A recent episode of the StarTalk podcast, “Incentivizing the Future with Peter Diamandis,” provides an interesting tale about Mr. Diamanis’s early efforts to spur space inventions through the XPRIZE Foundation as well as his current efforts to spur innovation in other areas, such as healthcare.
It was a good reminder about the start of Virgin Galactic, which began after Burt Rutan’s experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X Prize in 2004. One can quickly forget that some of the big names in new industries were piggybacking on the earlier achievements of others, such as Elon Musk buying a pre-existing Tesla company.
If you go to the XPrize Foundation page, you will see a variety of competitions underway. The latest space-related contest is the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE, which was
…created with two goals in mind. To spur affordable access to the moon and give space entrepreneurs a legitimate platform to develop long-term business models around lunar transportation and to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, space explorers and adventurers to enter the STEM fields.
As Mr. Diamandis was encouraged by contests from early last century, let’s hope other innovators and their supporters continue to carry the torch beyond this century to see what human ingenuity can create when challenged.
Our Awesome Universe 