Aldridge Commission recommends big space prizes

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?

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Joe Strout wrote in message ...
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?

Careful, here. How can you get cheap spaceflight when you pay ungodly
amounts of money for it ?
One of the reasons why small enterprises are sometimes innovative in
developing low-cost methods is that they HAVE TO make do with limited
resources. Give them billions and they'll spend billions too.

-kert

In article ,
(Kaido Kert) wrote:

Joe Strout wrote in message
...
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?

Careful, here. How can you get cheap spaceflight when you pay ungodly
amounts of money for it ?

$0.1B to $1B is not an ungodly amount for placing humans on the moon,
sustaining them a while, and returning them to Earth. It might just be
enough to spur a company to actually do it, but then again, it might not
(and the company that won the prize, might still lose money in the short
term, though presumably they and their competitors would leverage that
into profitable businesses thereafter, just as is happening with the
X-Prize).

One of the reasons why small enterprises are sometimes innovative in
developing low-cost methods is that they HAVE TO make do with limited
resources. Give them billions and they'll spend billions too.

But they're not proposing to give anyone billions. They're proposing to
give the *winner* of the contest an amount up to one billion. The
contestants will be making do with limited resources anyway, both
because they have no guarantee of winning (and thus recouping their
costs at all), and because even if they win, they at these stakes they
will certainly hope to make a profit.

There is a big, huge, enormous difference between "here's a big bag of
cash, go build us something" and "here's a bag of cash you will get if
you are first to achieve a specific goal, otherwise you get nothing."
Interesting that virtually all past space development has used the
former model.

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Joseph J. Strout Check out the Mac Web Directory: |
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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.

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?

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.

--
Stephen Souter

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

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.

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?

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".

Kaido Kert wrote:

Joe Strout wrote in message

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

Careful, here. How can you get cheap spaceflight when you pay ungodly
amounts of money for it ?

I agree that you won't get CATS by just throwing money at the problem. That
is why the NASA approach of "give us 20 billion USD and we will develop
CATS" is so ridiculous.

But a prize of $1B for a moon shot is not an ungodly amount of money. You
might even argue that it is way too low.

One of the reasons why small enterprises are sometimes innovative in
developing low-cost methods is that they HAVE TO make do with limited
resources. Give them billions and they'll spend billions too.

You don't give them billions up front. You give them billions once they have
earned it. That is a huge difference.

-kert

In article ,
Ruediger Klaehn wrote:
But a prize of $1B for a moon shot is not an ungodly amount of money. You
might even argue that it is way too low.

Indeed, that's the sort of number you want for a prize: it's too small to
make it a profitable project for a traditional aerospace company like
LockMart, but it's large enough to offer some hope of a big payoff to more
innovative competitors.

...Give them billions and they'll spend billions too.

You don't give them billions up front. You give them billions once they have
earned it. That is a huge difference.

If you pay people for making an effort toward a goal, the rational thing
for them to do is to maximize effort while making very slow progress.
(When you think about it, this explains many things.) Whereas if you pay
for results rather than effort...
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

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

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.


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?

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.

--
Stephen Souter

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

"Ruediger Klaehn" wrote in message
...
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".

Apples and oranges. The "prize" was proving that the US was superior to the
Soviet Union, nothing more. There was no money to be won by the US
government.

You'd do better to compare such prizes to the old aviation prizes. For
example, the $25,000 Orteig prize that Lindberg won for becoming the first
person to perform a transatlantic flight.

Jeff
--
Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.

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/