No Cash Prize for Next DARPA Grand Challenge

General Lee's Peking writes to mention an Associated Press article about a sad development in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Because of some new DoD-related legislation, the organization will no longer be able to award the $2 Million prize to grand challenge winners. It's not all bad, though; they still get a trophy. From the article: "The absence of a lucrative cash prize has forced some teams to retool their game plan and others to drop out. Some fear it would be harder to attract corporate sponsors and hurt media coverage of the race, which drew a throng of reporters last year and inspired a PBS documentary. 'The icing on the cake is gone,' said Ivar Schoenmeyr, team leader of California-based Team CyberRider, which is retrofitting a Toyota Prius hybrid."

Comments

Re:Is this really so bad?

[kfg]

$25M for first family car that gets over 100 mpg at $40,000 price

To be awarded posthumously?

It's easy enough to build such a car. Easy enough that it's been done many times over the past century.

All you have to do to achieve it is give up something else. We can strive for efficiency, but we canna change the laws of physics.

KFG

RTFA

[Geccie]

RTFA - Although DARPA has pulled the award, the current legislation does not bar awards. It moves the authorization level up one position above the DARPA director.

All they now have to do is get permission from their boss.

It appears they have chosen the ignorant route and - instead of getting requested authorization - simply claim they are not allowed

Sounds like typical Government Bureaucrats to me.

Re:Little investigation

[geoffspear]

Oddly enough, the President doesn't get to decide exactly what obscure sections go into a defense spending law. If he did, you can bet that companies located in districts represented by Congressmen on the appropriations committee wouldn't just happen to get lots of big contracts.

Sure, you can maybe blame him for not vetoing the spending bill, but unless he really cared about this one expenditure, why would you expect him to?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take a long shower, because I fell really dirty after actually defending the President. But can you please save your blame of him for the tons of things that are actually his fault?

Re:Little investigation

[El Cubano]

Not sure exactly what you mean there, but the Defense budget is the largest it has been in ages, it's perplexing that they'd choose to cut here

Two things:

• Please do not look at absolute dollar values, they are nonsense. Look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. The US defense budget is about the same size as it was during the isolationist period leading up to WWI. In terms of percentage, the US spends about 3.8% of its GDP on defense, putting it in the same area of the list as Tanzania.
• Thanks to the neglect of the military under Clinton, the Air Force has ancient aircraft and can't maintain them all because they break so fast, the Navy has too few ships and many of those still in service have entire systems which are inoperable due to neglect, and the Army can no longer rely on unlimited overseas basing, unlimited Navy sealift and unlimited Air Force airlift and so must get rid of all their heavy artillery and heavy tanks to transform to a lighter force.

That said, the US defense is the smallest it's been in ages and re-equipping three branches of the military is not cheap.

The Real Harm

[nomadicpuma]

I'm on the Princeton DARPA team, and we're on Track B. The prize money at the end was a nice incentive and certainly garnered attention for the competition, but that's not where the real harm lies. For passing the site visit, there was a prize of $50,000, and for making it to the finals, a $250,000 prize (don't quote me on the amounts, that's just my recollection). These milestone prizes would've gone a long way to offset the financial disparity between Track A teams (who've received substantial DARPA grants) and the Track B teams. We're on a shoestring budget, and that money would've been incredibly useful. Instead, we now have to go the entire distance without a dime from the government.

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