After the claiming of the X-Prize (hopefully) this year, and with the NASA
centennial challenges program, there is some need for new ideas for
aerospace prizes. One very simple upgrade to the X-Prize idea would be an
upgraded X-Prize with a significant downrange component.

But there is another area of space flight that is really unexplored and has
the potential for very high gains with comparatively low investments:
reentry and landing. There are numerous interesting concepts for reentry,
and most of them have never been tried (this is what NASA should have been
doing!).

Just to name a few: exotic metallic heat shields, exotic ceramic heat
shields, cheap ablative heat shields, water cooled heat shields, heat sink
heat shields, very large hypersonic drogue chutes, hypersonic parawings,
light inflatable heat shields, large unfolding radiatively cooled metallic
heat shields etc.

What about this idea for a new aerospace price: participants get a payload
of a defined mass (e.g. 100kg) and volume (e.g. 1m^3), and the objective of
the prize is to soft-land as much as possible of the mass from orbital
velocity.

Put in some eggs, and they should be neither cooked nor broken :-)

To sort out serious competitors, you would first do multiple drop tests from
low altitude. This can be very cheap by using a military transport plane.

Then you do one or two high altitude drop test from a stratospheric ballon
at 30km altitude or from an X-Price vehicle at 100km altitude.

All competitors whose reentry vehicles survive these initial tests are given
a free ride to orbit with a low-cost launch vehicle such as falcon, an old
(russian?) ICBM or as a secondary payload on a large launch vehicle.

The most practical approach would probably be to use a falcon I or an old
ICBM to get ~10 reentry vehicles in an almost orbital trajectory and to
separate them. Then they would be on their own and would have to survive
reentry and landing. Additional points could be given for hitting a
precalculated point downrange and for crossrange.

The barrier of entry for such a price would be very low, as demonstrated by
the wooden heat shields on some chinese capsules. So among the potential
participants would be universities, companies that want to demonstrate
their reentry technology and probably also non-profit organisations and
individuals.

Of course the exact requirements for this price would have to be worked out,
but I think the basic idea has some merit. With propulsion prizes, the
barrier of entry is very high, and no amount of ingenuity will get the ISP
of a hydrocarbon engine above 400s and the ISP of a LOX/LH2 engine above
500s. With reentry, the barrier of entry is comparatively low (a "starter
kit" would be an aerodynamically stable capsule with a wood heat shield, a
barometer and a parachute) and the potential gains are huge.

So what do you think?

best regards,

Rüdiger