Protecting NASA's prizes

Ray — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:55:25 GMT

Other than the Space Frontier Foundation press release, I'm not sure what the organizations are doing to support this. I checked the Space Exploration Alliance web page, and the links to the various constituent organizations. I didn't see any announcement about this on the SEA web page or member organizations' pages (NSS, Mars Society, etc). They may be there somewhere but they weren't obvious to me.

I'm sure these organizations support prizes and Centennial Challenges in particular. For example, the NSS magazine had early articles about the X Prize and George Whitesides has spoken favorably about Centennial Challenges before this particular announcement. The Mars Society has its own rover prize and Robert Zubrin advocated a series of Mars prizes in "Case for Mars". The Planetary Society has an asteroid mission design prize in the works and surely would favor a solar sail prize or a Mars air vehicle prize. The X Prize Foundation obviously supports Centennial Challenges (eg: X Prize Cup events). I could go on ...

Given that they do favor new Centennial Challenges, hopefully these organizations will follow up with prominent updates on their web sites about this effort, and follow that up with other associated efforts. It might also make sense for some of them to get involved with Centennial Challenges in other ways. For example, in cases where a prize is highly relevant to a group's goals, try to win the prize, help organize the prize events as is done with X Prize Cup and others, or sponsor a "2nd place" prize to match one of the Challenges.