Prize competition?
Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:42 pm
Nanos mentioned prizes in the Foresight thread. I thought that was interesting, but deserving of its own thread.
The X Prize certainly worked in fostering commercial suborbital flight. Of course it took a while, and required several benefactors — most notably Anousheh Ansari, to fund the prize, and Paul Allen, to fund the winning team.
Still, I wonder if we could get the X Prize foundation interested in a fusion prize. They should be interested in it, given how much a small workable fusion reactor would benefit space travel, and given some of their more recent interests. And it should be fairly easy to define clear-cut criteria for what constitutes a win.
It also has a similar spirit... before the X Prize came along, everyone assumed that space was Really Hard and could only be done by huge governments throwing around billions of dollars. Currently, everyone assumes that fusion is Really Hard and can only be done by huge governments throwing around billions of dollars. Quite the parallel in my eyes.
Of course, a competition wouldn't directly give anyone (including EMC2) the money they need to actually do the work... but it would certainly give the effort visibility, and may help to bring funders out of the woodwork, just as it did with Paul Allen. And who knows, maybe there are other approaches to fusion out there somewhere that could work too. I'm not picky.
So, let's brainstorm. What rules and win conditions would you suggest for a fusion competition, and why?
The X Prize certainly worked in fostering commercial suborbital flight. Of course it took a while, and required several benefactors — most notably Anousheh Ansari, to fund the prize, and Paul Allen, to fund the winning team.
Still, I wonder if we could get the X Prize foundation interested in a fusion prize. They should be interested in it, given how much a small workable fusion reactor would benefit space travel, and given some of their more recent interests. And it should be fairly easy to define clear-cut criteria for what constitutes a win.
It also has a similar spirit... before the X Prize came along, everyone assumed that space was Really Hard and could only be done by huge governments throwing around billions of dollars. Currently, everyone assumes that fusion is Really Hard and can only be done by huge governments throwing around billions of dollars. Quite the parallel in my eyes.
Of course, a competition wouldn't directly give anyone (including EMC2) the money they need to actually do the work... but it would certainly give the effort visibility, and may help to bring funders out of the woodwork, just as it did with Paul Allen. And who knows, maybe there are other approaches to fusion out there somewhere that could work too. I'm not picky.
So, let's brainstorm. What rules and win conditions would you suggest for a fusion competition, and why?