The Space Frontier Foundation issued a press release Thursday about Centennial Challenges, NASA’s prize program. The Foundation would like to see NASA and Congress increase the program’s FY06 funding from the current proposal of $34 million to $200 million, although they don’t specify what types of prizes they would like to see the additional funding spent on. The group also wants to see Centennial Challenges managed by an outside organization. Interestingly, the Foundation doesn’t call on Congress to authorize NASA to award prizes larger than $250,000, the current limit: without that, increasing the overall size of the program is not very useful.
Prizes for what?
What if SpaceShipOne had failed? As Rogers stated in his comission, this nation tends to go overboard re. short term success.
How about a prize for the first company that can statistically demonstrate to the 98% confidence level percentile that the passengers will either achieve LEO and return or bail out and return alive 4,999 times out of 5,000. They can just do 1/100th or 1/10th scale tests to demonstrate and collect massive data. They don’t even have to launch anyone.
I think that is worth 100 million dollars, and it will end the LEO rut.