FLUG REVUE December 2004: Price money stimulates innovation

COMPETITIONS PUSH TECHNOLOGIES

By Volker K. Thomalla

Burt Rutan has pulled it off again: the gifted designer of unconventional flying machines satisfied the conditions of the Ansari X Prize with the second successful flight of SpaceShipOne over the Mojave desert, and can now look forward to over $10 million in prize money, even if this sum will not actually be enough to cover the project costs of between $25 million and $30 million. But without financiers like Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, SpaceShipOne would never have been possible.

Especially in the early years of aviation, competitions have generated sensations and progress. Suffice it to mention just two of the most important prizes. When, in the first decade of the last century, the London Daily Mail newspaper offered a prize of £1,000 for anyone who could fly across the English Channel, it tempted many pioneering aviators to have a go. Eventually, Louis Blériot won the prize in 1909.

Then there was the $25,000 Orteig Prize sponsored by the New York hotelier, Raymond Orteig, for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris. This was won in 1927 by Charles Lindbergh, whose name went down in aviation history books as a result.

In both cases, the prize money probably did not cover the costs, but that was not the point of the exercise. The prizes were intended purely as an incentive to make the apparently impossible possible and to develop new, ground-breaking technologies. In both cases, these objectives were achieved. The competitions laid the foundation stones for huge leaps forward in development by offering clearly defined objectives and extremely attractive incentives: on top of the prize money, in both cases the prestige and the celebrity that the prize would confer on the winner were additional attractions. Of course, the prize money also attracted many gamblers who were prepared to take on excessive risk. The competitions accelerated a development which was possibly already in the air but which would never have been realised at that time without the prizes.

The Ansari X Prize should therefore be viewed as taking its place alongside the Daily Mail and the Orteig prizes. Of course, the SpaceShipOne flights do not yet amount to space tourism. But they have opened the door to this. They have also demonstrated to NASA and all the other government organisations around the world that privately financed space travel can be successful too. Richard Branson, Chairman of Virgin Atlantic, has founded a “space tourism company” called Virgin Galactic. The demand for tickets for the flights is enormous, even though the fares are likely to run into six figures.

A programme similar to SpaceShipOne would have cost many times as much time and money had it been organised by NASA, ESA or some other official organisation. These organisations do not have a monopoly on brainpower. Competitions serve the function of emboldening talented private individuals to try their hand.

If one day there should be space trips for private people which do not require several weeks of astronaut's training, then the Ansari X Prize will have paved the way to this and delivered an impressive example of just how effective competitions can be even today.

From pae 4 of FLUG REVUE 12/2004

Last updated 11 November 2004

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