“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.”

Land a billion dollars in cash, in unmarked bills, in a safe on the moon…

Anyway, I never claimed that prizes are intrsinsically good. Obviously, they have to be implemented properly, and we certainly may not know as much as we need to about how that’s accomplished (which is why it’s useful to try to get some going soon so we can start climbing that learning curve). There may indeed be lessons to be learned from the DARPA challenge.

I think you’re instantly jumping to the extreme conclusion and assuming that I am arguing that they could be “bad” as opposed to “not as good as the advocates claim.” (And I would also argue that in some cases “the goal not being accomplished” could be pretty bad indeed.)

I was trying to point out that more thought needs to be put into prizes than simply “Yippee! They’re good!” Part of this would be determining legal requirements for doing them. For instance, right now NASA is not allowed to award prizes for more than $250K, requiring changes in the law. But are there other political consequences and roadblocks that are currently not being thought about? One that occurs to me is implementation. Congress cannot currently commit future congresses to spend money. So today’s Congress cannot create a prize that pays $100 million in five years, because five years from now _that_ Congress may decide not to pay the prize. So how does one get around this? Can the US government put large amounts of money into private escrow? (I don’t think so.)

You yourself had some critical words to say about the DARPA robotics prize. What exactly went wrong there? Did they not think things through? What should they do differently? And now that they’re running that competition again, have they learned any lessons from the first failure?

Prizes shouldn’t be used for national imperatives, but they’re great for “nice to haves” that the government has shown an inability to do. And given the history of the space program, with all its failure and pork, it’s hard to argue that anything about civil space, particularly civil manned space, is something in which “failure is not an option.”