Likewise, many critics see the notion of leverage—taken as an article of faith in the X Prize offices—as overstated. Some of the investment is certainly redundant when competing teams investigate similar approaches. “Economists have long worried about that,” says Molly Macauley, an economist who studies space policy at Resources for the Future, an independent Washington-based think tank. “They view it as possibly negative.” It’s impossible to know how much of the $60 million invested by competitors vying for the Ansari X Prize was duplicative, says Ken Davidian, who monitored contestants when he worked for the foundation. Then again, most of Lindbergh’s competitors invested in variations of the same flight plan: a two- or three-man crew piloting a trimotor plane.
People seek recognition and appreciation, Elon Musk says. “If there is a prize ?that’s commonly understood to be important, they’ll go for it.”
The critics greatest worry, though, is that Diamandis’s mechanism for bringing in new players excludes the old ones—research institutes that depend on government grants and contracts to pay their operating expenses. “One of the wise things about federal research policy since World War II is that it wasn’t directed solely at conducting research but also at building capacity for research,” science and health policy journalist Daniel Greenberg says. “You trained people and gave money for equipment and financed research in many circumstances over the long term.” A contest, he says, “prices a hell of a lot of people out of the game.”
Unless, that is, they were to follow the example of one William Whittaker. “Red” Whittaker, as he is known (for reasons that are no longer immediately obvious), is a pioneer in field robotics. As a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he has built test rovers for NASA. On his own, he has fielded teams in each of the three DARPA Grand Challenges: His autonomous vehicles performed best in the first race, grabbed the silver in the second, and won the third. It is as if the Google Lunar X Prize were designed with Whittaker in mind. Sure enough, Whittaker announced his intent to compete the day the prize went public.
“The challenges create cultures that are unachievable by traditional research mechanisms,” Whittaker argues. “The goals pursued by the challenges are the grand leaps that are rarely pursued by traditional incremental research.” Most research, he says, is hobbled by a bureaucratic mind-set that reduces the topic to “gobbledygook.” In a competition, though, “the organizational mind-set is monotonically and unequivocally purpose-driven to the challenge, and everything else operates in the context of that.” And teammates, he says, “achieve effectiveness that has never been revealed before.” As a result, “the gobbledygook moves 10 times faster than it otherwise would.”
Few scientists would deny that funding research through grants and contracts is expensive and cumbersome, as well as risk averse. But few would suggest that contests could supplant it. “The contest model, I think, is superficially attractive, but if you said, ‘We’re going to put up a billion-dollar prize for a cure for cancer’—I mean, people who are knowledgeable about cancer research would say that’s ridiculous,” Greenberg says. “You don’t have people who are withholding their presence from cancer research because there isn’t a big prize at the end of the tunnel.”
No doubt, too, the competition model is ill suited to certain fields of research—for instance, whole swaths of basic science, where results are open to interpretation or even dispute. Contests, which depend on clear rules, goals, and results, appear better suited to technology and other applied fields. Nor is it obvious how grand a grand challenge can be, such as in space exploration: “You can start this kind of activity with small robotic projects, but at some point it doesn’t scale up very well,” says Howard McCurdy, a space historian and public policy professor at American University in Washington, D.C. “Nobody knows where the limit is.” A garage tinkerer might be able to design a space glove, but don’t count on him to send someone to the moon.
Diamandis acknowledges that he does not know where the limits on inducement prizes lie. “I think that prizes are going to be most successful when intelligence makes a big difference,” he says. “The more capital-intensive a prize is, the more difficult it will be.” Still, he has not ruled out a cancer prize. He points to a group of hospitals and labs that are attempting to collaborate on a “unique approach to cancer” but are stymied by infighting. “A prize,” Diamandis says, “could help focus them as a team.” It’s a novel idea: a competition to induce cooperation.
One arresting scene in the story of the X Prize comes at the end of SpaceShipOne’s first foray into space, captured in a Discovery Channel documentary. It has been a nerve-racking journey: Pilot Mike Melvill first wrestles with the ship’s controls, winds up more than 20 miles off course, and just barely reaches the touchstone altitude of 328,000 feet. Then, as he prepares to return to Earth, the trim control on one of the ship’s twin tails fails to return to its proper position, threatening to send the craft into an uncontrollable dive. We watch anxiously as Melvill struggles to fix the trim; “I was very concerned that I couldn’t get back,” he says later. Ultimately he does return, of course, but not before he reaches into a sleeve pocket and, in a gesture of victory, pulls out a handful of M&Ms. The camera shows them floating through the cramped cabin: deep reds, pale blues, lime greens, rich browns spinning and hurtling, until they succumb to Earth’s gravitational pull and drop to the floor.
Competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, Red Whittaker's Red Rover
Image courtesy of Andrew Collins/X Prize Foundation
As Melvill proved, a space race photographs well, and three years after SpaceShipOne, shortly after the Google Lunar X Prize was announced, Diamandis found himself on the phone with executives from a reality show production company, not unlike the one that puts on American Idol. “Good morning, everybody!” a producer began brightly. He appeared to be in a gregarious mood, telling Diamandis that he hoped “to open up a dialogue with you to see if you’d be interested in possibly coming together on some type of program.”
Diamandis wasted no time bursting that bubble. Whatever softness exists in his demeanor disappears altogether when he talks business. There is no small talk, no laughter. He seldom even cracks a smile. Here Diamandis’s tone was polite but even; it betrayed no emotion. “I have started a large number of the companies in this area,” he began. “I’ve seen about...at least a dozen proposed reality TV shows in space come and go, and none of them has closed the business case. They all end up in one way or another coming back either to X Prize or Space Adventures or Zero G.”
A second executive spoke up to focus the discussion on the Google contest. But the production team appeared to be at once too early and too late. “We’ve been in negotiations with Discovery on this now for well over half a year,” Diamandis said, “so a show regarding the Google Lunar X Prize is probably off the table right now until we figure out exactly where we are with that.” In fact, he added, “we’re in the midst right now of a series of media partnership negotiations” for all the prizes the foundation is considering. “Who we’re going to team with to produce them will come after network deals are put in place.”
