Centennial Challenges Workshop Updates

06/15/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Reports are trickling in from the Centennial Challenges Workshop (which I couldn't get to because of day job responsibilities). So far we have these observations (hat tip to Warren Thompson):

• There is a rumor that Elon Musk will call for the Kistler contract to become a prize tomorrow morning during his guest speaker appearance. I guess this means his efforts to buy Kistler outright haven’t been going well (see the last paragraph in this Economist article).
• Peter Diamondis was very interested in the Lunar Lander challenge, so much so that I came to the conclusion that he may have something other than the X Prize cup in mind for the near future. He did make three specific suggestions:
  • Soft land a rover on the Moon, rove to a historic Apollo landing site, take video and snap shots. (Think Radio Shack’s logo in the foreground of the Apollo 11 landing site.)
  • Soft land a rover on the Moon at the South Pole, rove to ice.
  • Create a truly international “Space Race” to the Moon with ESA and other agencies kicking in prize money.

• Diamondis also stated that he though that commercial space could get a rover to the Moon within 3-5 years… and then someone suggested the goal of the prize be to film NASA's return to the Moon. ;)

Another report from Paul Blase of TransOrbital:

bq.

I attended the Centennial Challenge workshop Tue and Wed, very interesting. NASA has authority from Congress to offer prizes like the X-prize and the DARPA Grand Challenge (for off-road navigation by autonomous vehicles); the purpose of the workshop was to help them generate additional ideas for prizes and to develop rules for running the contests by.

A large number of possible challenges were discussed, in both space and aeronautics, with subjects ranging from very-high-temperature computing (for use on Venus), to landing on the moon, to high-performance aircraft engines.

We boiled things down to 3 kinds of challenges:

• 1st to achieve prizes (similar to X-Prize)
• all-at-once races (like the Grand Challenge, generally used where the infrastructure cost for running the competition is high)
• and bounties. The latter was discussed in the context of asteroid sample retrieval, where NASA wants lots of samples from many different asteroids.

This next year (FY 2004) NASA will start to offer prizes of up to $250k (the limits are set by Congress) for relatively simple and short-term challenges. Next year (FY2005) they'll start with prizes of up to $30M.

One of the more interesting problems was convincing the NASA types not to try and overspecify the competitions and turn them into competitive procurements. They'd usually try to say “we'd like a challenge to do X, using technologies Y and Z. For instance, it took some argueing to make them see that ultra-high-temperature computers will not necessarily use semiconducting electronics (e.g. silicon carbide), or even electronics at all! I think that they got the idea at the end, however.