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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?
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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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.
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.
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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
$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.
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.
That's mostly because the US government got there, oh, nearly 40 years ago.
SpaceshipOne is not innovative in any way technologically. It's revolutionary because for the first time, a non-governmental organization did it.
That said, the promise of Apollo was that we'd all be flying to vacations in space in no time. Well, here we are, 30 some odd years since the first Moon landing, and nothing. NASA can't open up the frontier. Private, profit making corporations will. I hope this is the start of the deluge.