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NASA Hoping To Create Super X-Prizes
Rei writes "NASA is attempting to use a strategy of handing out contracts as prizes, akin to the Ansari X-Prize, instead of the contractor-preferred method of bidding and having payment before work is completed. They are hoping to have prizes worth as much as one billion dollars. The only hitch? Congress won't let them."
Congress doesn't care if a contractor gets actual results. All they care about is milking the various contractors for re-election contributions. Those who give the most get the contracts. That is so obvious that even a rocket-scientist should be able to figure it out.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
It could scare off the big companies, but that would allow smaller companies to get a foothold in the industry. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Worker saftey and standards are somthing that shouldnt be shoved aside in the quest for scientific advancement on the cheap...
If people are willing to take the risk, why not let them. Certainly when worker safety is being compromised through exploitation it might be worth worrying about, but I fail to believe that the test pilots for SpaceShipOne didn't have every option to decline to fly. They were being paid plenty of money to voluntarily take a risk. If they choose to take the risk let them.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Easy they wouldn't be able to control which team "wins" since the best product would win rather than the winner being picked by the current "political process" of lowest bidder/cost overruns.
So rewarding open ended contracts, often leading to billions of dollars wasted on dead end projects is being more careful with your money than making companies produce results *BEFORE* they're paid?
That's an interesting take on this, IMO.
Precisely. Congress won't vote to dramatically increase NASA's ability to award prizes, because they lose control over the ability to grab pork for their constituencies. Even if prizes are restricted to Americans (likely, since they don't want to be awarding multi-million dollar prizes to foreign economies), the chances are essentially n/300 million, where n is the number of people in any particular Congressman's district, that a prize will be awarded where that Congressman wants it to be. Now, for a state like Texas, with about 8 percent of the nation's population, a one-in-twelve roll of the dice might be okay, but it probably still doesn't compete with their average take on contracts, which I (without any evidence) seem to think is higher.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
So let's say the idea is 10 mil to get a man into orbit. OK, so they do it for 3 million. So they find a more cost effective way of doing things, which can be used in future spaceflight technology, and leads to greater savings in the long run.
But far more important that that, there's no way for the project like this to go overbuget. Look at the history of the shuttle, and you'll see a project that far exceeded it's initial cost estimate. Once you've sunk a few billion, though, it's a hard to back out and lose everything to save a billion or two. Especially when you've made promises to everyone and their mother to get the funding in the first place. This is what really saves you money.
As for the idea that companies wouldn't take the financial risks if uncertain of a reward, it's demonstrably untrue. This happens in the world of defense contracts all the time. Most large defense contractors, especially in areospace, have lost large sums of money developing prototypes, in failed bids to secure larger contracts.
As a final note, there are already congressmen who have made careers out of attacking NASA's budget. They point to the billions invested in space flight, and the lack of any visible progress. I can't imagine a program that guarantees results would make that any easier.
You're probably a troll. Congratulations. Why does Congress, or you, have the right to determine the risks that others will take for science? Living is dangerous. Even though thousands of humans are killed every year in car accidents, people still drive. Taking on that "ordinary" risk is acceptable, and yet taking on greater risk for the possibility of greater rewards isn't? Are legislators better at determining at determining what risks individuals should take than the individuals themselves? We're not talking about sweatshops where children are locked into virtual slavery: the engineers, pilots, and entrepreneurs who create and run small aerospace corporations are educated, experienced, and capable both of finding less risky positions and making informed decisions about their own safety. Who gave Congress, or you, the authority to make decisions for them?