By Offering Prizes to Meet a Challenge

So, will the next steps on the Moon be taken in order to win a $30 million X-prize? If Google has its way, it will. They’re offering that much money to whoever gets the first privately funded robotic rover on the Moon by the year 2012. It’s a great prize, although it probably won’t cover the actual costs of the rover. It almost really doesn’t matter if it does, though. It’s the spirit of the thing that really counts. That a foundation and a company would be willing to put their money with their mouth is speaks volumes about their commitment to moving humans ahead to explore the near-Earth environment. And, to do that, some radical moves need to be taken, both in funding and incentives as well as in the actual technology to do the job. In the history of technology, sometimes really good solutions have come about because of competition and pressure to do a job well. And, as we know from the history of space travel so far, the spinoffs benefit education, medicine, and many technologies we take for granted in our daily lives.

The X-Prize foundation doesn’t just fund competitions for space travel, although their first big one, the Ansari Prize to prove that personal, affordable space flight is achievable. It went to Spaceship One and Mojave Aerospace Ventures, led by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen. It was a private team and they achieved a major breakthrough in space travel. If you go to the X-Prize Foundation’s web site you’ll find X-Prizes for a variety of other challenges: genomics and automotive breakthroughs, to name a couple. You can even suggest an X-Prize challenge, something breaktaking, audacious, and visionary. That’s what it takes: an idea and a chance to push it through. Sort of like going to the Moon with a lunar buggy.
There it is—let’s go!