Settling Space

In the early days of aviation, it was not uncommon for the government to offer prizes for accomplishing certain feats. Private people and organizations were also involved. Today, the X-Prize foundation is attempting to take that idea into the space age, with a $10 million prize for the first 3-person craft to fly to 100km altitude twice in 2 weeks.

It's a laudable goal, but only half of the equation. The government is too busy repeating itself to even take a good look at what our goals in space should be. Given the nature of government and bureaucracy, it's not surprising that NASA has become an organization whose primary use is to extract more funding, turning it into jobs (and thus votes) in key congressional districts. However, the government could quite easily get a lot done in space, for significantly less money than is currently being invested, if it wanted to. It could do this by offering prizes for a variety of tasks which do not require research to attempt, because that has already been done. For example:

1. The international space station could be awarded to the first private group which puts a person on board the station. This has the added benefit of getting that white elephant off the taxpayers' backs.
2. The X-Prize could be matched with government money, radically altering the cost equation and bringing more competitors into the field. Alternatively, the money could be used to extend the timeline of the X-Prize.
3. A prize of $50 million could be offered for the first private manned flight to LEO, and a further $100 million for the first private manned flight to GEO.
4. A prize of $250 million could be offered for the first private lunar surface probe, a further prize of $2 billion for the first private person to get to the moon, and finally a prize of $3 billion for the first private person to get to the moon and stay there for 1 year.
5. Similar prizes for Mars, but with larger payouts ($30 billion for the first person, another $20 billion if they stay for at least 1 Earth year, etc), could be offered.

The key would be to force the prize winners to make their designs public, and allow royalty-free use of their patents after they are awarded the prize. This would advance the state of the art, as well as likely providing a market for NASA to cheaply obtain needed equipment to fulfill whatever goals the government finds useful. Finally, this concept would start the exploration of space in earnest. (I'd bet you that someone would come up with a ship that could take a crew to Mars for a year, and use it to try to collect all of the prizes. Heck, I'd be looking for funding, because I think it could be done for less than the amounts specified above: there's not much new science here, and the engineering is well-understood.)

It'll never happen, of course, because the government is a control freak by nature, but it's nice to contemplate.

Posted by Jeff at July 27, 2003 11:40 PM | Link Cosmos