speculist on large space prizes

The Speculist on Large Space Prizes

The Speculist posts on push prizes and getting to the Moon. It's in

favor of relatively modest (in aerospace terms) space prizes like the

Centennial Challenges, but suggests that the boundary where prizes are

too ambitious is somewhere around the difficulty of the Lunar X PRIZE

because there's a threshold of difficulty where challenges are too

difficult for small teams, and large corporations with stockholder

requirements can't risk going after the prizes.

I think there's probably a great deal of truth to this line of

thinking. However, an extremely difficult prize can be designed to

reduce this effect, for example by increasing the prize reward,

reducing the risk by including second and third place prizes,

including incremental sub-prizes that are stepping stones towards the

big goal, and/or orienting the prize towards a goal that businesses

would find attractive to address (just not quite enough to go after it

without the prize) because of market potential. Another way of

thinking about it is that there's no harm in offering a large prize

even if you as the sponsor think there's only a 10% chance of anyone

achieving the goal, since you don't have to pay if noone wins, and

some of the competitors may make useful progress towards the goal even

if they don't win.

The post links to a number of earlier posts from the same site on

space prizes, such as this one that's only a day old about the