In article ,
"Jeff Findley" wrote:

"Stephen Souter" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Joe Strout wrote:

From the report: "Given the complexity and challenges of the new vision,
the Commission suggests that a more substantial prize might be
appropriate to accelerate the development of enabling technologies. As
an example of a particularly challenging prize concept, $100 million to
$1 billion could be offered to the first organization to place humans on
the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period before they return to
Earth."

Zow! I don't for a moment believe any such thing will happen, but it
sure is neat to see it recommended in an officially commissioned
report...

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.

What you're talking about was a government program. That's not the same as
offering prizes for private indistry to reach some goals. Look at the
hisory of the airplane and see how many prizes were awarded for advances in
aviation. Lindberg won the $25,000 Orteig prize for crossing the Atlantic.
This was clearly a stunt since the only real payload of that craft was
Lindberg himself.

However, it proved to investors that such flights were possible.

If investors had to wait until Lindberg and 1927 before realising such
things as trans-atlantic crossings were possible they can't have been
paying attention! Alcock and Brown had already achieved the first
non-stop Atlantic crossing eight years earlier in 1919.

You might as well argue that the X Prize serves the purpose of making
investors realise that that newfangled thingy called space flight is
possible. :-)

In the
end, Lindberg himself helped to start the airline that became TWA.
Certainly his trans-Atlantic stunt had helped build his credibility.

TWA was hardly the world's first airline. It was not even the world's
first American airline. (United, for example, apparently began
operations in 1926.)

Lindberg's flight made him famous and it undoubtedly stimulated interest
in aviation. (At least in America, where presumably the only reason
investors knew there even was a thing called an "airplane" was because a
couple of Americans made the first powered flight in 1903. Just as they
seemingly only knew trans-atlantic travel was possible because an
American was able to do it in 1927. :-)

It was also, as you say, a stunt.

But it was surely the flight and the stunt which stimulated the investor
interest in aviation, not the prize. The prize may have stimulated
*Lindberg's* interest, but had there been no prize at all sooner or
later some other American else would have made the same attempt he did,
presumably becoming famous in the process and sparking similar investor
interest.

As one webpage notes:

"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

--
Stephen Souter

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