Eyes on the Prize

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It's hard to argue with the success of the X Prize, without which private space flight might still be languishing in an embryonic state. Indeed, several entrepreneurial ventures are now planning commercial space flights, including Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, PayPal founder Elon Musk's SpaceX, video-game developer John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin.

The Federal Aviation Administration even opened an Office of Commercial Space Transportation after SpaceShipOne's historic flight, and has begun drafting regulations for commercial space travel that it expects to begin in 2007 or 2008.

If prizes are so effective at motivating research and pushing innovators to new heights, why not offer more of them? DARPA estimates that it spent $22 million on the Grand Challenge, which included the $2 million prize and the cost of organizing, hosting, and publicizing the event. That's a drop in the bucket compared with DARPA's 2005 budget of $3 billion. The rest of the agency's money is doled out primarily through grants and contracts.

"The prize approach is particularly useful in energizing a community and giving people an incentive to become involved in researching a technology area of interest to DOD," says Jan Walker, a spokesman for DARPA. In fact, DARPA officials are so pleased with the results, says Walker, that they plan to sponsor another Grand Challenge in the future, in a yet-to-be-named field.

Yet contests may be appropriate for only some kinds of research or take research only so far. The highly successful Grand Challenge and the X Prize were both built around a well-defined problem, had clear objectives, and presented challenges that were both difficult and rewarding for a wide variety of contenders to tackle.

"I don't think the contest model works broadly," says Mohr Davidow Venture's Feiber. "It works for certain objectives, but you couldn't grossly restructure research around this kind of system. But when it does work, it has enormous benefits."

Stanford's Thrun agrees. "You could not do everything by a competition of this type, because it's entirely unsustainable," Thrun says. "It was an important part of my fundraising that this was a unique event, and that it was really big." If this year's event had been the fifth, or the 25th, Grand Challenge instead of the second, Thrun says, he would have been unable to raise the $500,000 to build the machine. In other words, part of the attraction of the Grand Challenge was its uniqueness and headline-worthiness -- qualities that could fade fast if similar contests happen every year.

Still, considering the salutary effects of the Grand Challenge and X Prize, it's reasonable to believe that a few more such contests might be useful for advancing research in key areas.

Here's a modest proposal: NASA has a five-year, $12 billion budget for creating new spacecraft that can take humans safely to the Moon and, eventually, Mars. Why not devote just one percent of that budget to a prize aimed at encouraging parallel research by private industry?

Although NASA has set up a "Centennial Challenges" program to stimulate innovation by offering prizes, all of the contests so far are relatively minor, such as a $250,000 prize for developing the best new glove for astronauts.

A much larger bounty -- say, $120 million for sending humans to orbit the Moon and returning them safely -- would be a powerful stimulus to space research. Certainly, it would generate innovation, and it might also produce some commercial spacecraft, launch vehicles, or other tools that NASA would find useful in achieving its own goals. Perhaps most importantly, it would likely boost popular opinion of space travel, turning it from a federal boondoggle into a shared vision and common goal. In short, it might be a winner for an enterprising team of engineers -- and NASA.