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I'm not sure I see the incentive here. Follow my logic. A prize is valuable because it's something you couldn't afford yourself. If I offered $1 prize people

by SamAtt 17y ago

I'm not sure I see the incentive here. Follow my logic. A prize is valuable because it's something you couldn't afford yourself. If I offered $1 prize people probably wouldn't be too psyched about it because a dollar is something they could spare out of their own pocket. The whole point of this article is that NASA doesn't have enough money to overcome the hurdles you refer to. So it stands to reason that companies would have to spend more to overcome the hurdles than the prizes themself would be worth. Which is why I don't see how prizes would have any positive impact.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
By offering a prize, a large organization can "pay ahead" the cost of developing, testing, and implementing a new technology. Look at it this way: let's assume it would cost the government $20 Billion to reduce cost-to-orbit by three-fold, say through the use of hybrid-magnetic launchers or some such. But that $20 Billion would take 20 years and dozens of missions. Instead the agency could offer a $10 Billion prize for any company that had three successive launches at one-third the cost in the next three years. Each year after that the prize would increase by $1 Billion. Now, instead of one technology, pursued by one agency, you have a dozen possible solutions pursued by a dozen organizations. At some point the prize money is paid out -- arguably much earlier than 20 years but who knows? It's definitely not going to cost any more money, and now you've decreased cost-to-orbit of every other mission you ever want to have. That means for every mission you have after the goal is reached, you've reduced launch costs by two-thirds. Forever. In addition, you're likely to end up with 3 or 4 technologies that all can reduce cost-to-orbit, all that are viable. That's why reducing cost-to-orbit is such a critical goal. It's this huge productivity multiplier. Yes, you spend more now, but it makes all the other decisions easier (eventually). You quickly reach a point where lots of entities have the funds to do multiple missions using lots of new technologies -- a much better situation than continuing to pay more and more money for less and less return.

by SamAtt 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

By offering a prize, a large organization can "pay ahead" the cost of developing, testing, and implementing a new technology. Look at it this way: let's assume it would cost the government $20 Billion to reduce cost-to-orbit by three-fold, say through the use of hybrid-magnetic launchers or some such. But that $20 Billion would take 20 years and dozens of missions. Instead the agency could offer a $10 Billion prize for any company that had three successive launches at one-third the cost in the next three years. Each year after that the prize would increase by $1 Billion. Now, instead of one technology, pursued by one agency, you have a dozen possible solutions pursued by a dozen organizations. At some point the prize money is paid out -- arguably much earlier than 20 years but who knows? It's definitely not going to cost any more money, and now you've decreased cost-to-orbit of every other mission you ever want to have. That means for every mission you have after the goal is reached, you've reduced launch costs by two-thirds. Forever. In addition, you're likely to end up with 3 or 4 technologies that all can reduce cost-to-orbit, all that are viable. That's why reducing cost-to-orbit is such a critical goal. It's this huge productivity multiplier. Yes, you spend more now, but it makes all the other decisions easier (eventually). You quickly reach a point where lots of entities have the funds to do multiple missions using lots of new technologies -- a much better situation than continuing to pay more and more money for less and less return.