Google Inc. is bankrolling a $30 million out-of-this-world prize to the first private company that can safely land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images and video to Earth, the Internet search leader said Thursday.
Many interesting things come out of this new prize. A classmate commented "It will be interesting if they can get this done before NASA, and potentially for about 1/10th the price". 'They' are the now anonymous but very well funded inventors. But what counts as the price? I would include the cost of invention, in addition to the $30m. Why should we assume that, after adding the cost of development, a private company can develop this or any other invention for less than a public entity?
Also, competition seems to be arriving to such prizes: the blogs spot instapundit comments on the reaction of Peter Diamandis, head of the X-prize Foundation on the Google prize. Does competition do anything to prizes like this? If these entities need to 'product differentiate' because of competition, will prizes become increasingly wacky, or increasingly realistic as the number of potential inventors with the necessary resources and capacity decreases?
Finally, will society be better off if space exploration and manned spaceflight cease to be the sole province of national governments? Despite all the scandals, corruption and wars, I trust government infinitely more than private parties with this kind of technology. Is anyone else reminded of James Bond or Austin Powers films!?
Comments
Nice post.
But it always infuriates me that these sorts of prizes are the preferred method of R&D when governments could just as easily design basic research education systems and bench research funding mechanisms that benefit not only the "winner" but society as a whole. In this type of proprietary rat race, all the "losing" research goes for naught, and all their "failures" fail to instruct future researchers or students.
The goal of R&D, from a societal standpoint, is not just the finished product, the cure, the solution... it's the nuts and bolts that went into creating it, and the ripple effect it has on future researchers.
Interesting. Just today we (with a common PRican friend) were having a conversation on what the roles of the state should or should not be, too basic stuff for you MPPs Im sure. The cold war was the reason for the space race, and for all of the R&D invested by the US and Russia. It's all about incentives, today the incentives for governments to invest in outer space investigation have decreased. Today we see one incentive for private companies to take this role, the question is if this incentives will keep growing and if the private sector will take on this type R&D. What type of incentives might these be? Is it good or bad for the society? it only would matter for a philosophical discussion, if conditionas are set it will just happen.