I don’t agree that large prizes are necessarily not going to work. Yes they would be beyond the guy & his brother teams (the Wrights & Rutans) but Exxon might well decide that an extra $20 bn on the ledgers was enough to make something like an atomic spaceship capable of reaching not just Mars but other places worthwhile. Though I do agree that cutting it into a lot of smaller prizes for steps along the way might work better.

In any case what is the downside? Offer $20 bn for the first Mars landing, if it is American & the Chinese get there first – no payout & the government still has the $20 bn. Perhaps a lot of people saying we should have put up $40 bn & let a small bank fail but the economy is not worse off than if no prize had been offered & the Chinese still got there first. Equally this is not a competitor with NASA. Nasa get $18 bn & would want much more for a Mars ship but they get this annually. A $20 bn prize would probably take 15-20 years to be won & so is amortised over that period & government can certainly afford $1 bn a year or less depending on what interest rate is applied. Equally whatever Feynman may have felt if you say not creating an entire new industry for an investment of $1,000 is a failure you have pretty tough success standards.

In the same way an X-Prize for getting various lengths & strengths of nanotube might have a much more innovative effect than letting much of the universe’s wealth go to whoever makes one 31,000 miles long & has a space elevator

My feeling is that the reason X-Prizes aren’t the normal way of doing things is because most government expenditure isn’t to achieve things but, as suggested above, to pay off political favours & provide permanent jobs to public employees. Cynical I know.

I was also impressed with the number of historic prizes mentioned. I have also mentioned another 2 – http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/06/historic-x-prizes.html

– Celluliod, which did indeed start a new industry came about because “in 1863 a New York billiard equipment distributor announced a 10,000$ prize for an artificial ivory”. They were running out of elephants.

– Somewhat earlier than that Archimedes got out of his bath shouting Eureka because he had figured out a way to win a prize put up by the king of Syracuse for measuring gold.

If you lose a upwards of a billion dollars on SeaLaunch, and then another billion dollars on the Delta IV, then that makes you a little gun shy about your ability to assess the commercial potential of space ventures.

They have bid on the ISS cargo delivery market though. If you are saying that they could/should have invested their private $$ in an ISS cargo system, that is an interesting point.

Maybe they know something that SpaceX and RkP does not.

– Al

— Donald

DONALD SAID: But, they’re barely being used. Is the program a success if it produces a rocket (the Delta-IV) that the company doesn’t really support and that no one wants to buy?

Donald,

It depends on who you ask.

If you asked those in the DoD who made the decision to start the EELV program, they would say “Yes, the EELV program is absolutely a success”. They would point to the 50+ successful DoD launches in a row, and point out how much more reliable that the Atlas V & Delta IV are than the Titan IV. If you talked to them privately, they would tell you that the “cost” of launch is not that important compared to reliability, or as they like to call it … “mission success”. The DoD spends 2-5 times as much on the satellite today as compared to the launch, so they really don’t care about the cost of launch. The DoD does not care that much about the fact that the Delta IV is not commercially competitive. They also don’t care about the fact that Boeing lost their shirt by making a poor investment decision.

However, if you asked the Boeing senior executives, and their BoD, whether they considered the Delta IV to be a business success, they would say that “No, we will never recover an adequate ROI on the very large private investment that we put into the Delta IV.” The rumor is that Boeing put in well over 1 Billion dollars of private investment into the Delta IV — matched by $500M from the DoD — based on the widespread belief in the late 1990s that there were much larger commercial launch markets to be captured.

My previous point stands — the parts of the DoD that design, develop and procure new launch systems are getting itchy. They are looking for the next thing to focus their talents and energy upon. The EELV is essentially complete, and it is a success from their perspective. There are small upgrades to make, but nothing really to fix.

– Al

Richard Feynman offered two prizes for $1,000 of his own money with the hope of jump starting nanotechnology.

The first was for an electric motor. The full story is here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3785509.stm
Tuesday, 8 June, 2004, 11:23 GMT 12:23 UK
Small world’s big achievement
By Roland Pease
BBC radio science

Some quotes:
[[[Richard Feynman had specified a working electric motor no more than 1/64th of an inch on a side, confidently expecting making such a device would take an entirely new approach to engineering. Bill McLellan proved him wrong.

“He’d seen a lot of cranks come in with motors who didn’t understand the challenge and I brought in a big box, and he said ‘Uh-oh, here’s another one of them’. And then I opened my wooden box and there was my microscope, and he said ‘Oh! Nobody else brought a microscope!'”.

But Feynman had to agree, the motor met his specification.]]]

And

[[[“Feynman’s disappointment was he didn’t get the new method,” says McLellan.]]]

So Richard Feynman himself regarded it as a failure.

So in summation the verdict of the literature and my statement that Richard Feynman prize was a failure stands. Indeed as indicated he felt that way himself.

And it isa lesson to be careful how you state the conditions of the prize. For example if the X-Prize had provided a requirement of two paying passengers, instead of the equivalent of dead weight we would have a sub-orbital tourist industry today instead of the promise of one. But of course under those conditions its also likely the prize would have never been won. Still history will tell if it was a false dawn, like Apollo.

But, they’re barely being used. Is the program a success if it produces a rocket (the Delta-IV) that the company doesn’t really support and that no one wants to buy?

— Donald

Dr. Matula,

You are mistaken. By classifying it as a “failure” you are leaping to the conclusion that Feynman’s objective was to develop new technology or to build a nanotech industry.

This motor has been on prominent display, for many years, in the physics building where Dr. Feynman used to work. I saw the display in the early 1980s when I was a student, and Dr. Feynman was still alive, and I believe it was there long before I ever set foot on campus.

If Feynman’s intention had been to develop “new technology” or to kick-start the nanotech industry, it would have been quite easy for someone of his stature to persuade somebody to fund another prize, of much more challenge. All he had to was ask, and people would have jumped at the chance to fund such a prize. The fact that he did not strongly suggests that he considered the prize to be a success.

– Anonymous Caltech Alumnus

No.

V-prize!

http://spaceports.blogspot.com/2007/06/transatlantic-v-prize-being-organized.html

http://www.v-prize.com/

Movin on up the alphabet…