March 27, 2005
NASA Will Offer Cash Prizes for Technological Innovations By WARREN E. LEARY NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/politics/27prize.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, March 26 - In an effort to stimulate fresh thinking, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has announced that it will offer cash prizes for innovative technology that can be applied to space exploration.
The competitions, open to large and small companies, colleges, technology groups and individuals, are seen as ways to promote innovation by letting contestants pose any solution that works to solve a problem, an agency official said Friday.
The prizes are a new approach for NASA in its effort to find new space technology.
"We want to find innovation wherever it exists," said the official, Brant Sponberg, manager of the Centennial Challenges Program at the space agency, in a telephone news conference.
The program, part of President Bush's new vision of exploration for the space agency, was inspired in part by last year's Ansari X Prize of $10 million for the first private piloted suborbital flights, and in part by the incentive programs that have long been sponsored by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The first two competitions will focus on the development of strong lightweight materials for making ropelike tethers and on ways to transmit power wirelessly from one point to another.
After face-to-face demonstrations by candidates later this year, the winners of the Tether Challenge and the Beam Power Challenge will each receive a $50,000 prize. The second year, NASA will repeat the challenges but raise the technical standards. Winners in each category will receive awards of $100,000, $40,000 and $10,000 for first, second and third place.
In one competition, the tether materials will be stretched in matched contests. In the other, wireless power transmission and receiving systems, like those using laser beams or microwaves to transmit energy, will power robotic devices that carry weights up a cable.
Mr. Sponberg said monetary inducements, like the $25,000 Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh for the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York, were a proven way to advance innovation and technology.
NASA will provide the $400,000 for prizes in the first contests, but the competition will be managed and run by the Spaceward Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Mountain View, Calif., that supports space technology and the concept of building an elevator between Earth and a station in space. NASA will loosely oversee the competition and the selection of unbiased judges to assess the contests, Mr. Sponberg said.
With Congressional approval, NASA hopes to direct about $80 million toward such technology prizes over the next five years, he said.
Planned are several annual Keystone Challenges, costing up to $3 million each, for things like explorer robots, lunar vehicles or autonomous mining equipment.
With enough support, Mr. Sponberg said, NASA also hopes to sponsor one or two so-called Flagship Challenges a year, which could offer a prize of up to $25 million for a low-cost space mission, like a Moon landing robot or a human orbital flight.
Ideas for future challenges have come in from NASA professionals, universities, private industry, those attending workshops on space technology, hobbyists and people sending in e-mail messages, he said.
"We are drowning in good prize ideas," Mr. Sponberg said.
================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu
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