In article ,
Ruediger Klaehn wrote:

Stephen Souter wrote:

[snip]
Can you imagine the trophy that would go along with a $1B prize?

Offering prizes are all very well, but think back to the Moon Race of
the 1960s. That was all about winning a coveted prize too: viz. the
prestige associated with being the first nation to land a man on the
Moon.

The trouble was that once America won that prize (and had basked in the
limelight for a while), both it and the Soviets seemed to lose interest
in the Moon, and turned their manned space efforts to other goals.

That raises the question of whether offering a prizes is such a good
idea in the longer term. It is all very well to attract interest, but
what happens after the prize is won? Will interest (especially investor
interest) be sustained? Or will the competitors and/or their investors
turn to other things?

If you can sustain people on the moon for less than 1 billion USD, there
will be commercial interest for a followup mission. 1 billion for a moon
shot is dirt cheap by any reasonable standard.

Depends. The firm which won it probably spent a good deal more than
billion dollars to win it! (Just as most X Prize contenders have
probably long since outspent their $10 million prize money in
development costs.)

If that firm cannot turn a profit, then eventually it too will have to
stop sending people to the Moon. Just like NASA.

After all, if they were serious in the first place, be about launching
someone into space or putting someone on the moon, they would not need a
prize to accomplish it.

The prize is just a way to convince the investors and to amortize the
development costs. Did people stop flying over the atlantic after lindbergh
won the prize?

Shouldn't you be asking what Lindbergh's trip had to do with people
crossing the Atlantic as paying passengers?

People had already crossed the Atlantic before Lindberg took off.
(Alcock and Brown did it in 1919.)

"Prizes have had a spotty record at best. While raising
public awareness of the potential of transportation
technologies, they have not had the lasting results of
government contracts. The airmail contracts of the nineteen
twenty's and thirty's attracted businessmen not adventurers,
and they built transportation systems not one-off flight
vehicles intended to win a prize. By 1937 it was possible
to buy tickets on commercial airlines to fly around the
world because the airmail routes extended around the world."
--http://web.wt.net/~markgoll/prize.htm

If the prize were too high (like 100 billion USD), you might get an
unsustanably expensive mission architecture. But a (relatively) small prize
like 1 billion USD will force the participants to develop something cheap
and sustainable...

So the problem with the 1960 space race was not that there was a prize, but
that the prize was so large that the motto on both sides was "waste
everything but time".

If the prize does not cover the cost of development then you should ask
yourself whether the competitors are competing *for* the prize or for
the *prestige* attached to winning the contest.

If prestige is the goal, then how does something like the X Prize differ
from the race for the Moon if the 1960s? After all, someone who is
prepared to spend more money *on* a project than he can make *from* it
is surely not in that project for the profit motive. More particularly,
it implies the motto you claimed for the Soviets and the Americans in
the space race: "waste everything but time"

--
Stephen Souter

http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/