It’s no secret that private enterprise will drive much of the future in space travel / exploration. But it wasn’t until recently that this became conventional wisdom – largely the result of the privately-funded Space Ship One reaching space and winning the Ansari X-Prize. The X-Prize has had an interesting effect, essentially legitimizing the cause of private space exploration by offering enormous financial incentives. If such a sum of money is available, the thinking goes, it must be worthwhile. As X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis mentions in his inspiring TED talk, this gets around many of the hurdles of traditional space exploration: bureaucracy, regulations, etc.
Diamandis has now expanded the range of prizes offered by the foundation, hoping to build on the success of the initial prize and encourage giant leaps of innovation in other fields. In general, I think this model holds a lot of potential, but it will work better for some purposes than others, and the key is risk distribution.
Look at it this way. Government regulation and bureaucracy, though often tedious, serves a purpose – it (ideally) ensures that programs are run safely and efficiently and for good reasons. It aims to minimize human and financial risk. Nearly all prizes circumvent the financial component: government need not spend a dime, and competitors are incentivized more than might otherwise be the case. But only some prizes truly deal with the human risk aspect. Exploration prizes are great in this sense. NASA must be militantly risk-averse because loss of astronauts would destroy public perception of the agency and make future funding problematic. Private groups, on the other hand, can take as many risks as they like because it is their own reputation and health on the line.
It’s not quite so simple for other types of prizes, such as health or environment-related efforts. There’s a lot more gray area here as competing teams must now involve other people, both willing (as in the case of a drug trial) or unwilling (for environment-related efforts). Obviously, all entrants are in it to improve a given situation, but one person’s revolutionary new approach might be another’s draconian measures. Laying out rules and regulations is important, but it’s also one step toward becoming the system you’re trying to fight.
That said, I’m all for prizes, as long as the risk is borne exclusively by the participants. The initial X-Prize really has changed the public perception of private spaceflight, and hopefully future prizes will be similarly successful.
In other news, looks like Lance Armstrong was getting a little bored. He’s back….
