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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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/

In article ,
Stephen Souter wrote:

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. :-)

That is *exactly* what it does (if you append "for commercial
enterprises to do" before the exclamation mark -- but that should be
assumed anyway since it is only commercial enterprise that is of
interest to investors).

And that is exactly what makes the X-Prize competition, and next week's
flight, so valuable, and it is why several years from now there will
finally be viable companies making a profit on suborbital tourism, even
though from a technical standpoint this was all possible many years ago.

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.

Not sooner. Only later. There is no way I can see that the existence
of a prize dissuaded someone from pulling the same stunt years earlier
-- indeed, the only reason this stunt was worth a $25K prize was that
nobody had done it or seemed about to do it, just as with commercial
suborbital flight today.

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Ruediger Klaehn wrote in message ...
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 ?

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.
All correct, i was simply trying to point out that a simple cash prize
model doesnt scale very well, IMHO. Its ok for relatively small jumps
in the state of art, but wont work that spectacularly for so huge
leaps.
A million dollar Orteig Prize with similar goal in 1902 would have
produced nothing but couple dead bodies and scrapheaps, and not that
many competitors.

A gradual step-by step advancement in capabilities and/or different
prizes for different subgoals might be more reasonable for lunar
trips. At some point, appropriate subsidies might work even better.

One point to emphazis is that while prizes produce some technological
advances, the more important advances are within organizations
capabilities that compete for the prize. Experience base, personnel
etc etc. You cant take huge leaps with those.

-kert

In article ,
(Kaido Kert) wrote:

All correct, i was simply trying to point out that a simple cash prize
model doesnt scale very well, IMHO. Its ok for relatively small jumps
in the state of art, but wont work that spectacularly for so huge
leaps.

Ah, yes, I agree with that. I don't think the Commission was intending
this prize to be announced next year, but maybe 10-15 years down the
road, when commercial spaceflight is routine and the proposed lunar
mission would be a smaller jump.

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(Henry Spencer) wrote:
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...

You get huge dinosaurs with deep pockets who can afford to produce the
results. What you don't get is young innovative startups who can
barely make payroll producing significant results unless they too can
get acess to deep pockets.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

Joe Strout wrote:
$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

The big problem with kind of scenario is getting the operating capital
to cover the cost of meeting payroll and bending metal during the
years between start-up and the awarding of the prize.

There's no shortage of companies willing to try, and some of them
might even be capable, but there is a massive shortage of billion
dollar pots of cash sitting around for them to tap into. Prizes work
well for modest goals, like the X-Prize or say 1M resolution pictures
of the moon, but they are not likely to work for larger projects.

Even worse, how many companies can survive burning someone else's
capital to stop short (for whatever reason), or spending the full
billion and losing. This isn't like the internet bubble where a lot
of companies can win big.

(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).

They'd better have a damn good business case from the get-go, or they
won't even get a chance to try. It's the same chicken-and-egg problem
that plagues us in so many ways.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

Stephen Souter wrote:
The profit motive does *NOT* guarantee a follow-through. It only
guarantees there will be one if there is a profit to be made. If there
is no profit to be made, then a corporation is actually less likely to
proceed as far as a government agency might (since the latter does not
need to make a profit to stay in business).

Which brings up an interesting 'prize'... The Blue Riband. No money
attached, only (corporate and national) prestige and the possibility
of profits (via increased publicity). Not only that, but the 'prize'
was awarded for performance in large, well established, and growing
market with room enough for dozens of companies.

Yet only a few of the largest participated in the race for the Prize,
and quite frequently (IIRC) they had tacit goverment assitance.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

Joe Strout wrote:
Time will tell how many of the X Prize contenders will remain in the
business once the prize is won.

Who cares? You have missed the point entirely.

It certainly does matter. If they fold en masse, then investors could
prove skittish. (Look at all the companies that folded!)

The point is this: things have changed already, and they'll change even
more on Monday morning. Suborbital tourism is no longer something to
cause starry-eyed dreamers from the lunatic fringe to get laughed out of
a venture capitalist's office. It something real and undeniably achievable.

Hopefully somebody other than Rutan remains in business to buy ships
from though. It doesn't matter if it's Boeing or Scaled, a single
manufacturer market is a Bad Thing. Competition, between suppliers to
grab market share, and between operators to get the best craft, is
what we want, not a smaller scale status quo.

Space travel is no longer something so expensive and hazardous that only
major world goverments can do it; any company with appropriate expertise
and modest amounts of investment can do it too.

Hopefully investors can be found that are interested in space travel,
and understand the difference between space travel and sub orbital
amusement park rides.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

Stephen Souter wrote:
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?

There was an interesting discussion over on sci.space.history on
something close to this topic; The Gee Bee racers. Often credited
with 'proving' the technology for high speed fighters, they had almost
nothing in common with their supposed 'progeny'. High speed fighters
were different in almost every way, and the one Gee Bee style racer
that became a fighter... Was an abysmal failure.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.