More Spaceflight Innovation X-Prizes Will Be Coming
The organisation that funds big money innovation prizes will be issuing more spaceflight innovation competitions in the future. That’s according to Gregg Maryniak, the corporate secretary of the non-profit X Prize Foundation in a feature on Space.com.
No dates have been attached to future competitions and details are not yet at a stage where they can be discussed. But they will be coming said Maryniak at Maker Faire Bay Area, a two-day festival celebrating DIY science, engineering and technology.
The X Prize Foundation awarded $10 million to a private spaceship in 2004 and is currently offering $30 million in prizes for a private race to the moon.
The Google Lunar X Prize challenges privately-funded spaceflight teams to compete to launch a robotic spacecraft that can land and travel across the surface of the Moon whilst sending images and data back to Earth.
Prize-based competitions have helped to give flight to the fledgling private space travel industry and the foundation is keen to offer its support to further catalyze breakthrough advances.
Concepts Under Consideration
Although Maryniak gave few details about what the foundation is thinking in terms of future spaceflight competitions, some clues can be gleaned from its website. It outlines a few possibilities as ‘concepts under consideration’.
These include:
This would ‘seek a low-cost, scalable method to safely and efficiently dispose of orbital debris’
Seeking the development of ‘very low-cost, robust capability to take scientific instruments to the edge of space’
The development of designer organisms to aid the human exploration of Mars.
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