Competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, Team Italia's insectlike crawler
Image courtesy of Andrew Collins/X Prize Foundation
Fourth Street in downtown Santa Monica is an eclectic place—home to, among other concerns, the studio of “Dance Doctor” John Cassese, a chic trade-in clothing shop, and an emporium with the self-explanatory name Magicopolis. Amid such colorful neighbors, the X Prize Foundation presents a facade of anonymity, even, perhaps, of quiet mystery: a mirrored door that reads “Revolution Begins Here” with a stylized and rather cryptic X above, as if to mark the spot but do little else.
The entrance is at once easily overlooked and profoundly misleading. Behind the glass and up a flight of stairs, the X Prize organization is doing plenty. It made history in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to aircraft designer Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites for twice sending its SpaceShipOne more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) up into space, still the world’s only private manned spaceflights. Since then, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis has worked tirelessly to build a franchise for radical innovation that he says will change the world.
In September 2007 he stood with Google cofounder Larry Page in Los Angeles to unveil the Google Lunar X Prize, promising up to $25 million to the team that successfully lands an unmanned rover on the moon, drives it 500 meters, and sends back photos, video, and data. Two weeks later Diamandis was in New York, sharing the stage with former president Bill Clinton and committing to a dozen more competitions over seven years. Purses totaling $300 million would go to those who tackle “grand challenges” in categories such as global poverty, the environment, public health, and education. The first of these will take place in the fall of 2009, when Diamandis says up to 50 teams will compete for the Progressive Automotive X Prize by racing technologically advanced green cars—which must achieve the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon—in trials around the country. Nobody has yet mass-produced such cars.
Diamandis, though, is aiming for a still bigger breakthrough: a breakthrough in the way we achieve breakthroughs. Ever the evangelist, he spent one evening between the Google and Clinton announcements pitching his vision to a hundred or so Hollywood heavyweights gathered in the home of the socialite, pundit, and Web media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington. “What we try to do is really reach down into the souls of people and say, ‘You have the ability to solve the problems,’” Diamandis said, his voice rising. “It doesn’t take the government, it doesn’t take a large corporation. In fact, most brilliant solutions to problems come from the mind of an individual.
“We believe there’s a new model. It’s putting out a clear set of rules and a large cash challenge and saying, ‘We don’t care where you are, where you’re from, where you’ve gone to school, whatever you’ve done before—you solve this problem, you win.’”
It is a seductive notion—especially in this era of overextended government and corporate cutbacks—and one that is gaining traction in philanthropic circles and the research establishment. The National Academy of Engineering and the National Science Foundation have urged experimenting with so-called inducement prizes to spur research. Within government, NASA has taken small steps into the competition arena and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored Grand Challenge robotic automobile races. Last year, Republican presidential candidate John McCain made a $300 million prize for improved electric car batteries a plank in his environmental platform.
DARPA's challenges have featured drag races of driverless,
autonomous vehicles
Image courtesy of DARPA
The audience in Huffington’s living room was a self-made yet largely liberal-minded crowd, so it was not surprising that they might embrace a vision that unites, as Huffington put it, “the instinct of competitiveness that we all have—the instinct to win—with the better angels of our nature, the instinct to make this a better world.” It is a vision that also ought to resonate with millions of Americans, already captivated by reality show competitions like American Idol and The Amazing Race. The only question is, can the X Prize compete?
The X Prize offices in Santa Monica are long and narrow, with a double-high ceiling that has exposed joists and beams. Appropriately, the space somewhat resembles a hangar. One morning while I was visiting, Diamandis sat in his corner office with his assistant at the time, Angel Panlasigui, and waded through potential prize ideas in advance of a board meeting. One possibility, hashed out with James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, would foster the development of three-man submarines that could dive to the ocean floor. The next idea took the concept to a fantastic level: autonomous robots, cheap enough to mass-produce, that could sink to the bottom of the sea, collect data, and return to the surface to share that data with a central computer. “This is an idea that I kicked around with Larry Page,” Diamandis explained. “If you have thousands of these going down randomly, gathering data, you then can stitch the data all together.”
Robotics pioneer Red Whittaker's converted Chevy Tahoe won the
2007 urban challenge, successfully navigating through a
mock city environment.
Image courtesy of DARPA
“Wow,” Panlasigui said.
Five or six years ago, the thought that he would be kicking around ideas about ocean exploration with the likes of Cameron and Page might have had Diamandis saying “wow” too, and not just about the company he now keeps. For three decades Diamandis, 47, was single-mindedly focused on space. He grew up in the Age of Apollo and in fifth grade began “cutting out every news article I could and recording the launches off the television set with my parents’ Super 8 camera.” In junior high school he confessed to his mother a secret desire to be an astronaut. Diamandis chuckles at the memory. “She goes, ‘That’s nice, son, but I think you’re going to be a doctor.’”
Diamandis was undeterred at first—a lot of astronauts have trained as doctors—but a conversation in college with an actual astronaut, Byron Lichtenberg, forced a reconsideration. Even if he defied the odds to become an astronaut, “you have to do what you’re told and be on best behavior all the time to get a chance to fly,” Diamandis recalls being told. “That just wasn’t me.”
