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How a Prize Can Get You to the Moon
by michael belfiore
One of most powerful tools for fostering rapid innovation on the cheap that I talk about in my free paper is to offer a prize.
At the most basic level, prizes can get you a lot of R&D work for free. Think about it: you only have to front the prize money, and you only have to pay the winner. You get all the other competitors for your prize working on the challenge you set the prize up to solve, for free.
But prizes also get you new ideas coming in from places you would never think to look. One of the finishers in the DARPA-sponsored autonomous car races was an insurance company. Great innovations don’t always come from the usual suspects, and prizes have a way of ferreting them out.
The biggest incentive prize in history is up for grabs right now. The Google Lunar X PRIZE offers a total purse of $30 million to the first privately funded teams that can land a robotic rover on the moon, drive it around, send back some cool video, and generally demo a capability that only one major government (the Soviet Union) has managed to achieve. The deadline is the end of 2015.
The field has at this point narrowed down to just two serious contenders: Astrobotic, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff, and Moon Express, a heavily backed venture based in Silicon Valley.
The two teams are using two very different organizational approaches to winning the moon. Astrobotic is leveraging its decades of experience in robotics and keeping its work in-house. Moon Express is buying its way to a win, having already acquired the assets of two other technically promising, but financially challenged teams.
Both Astrobotic and Moon Express will rely on commercially available rocket launches to get their payloads to the moon. Astrobotic has announced that it will send its rover on a SpaceX Falcon 9. Moon Express won’t say what vehicle it’s using, at least not yet.
Which approach will win? Who knows? And the X PRIZE Foundation and its sponsors at Google don’t really care. They really only care about fostering a new capability, proving that it can be achieved.
Or, as former DARPA director Tony Tether likes to say, “Taking the technology excuse off the table.”
Then, and only then, can we get down to the business of commercializing a new capability. Prizes can make it happen.
Keep looking up.
Michael Belfiore is an author, journalist, and speaker on the innovations shaping our world. He has written about game-changing technologies for Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, New Scientist, Smithsonian, Invention & Technology, the Financial Times and Moonandback among others.
Moonandback
reports on spaceflight daily and our documentary project interviews \”the people who are making space happen\”.
2013-04-15 01:34:10
Source: http://moonandback.com/2013/04/15/how-a-prize-can-get-you-to-the-moon/
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