Prizes are irrational. Contestants on “The Price is Right” happily embarrass themselves for a chance to win free drain cleaner; kids triumphantly loft gold-painted plastic trophies; I know a 2-year-old who will use the potty for one raisin.
Prizes are also powerful. In 1919, a French hotelier named Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Paris (or vice versa). The reward was only supposed to be good for five years, but Orteig extended the contest, and in 1927, Charles Lindbergh won it, flying the Spirit of St. Louis some 3,600 miles from Long Island to Paris.
His flight spurred a surge of interest and confidence in commercial aviation; some people argue that today’s airline industry wouldn’t exist without Lindbergh and the prize he went questing for.
Inspired by the Orteig prize and hoping for a similar awakening in commercial space travel, in 1996, entrepreneur and space-industry champion Peter Diamandis announced a $10 million purse for the first private team to demonstrate a reusable, crewed spacecraft. In 2004, the award, called the Ansari X Prize, went to the team behind SpaceShipOne, a rocket-powered craft that launched in mid-air from a custom plane dubbed White Knight. SpaceShipOne now hangs alongside the Spirit of St. Louis at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Today, X Prize is running seven different active competitions, tilting toward global health and education, and declares itself not just a prize giver-outer, but something more elevated: an “innovation engine.”
The government has gotten in on the prize game, too: NASA sponsors a set of prizes called the Centennial Challenges, and DARPA’s “Grand Challenge” autonomous vehicle prizes garnish the resumés of many key players in the driverless car revolution.
But last month, X Prize made a different, more despondent, sort of news, as it declared that the Google Lunar X Prize — $20 million waiting to be claimed by anyone who could land a spacecraft on the moon, traverse half a kilometer, and send back HD video of the feat — would shut down with no winner.
The Google Lunar X Prize competition started in 2007, with a 2014 deadline. That deadline was extended and then extended again; as of a few weeks ago, it stood at March 31, 2018. But with none of the five remaining teams on track to launch in time, Google, the prize sponsor, decided to cut its losses and let the prize expire. The X Prize foundation announced the decision on Jan. 23.
Of course, they didn’t call it a failure. As Diamandis and X Prize CEO Marcus Shingles wrote in an “important update,” the competition drew $300 million in investment (it’s a basic axiom of such prizes that contestants spend more pursuing them than they stand to win), drove regulatory firsts and inspired the public with a pretty great story — at least up until the ending. Moreover, at least some of the teams may keep going: It never really was about the prize money, anyway.
So, is this a story about success, or a story about failure? I’m still trying to figure it out. But I think the answer has to do with the peculiar magic of a prize competition: the alchemy that transforms an insubstantial froth of spin and PR and media glitz into real labor, investment and progress. Something-from-nothing can get you pretty far, it turns out. Just not all the way to the moon.
Kate Becker is a science writer living in Boston. Contact her at spacecrafty.com, or connect via facebook.com/katembecker or twitter.com/kmbecker.
