Opinion Editorial

By Dennis Polhill

At no cost to taxpayers space technology is making its greatest strides since completion of the Apollo Mission. And the result may turn Colorado into the world’s space shuttle capital.

Since its creation in 1958 NASA continues to spend over $13 billion of taxpayer money annually.  NASA has had many great successes.  But the space shuttle has failed to reduce the cost of access to space via reusable launch technology.  Each launch costs taxpayers close to $500,000,000.  The space shuttle does allow the purchase of on-board lockers for conducting in-space experiments, but scheduling backlogs mean delays of years.  Budget constraints are likely to yield fewer future launches.  Recently asked what it would take to return to the moon, NASA responded by stating, 20 years.  Those old enough, recall in the 1960s that the task took only 10 years when there was no experience and no technology to achieve it.  NASA has evolved into a bureaucracy.

In July 1996 a group of Saint Louis business people put up $10,000,000 to fund the X Prize.  The prize will be awarded to the private group that launches a reusable launch vehicle into space two times within fourteen days.  Sixteen teams registered to compete.  Pioneer Rocket Plane of Lakewood, Colorado is one of the contestants.

To succeed a new technological approach is needed.  At $10,000 per pound old technology is too expensive.  The first stage of a three-stage rocket gets a payload only to about 100,000 feet altitude and consuming about 70% of the launch cost. Because air is a compressible fluid, it is heaviest near the surface of the earth and hard to move through.  The new approaches use many different means to reach altitude before launching into space.  Expectations are that the X Prize will be awarded before 2002 and launch costs will decline by as much as 90%.  At $1,000 per pound dozens of new space markets will open from tourism and medical treatments to the manufacture of faster computer chips and better pharmaceuticals.  The human race will experience a quality of life paradigm shift at least as significant as the invention of the microcomputer.

From a public policy perspective, the inevitable paradigm shift is less relevant than the leverage a few visionaries have exercised to motivate the change.  There is no financial risk because the prize is not paid out unless and until there is success.  In addition results are achieved for less than 0.1% of NASAs annual budget.  The startling contrast deserves a closer look.

The notion of a prize being awarded to someone who successfully advances technology is not new.  In 1714 maritime navigation was revolutionized 20 years after the British Parliament offered a 20,000 pound prize for development of an accurate clock that could be used at sea.

The December 1986 around the earth non-stop non-refueled flight by Voyager won $1,000,000.  The Voyager was designed, constructed and flown by 2 innovators at a cost of  $5,000,000.  Design-only by one of the giant aerospace firms has been estimated at 20 times that amount.

Possibly, the most historically famous prize was the Orteig Prize.  Raymond Orteig, a New York hotel entrepreneur, offered $25,000 in 1919 to the first team to fly an airplane from New York to Paris non-stop.  The prize motivated numerous teams to compete.  Together they spent about $400,000 to develop their respective approaches.  The team lead by Charles Lindbergh succeeded on May 21, 1927.  Lindberghs $25,000 cost was offset by the winnings.  Orteig succeeded in stimulating 16 times as much research as he directly funded and automatically aligned himself with the winning technology and limited his financial exposure.  Theoretically, he could have chosen to back Lindbergh directly instead of offering the prize, but then he would have had to decide in advance which technology held the best prospect of success and Lindberghs incentive to make his approach work cheaply and quickly would have been diminished.  Because Lindberghs was not the most likely to succeed at the onset, it is likely that Orteig would have chosen another and the succeeding technology would not have been so quickly discovered.

In 20th century America hundreds of prizes have been offered.  Most have been in the aerospace field.  But to apply the prize idea to other technological fields such as environmental protection, environmental clean up, reusable energy, fuel cells, cleaner automobiles, traffic congestion, and many more all that is needed is leadership and will.

When government research labs consume taxpayer money like fuel on a campfire, at some point the question needs to be raised, can we achieve more with less?

Dennis Polhill is a Senior Fellow at the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Golden, http://i2i.org.

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