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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."
a billion dollars as a prize seems somewhat of a NASA style expenditure.. why would they do that?
MABASPLOOM!
This could turn out to be a good thing, Developer handles all of the R&D costs doesnt get a dime unless work is satisfactorily completed and cant go over budget.
only down side I see is it could also scare off buisnesses not willing to take the risk of spending all that money and then not getting the contract.
Congress won't let them
So, I'm supposed to be disappointed that Congress is actually looking out for my money... at least to some extent?
If NASA want to offer upto $1 billion of cash prizes, I think they'll have to generate most of money for the prizes in other ways, i.e fund raising events, or charging for trips on the Shuttle or to the I.S.S.
I doubt Congress is going to grant them an extra $1 billion a year to just provide the cash prizes. They will have to take the money from elsewhere, i.e current projects and missions, something they are already doing for the Moon - Mars plan. In other words, ain't going to happen. It's a shame really, as we've already seen what the X-Prize is doing, creating more and more determined would-be astronauts and a real effort to make space accessible to all of us. Something like winning a prize from NASA would really be a fledgling space tourism companies PR dream.
This seems to me like potentially a very wasteful way of accomplishing a goal since many people will contribute a lot of work and never see any money for it.
To overcome this, perhaps NASA could consider breaking the prize money down to make sure that the most efficient way gets acknowleged as well as the quickest way.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
2. The NASA contract awarding process is flawed as is. There's rampant corruption and favouritism. These factors directly contributed to the Challenge disaster, as the Faynmen report outlined. The Super X-Prize is not going to solve that.
3. Winners will be determined by actual achievements, not proposals, So they need money to build it in the first place. But prize competitors will have to produce some results first before NASA will fork out any cash. So unless you have a co-founder of M$ backing you to the hilt, you ain't gonna reach orbital velocity buddy!
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Nothing to see here
Would you rather have NASA get another 5 billion a year or the FAA spend the same on a computer upgrade that doesn't work. Come to think of it, which would rather have: NASA, or another aircraft carrier battle group.
This is my sig.
Nasa usually does their own testing on most of their stuff.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's too much of a risk. $10 million for X-Prize is fine because that's doable for a corporation, but $100 million - $1 billion + is just way too far out there.
Microsoft is sitting on $40 billion in cash. I'm sure there are a number of companies with visionaries at the helm who'd love to throw cash at the problem - Richard Bransom of Virgin, for example.
If the documentary i saw on the discovery channel is to believed, Boeing and Lockeed-Martin built fighters, and then the army, navy, etc, picked the best performing unit (it ending up being the Lockeed-Martin one). If the army can do it, why cant NASA?
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Something like AIDS is a bit different, though, in that the payoff will be astronomical even without a prize. I can easily see major drug companies offering to buy your cure for more than a billion if you came up with one independently anyway, because they know they could easily make it back - the market is large, growing and proven, which are all differences from space exploration
Sub contracting helps in this though. The big companies often sub-contract out parts of the whole to little companies, especially niche players.
Sub contracting even aplies amoung the big companies. Once when Lockheed looked like it was going to loose a contract bid for some project or rather in the late 80's or early 90's my dad asked my uncle (who works for LM on some military project as a design engineer) if he was worried about it. He basically said "no I'll still get to work on it, it doesn't matter as much which of us (big areospace companies) gets it, the other two will still get alot of the work as subcontractors, just won't get the biggest piece of the pie". Though in quotes it's not an exact quote, just a paraphrase.
And that's pretty much what I expect would happen here, the big companies get the lions share, and the smaller companies get a healthy load of work as subcontractors.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
I would love to hear from an American astronaut what they think about increased risk.
From here:
Cunningham [an astronaut on Apollo 7] departed from most current critics of NASA in criticizing the agency for becoming too risk-averse -- like our society, he opined. NASA is more afraid of failures than it's interested in attaining success in its missions. Abandonment of Hubble servicing was given as an example, and he criticized NASA's rationale for taking this action because of "higher risks" in placing a crew in the Hubble orbit by noting that NASA has put crews in that or similar orbits on no fewer than 90 prior occasions.
When astronauts place themselves in harm's way to accomplish such a mission, they do so with foreknowledge and willingly accept the risk, he said. Cunningham termed abandonment of the Hubble particularly galling because of its popularity with the public. He observed that since we reached the Moon, only two things that NASA has done have stirred public imagination: the Hubble and the Mars rovers.