individual sum of money will be used for. Such a system would be simply unworkable.
As for NASA, I doubt SpaceShipOne could have gotten off the ground with the funding it received without the huge amount of government-sponsored research behind it. One of NASA's primary roles is as an incubator project for the still-fledgling aerospace industry. You and I finance the groundwork science and engineering that must be done before industry can profitably take it up. But once it is, if successful, the industry in our country enjoys a significant advantage over others, increasing market share, profit margins, employment opportunities, and the general economy.
And a good economy benefits us all. And, again, if successful, more than reimburses you for the paltry sum you paid to finance it.
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