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!

NSS 2007 Space Budget Blitz

space.com has an article about the National Space Society's 2007 Space Budget Blitz. On of the topics that the NSS space advocates discussed with Congressional Representatives and staffers was finding ways to "Protect and expand opportunities for private industry and entrepreneurship by supporting programs like the Commercial Orbital Transportation Service (COTS) and Centennial Challenges".

Moonbuggy race results

Spaceref has a post about the high school division results in the MSFC Moonbuggy race. You can also see information about the college division results here. Photos of the high school and college races are also available.

Diamandis interview on NPR on Automotive X PRIZE

NPR has a radio interview of Peter Diamandis on the Automotive X PRIZE, which recently released its draft rules for comment. The interview is only a couple minutes long, so go ahead and have a quick listen. The interview also covers some space and space prize subjects.

a prize idea - prize for biospheres

Colony Worlds asks if there should be an X PRIZE for closed biospheres.

documents on the development of Centennial Challenges

Here are a couple of interesting documents that illustrate some of the thinking that went into the development of the NASA Centennial Challenges.

The first is the 2004 Centennial Challenges Workshop Report that shows a lot of the discussion and brainstorming that went into narrowing down the numerous proposals for prizes for the program. Obviously there is no shortage of problems to solve with the prize mechanism.

The second is a paper by Ken Davidian that covers the history of innovation prizes, and the history and state at the time of writing of Centennial Challenges. He uses a lot of the same sources that I used for the paper that eventually resulted in my starting this blog. I probably would have used this paper as a reference, too, if I'd encountered it then.

Human-Powered Vehicle contest

Spaceref posts about the West Coast Human-Powered Vehicle contest being held April 13-15 at NASA Ames Research Center. The classes of vehicle are single rider, multi-rider, and utility. An East Coast version of the challenge will be held in Orlando at May 11-13 at the University of Central Florida. The contest comes courtesy of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers). Rules, Team websites, results from past years, and more can be found here.

This contest should not be confused with the Dempsey/MacCready Prize for "speedbikes" organized by the Human Powered Vehicle Association.

California ROBO Challenge

The California ROBO Challenge will be held on May 12, 2007, in conjunction with the Regolith Excavation Challenge at Santa Maria Fairpark in California. The ROBO challenge is for K-12 students, and is intended to get them interested in engineering and programming through a series of fun robot-building contests.

Centennial Challenges update

The Centennial Challenges website has been updated a bit. The changes I noticed are in the detailed page for all of the Challenges. Each Allied Organization that actually runs the competitions has their own style of website, and it appears that the Centennial Challenges page is providing a consistent way to find similar types of information, as it becomes available, across all of the Challenges. For example, the NASA page has "Competition Venue" and "Venue Directions" links in cases where this has been determined.

The 2007 Astronaut Glove Challenge and 2007 Regolith Excavation Challenge are fast approaching. The first event is scheduled on May 2-3, at the New England Air Museum, and the second is scheduled on May 11-12, at the Santa Maria Fairpark.

Model Spaceship Design Contest

Space for All points us to an announcement about a model spaceship design competition. The current competition's theme is original "fighter" spaceship models. The 5 finalists wiil compete based on voting. According to the announcement, the winning model will be used for a model kit that Fantastic Plastic Models will sell, and the winner will get 2 copies of the kit based on their design.

NASA's 14th Great Moonbuggy Race

Spaceref has posted an article about an annual student moonbuggy race that will be held this Friday and Saturday at Huntsville. NASA MSFC is organizing the race with help from Northrop Grumman and a number of other sponsors. You can find out more details about past moonbuggy races, sponsors, and rules here. Prizes (not specified as far as I could see) are awarded in divisions for high schools and colleges (3 in each division, plus a number of awards in special categories like moonbuggy design).