2007 X PRIZE Cup at Holloman Air Force Base

RLV News points to an article in the Las Cruces Sun-News on the move of the X PRIZE Cup from the Las Cruces airport to Holloman Air Force Base. This was discussed by Will Pomerantz as a possibility at the 2007 Space Access conference. There will still be a related (and from what I read last year probably well worth while) conference in Las Cruces, but the actual X PRIZE Cup will be at Holloman. This allows the X PRIZE Cup to combine an air show with their space show. It also gives them access to a lot more facilities like hangars, parking, and launch pads. Las Cruces is still the likely "home base" for many travellers.

X PRIZE Cup Competitions for Future Spacers

In addition to the rocket launches and Rocket Racing league rocketplanes, the X PRIZE Cup is going to include a number of fun competitions designed for the younger space fans. This includes driving rovers on a moonscape, model rocket painting and launching, balloon rockets, rocket designs to protect a delicate egg payload (I've seen something similar in a science museum), and Lego space elevator climbers.

That's just through grade 8!

For high school students, there will be a space art contest, and also a contest to come up with the best design (as judged by the public with votes) space contest that will be promoted later, with a scholarship going to the winner.

No matter if you're 8 or 80, get to the 2007 X PRIZE Cup this year!

Remembering the Great Moonbuggy Race

Spaceref has another post on the Great Moonbuggy Race, this time looking back on the event.

Mars Robotic Construction Challenge

The Spaceward Foundation has a lot of space prizes on the agenda. They are going to be running the Space Elevator Games again later this year, but this post is on another prize - a Mars robotic construction prize. I'm not sure what the status is of this one, but whether or not it really ends up happening, it's an interesting idea. This idea was in the works for the NASA Centennial Challenges program, but hasn't (yet?) been funded. Contestants would send Mars robots they build to the Spaceward Foundation. Spaceward would put the robots in a simulated Martian environment. They would control the robots over the internet with a time delay similar to that experienced by JPL controllers of real Mars robots. The plan is to use the test environment for a continuing series of difficult $250,000 prizes like connecting ISRU components. The prizes would be geared towards complex tasks that require multiple Mars robots cooperating. Smaller prizes would be available for less difficult tasks designed for science high schools. The simulator and computer setup could also be used for ongoing testing of Mars robotics with large time delays.

Astronaut Glove Challenge in a few days

Spaceref has the first reminder I've seen that the Centennial Challenges Astronaut Glove Challenge will be held on May 2-3, which is next Wednesday and Thursday. (Update: The Spaceports blog has the 2nd such reminder, and RLV News also has information about the competition). The total prize purse for this year's glove challenge is $250,000. The update has some additional information I hadn't run across before, so I'll give these details. In addition to noting that the Challenge will be held at Windsor Locks, Connecticut, at the New England Air Museum located by the Bradley International Airport, it gives the times of the event. The first day the challenge runs from 3:00 to 6:00, and the second day is a full-day event from 8:00 to 6:00. As noted earlier, there are 2 Challenges, $200,000 for the best overall astronaut glove improvements, and $50,000 for the best Mechanical Counter Pressure gloves. Here is the original NASA press release.

Here are some more links that should be of interest if you're following the astronaut glove competition.

Here's an older, slightly out of date, but still good introduction to the glove prize at Cosmic Log.

Rand Simberg's original suggestion to have an Astronaut Glove Centennial Challenge is an interesting read. It shows some of the reasons this Challenge is so important. The article is even more striking given more recent developments in NASA's Vision for Space Exploration. Rand wishes the contestants good luck.

Update: New Scientist posted an article on April 30 on the Glove Challenge. It has some information I haven't seen from other sources. There are no contestants for the mechanical counterpressure challenge this time around. (Typically with these challenges you have to pay a reasonably significant registration fee, so even if you're working on the problem you're not likely to enter unless you think you have a good chance to win.) There are 6 teams competing for the bladder restraint challenge, which has a $200,000 prize.

Here's my post on Ken Davidian's Centennial Challenges talk at Space Access '07 that gives some context on where the glove challenge fits into the overall program, and how the total $1 million for the challenge is spread out over the next few years. Ken manages NASA's Centennial Challenges.

Here are the Centennial Challenges links for the glove challenge.

Volanz Aerospace is running the challenge. Their site has more information about the competition. A lot of the information is here. Some of it is a bit out of date (part of it says the challenge is in April, but the current dates are displayed prominently). I'd also like to see more information about the competing teams and the sponsors. A Centennial Challenges update from October 2006 noted that as of that time there were 2 teams registered for the challenge.

Update: The folks at Spaceflight America kindly sent me an "Announcement of Dates" document that gives some more information on the contest. This goes into more details than I knew before about the corporate sponsors. Since I can't find some of this information on the web, I'll post it instead of linking to it. The 2 main sponsors, which have provided "major financial and technical support" to the glove challenge, are Hamilton Sundstrand and ILC Dover, 2 companies with expertise in the space suit glove area. “We would not have been able to hold this type of technical challenge without the incredible support of Hamilton Sundstrand and ILC Dover”, said Dr. Alan Hayes, Chairman and CEO of Volanz Aerospace Inc. Their expertise and on-going commitment to our efforts have been instrumental in our ability to hold this competition”, said Sigmund Gorski, President and CIO of Volanz Aerospace. In addition, 2 other corporate sponsors are recognized for their support: OST Global and EDS.

In addition, the document gives some information about the judges for the contest: "The three judges are Mr. Sigmund Gorski, President/CIO of Volanz Aerospace Inc., Mr. Carlos Rivera, Director of Airspace Services, Dimensions International, and Mr. Vijay Narula, President of Optimal Solutions and Technologies Inc. Dr. Alan Hayes, Chairman/CEO of Volanz Aerospace Inc. will act as the appeals judge."

I also don't see anything on the NEAM events page for the challenge.

A blog keeps track of the glove challenge.

Here's a slightly out of date presentation that gives the status as of that date (in 2006) of Centennial Challenges, including the Astronaut Glove Challenge (which is described on page 13).

Best of luck to the competitors next week, and thanks to Spaceflight America/Volanz Aerospace, NASA Centennial Challenges, and the corporate sponsors for organizing the challenge!

Rocketplane Kistler Bridges Competition

Here's an old one, from last summer, that I missed. When you're just pseudo-randomly surfing and searching around the Internet, you're going to miss things. Rocketplane Kistler last summer announced the Bridges Competition to build bridges between microgravity researchers and launch companies. The announcement mentions that the Aero Institute of Houston will help them get corporate sponsorship, and also to get proposals from graduate students and from small companies. Proposals can result in prizes and Rocketplane or K1 trips for experiments. I couldn't find an Aero Institute of Houston on the Internet (there's one in Palmdale, but I didn't see anything about the Bridges Competition there), so it's not clear to me what, if anything, has happened since the original announcement.

Law, Legislation, and Lunacy

Here's a blog with some prize-related posts (most with some space prize aspect or other):

Gingrich Kerry debate climate change and prizes

Save Lives and Win Fabulous Prizes Grainger water-filtration prize

NetPrizes NetFlix Prize

Prize Watch list of prizes they're checking, most either space-related or X PRIZE Foundation prizes

Shafting the Space Elevator NASA and the space elevator concept - note that since this point, Centennial Challenges has committed to a series of tether and beam prizes with larger prize purses. Also note that NASA is *not* specifying the space elevator as their way to get into space. They offered prizes for tethers and power beaming, which have a variety of near-term potential uses in space with NASA and commercial applicability. The Spaceward Foundation that is administering these prize competitions for NASA is packaging them as Space Elevator competitions for their own purposes. It's a win-win for both.

NASA Wises Up ... Sort Of Replacing the Shuttle with a capsule design instead of letting the private sector do it

A Prize No More X PRIZE won

How Prizes Change the World thoughts on the X PRIZE and innovation prizes in general

Prizes for Innovation in African Agriculture

Purdue professor Dr. William A. Masters has done, and continues to do, a lot of work in the area of innovation prizes for African agriculture. You will see a lot of details and supporting documents on this site. His proposal is similar to the X PRIZE type of innovation prize concept, but more complicated in that it tries to measure the value of different agriculture innovations rather than specifying a particular desired innovation up-front. One recent update on the site is that there was a presentation to the X PRIZE Foundation recently, but I don't see any additional details on that presentation. The framework paper "Prizes for Innovation in African Agriculture: A Framework Document" was an important one in my thinking as I wrote the paper on space prizes shortly before starting this blog. In addition to explaining the need for innovation prizes in African agriculture and detailing a specific prize model to accomplish this, the paper gives a good overview of innovation prizes in general, including the CATS Prize and the X PRIZE.

Arthur C Clarke Awards

Here's one that I missed last year ... the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation has information about several awards. The 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Awards, the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Innovator's Award, went to Walter Cronkite and Robert Bigelow, respectively. The Innovator's Award is for innovation that supports communications satellites and their benefits to society, while the Lifetime Achievement Award is for contributions to arts and science that will benefit society now and in the future. The awards have been given to other notables in past years.

In addition, communications satellite company SES AMERICOM has set up the SES AMERICOM Arthur C. Clarke Challenge, which is for college students that produce significant ideas that would help communications satellites. The maximum award is $50,000.

The Foundation also offers scholarships for engineering, space, and space safety studies.

Buzz Aldrin and the ShareSpace Stakes

This has been widely reported in the traditional media and blogs, so I won't say much more about it, but Buzz Aldrin announced plans for a contest with prizes consisting of space experiences, including orbital rides.

NSF innovation incentive prizes

RLV News provides a link about an innovation incentive prize program that Congress asked the NSF to investigate. A committee wrote a significant paper suggesting approaches NSF should take to implement the prize program. Here's the Executive Summary in PDF format. The initial suggested approach appears to be similar to NASA's Centennial Challenges. More comments on the paper appear in the RLV News comments. We will see what happens with the funding and implementation of this program, and whether or not it turns out to be a major part of the innovation incentive prize world.

The Intangible Economy blog has a post about this report, too. The blog also discusses innovation prizes, the Virgin Earth Challenge prize, and a prize for helping a mining company find gold. The ACM also has a summary of the report (at the bottom of the page), as well as notes on how the proposal is having trouble because of changes in Congress and this year's budget freeze. Page 3 of the Southern Illinois University Carbondale Research Matters report also has an update with a little politics thrown in.

Nothing more for private sector to do

Spaceref reports on a report released by the Generate Accountability Office (GAO). The gist of the report is that several Federal science-related agencies, such as NASA and NOAA, were required to compete commercial activities currently done in-house with private industry. It seems (to me) like a half-hearted effort was made to identify commercial activities (I guess they mean potentially commercial?) and to allow private industry to compete for this business. The comclusions were that private industry is pretty inefficient, and the in-house government agency won almost all of the time. The agencies expect even less results in the future because they've already done it with the jobs that private industry can handle like janitorial services.

From the report: "Agency View of Activities That Can Be Successfully Contracted Out: According to agency competitive sourcing officials, they expect the in-house organization to win most competitions. For example, Energy officials told us that they expect the in-house win rate to be higher than the private-sector win rate because most commercial type activities such as cleaning and general maintenance have already been contracted out. The remaining activities are more complex and require greater knowledge about agency operations, which officials said gives agency employees an advantage. Similarly, NASA officials told us that NASA started off about 30 years ago contracting out many of its commercial services and now has fewer such services to compete."

I think there are completely different ideas within these agencies and outside them on what commercial services are. For example, I think most people would not consider "Space Trucking Company" as an inherently governmental activities, but if anything inherently non-governmental activities.

As far as this blog is concerned, though, the main thing I want to point out is that the only business mechanism they considered for working with the private sector is the traditional contract that has suffered from so many nation-wounding problems in big aerospace, cost-plus projects. Prizes are completely off in left field.

ISS Node 2 Naming Contest

Space Pragmatism has an article about a contest that was held to name the ISS Node 2. Depending on your views on the ISS you may or may not enjoy the anonymous post that suggests a name. The challenge was for K-12 students. There is more to the challenge than you might think at first. NASA has more information about the name here. If you haven't heard the winning name is Harmony, a name that 6 classes chose.

ESA SUCCESS student contest

Spaceref has an article on The European Space Agency's SUCCESS (Space station Utilization Contest Calls for European Students) student content. The competition was to design an experiment to fly on the ISS. The first prize winner got an internship at ESA. The winning experiment investigates cosmic radiation and how it influences the retina and/or the brain. During the internship, the winner will get the experiment ready for the ISS.

Heinlein Centennial Writing Contest

The Heinlein Centennial Conference will include a short fiction writing contest. There are prizes in several categories, including professional, amateur, and young writers. There are some guidelines on what they are looking for, as well as hints on how to get disqualified if that's your cup of tea. I also recommend reading some Heinlein stories because you can bet that's the type of writing they like. The space review has an article on Heinlein's writing, the conference, and the movie Destination Moon. Since this is called "part 1" you can also bet that at least one more such article will appear in the series.

Update: And here's part II!