Aldridge Commission recommends big space prizes

In article ,
Stephen Souter wrote:

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.)

Actually, that last point is untrue. AIUI, only Scaled has spent more
than $10M. The next biggest spender is probably Armadillo, who's spent
a little over $1M. The other teams have not managed to pull together
that amount of funding (and this is probably a big part of the reason
why they are not now flying hardware).

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

No, not at all like NASA. NASA never intended to turn a profit, nor did
its profitability have anything to do with its continued presence on the
Moon (or lack thereof). NASA answers to congresscritters, the
presidential office, and (indirectly) public interest. Those ran out of
interest in the Moon.

But a company that could send people to the Moon and bring them back for
something on the order of $1B almost certainly WOULD find ways to make a
profit thereafter. And no public interest is needed. The public, on
the whole, is not at all interested in climbs of Mt. Everest,
expeditions to Antarctica, or production of energy, yet all of these
things happen routinely and profitably.

"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

That's an interesting point, but of course the reason the airmail
contracts had that effect was that they were for a long-term (indeed,
indefinite-period) service. The space equivalent would be contracts to
deliver a certain amount of cargo to and from the Moon each week for the
indefinite (and unlikely-to-be-cancelled-because-it-would-cause-a-public-
outcry) future. Sure, that would be great, but a prize seems more
likely, at least in the short term.

Conversely, the usual kind of government contract today is much worse
than a prize: it's for a just-once mission and gets awarded not to the
most effective company, but to the one selected beforehand through a
process of dubious objectivity.

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.

Clearly they are competing for both. A government can (and often does)
spend extravagantly, and not have to answer to anyone about it. No
company spends that way and survives for long. Scaled's craft cost on
the order of $20M, which is far, far cheaper than what NASA would have
spent for a similar accomplishment.

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"

Pure nonsense. I'm guessing you're a government employee.

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