For pure energy, drive and tenacity, you will be hard put to find anyone to surpass my hyper-achiever friend, Peter Diamandis. Smarter than any three average bears, brimming with seemingly inexhaustible energy, and blessed with a wickedly sardonic sense of humor, Diamandis is both a Harvard M.D. and an M.A. in Astronautical Engineering from MIT -- a resume impressive enough on its own buy truly awesome when you realize that he won both degrees simultaneously, while also working to found International Space University in the late 1980's. With ISU up and running, he continued with a series of space entrepreneurial ventures, all informed by his lifelong determination to fling open the gates to space -- and if possible, to personally and physically barrel through to orbit himself.

Diamandis' latest endeavor designed to revolutionize space by making it accessible to all is the X-Prize. Exasperated with the country's seemingly endless parade of paper launch vehicles and bureaucratically constipated development programs, he is out to propel us into space by a long disused but once time-honored technique: a fat, juicy multi-million-dollar prize awarded neither for feasibility contracts to study the feasibility of contracts, nor for vugraph gross weight, but for that seemingly forgotten principle -- success.

The X-Prize bears not the slightest resemblance to your classic governmental development program. This is wholly --nay, vehemently! -- intentional. The prize will be between $5M and $10M, and will be awarded to the first individual or group that launches a spacecraft that 1) is completely privately financed, 2) carries at least two people to an altitude of 100km, and 3) does that twice within two weeks.

Or as Diamandis puts it, ``No vugraphs need apply!'' Revolutionary, right? Well, yes and no. It's revolutionary when you compare it to the sclerotic procurement process that is fast driving every major Government endeavor to total paralysis. But actually, it's more Back To The Future because this is how a lot of revolutionary advances in flight have been made.

There have been several such prizes: the Kremer Prize for human powered flight, for example, or the Schneider Trophy for seaworthy planes. Possibly the most famous was the Orteig Prize, offered around the turn of the century to the first person to go non-stop from New York to Paris. The winner was Charles Lindbergh. But as Diamandis points out with obvious glee, before Lindbergh won the $25K purse, other unsuccessful contenders had spent a total of some $400K trying for it -- i.e., 16 times the value of the prize itself. For his part, Orteig never had to spend a penny until Lindbergh finally crossed that finish line.

If we seriously want to ``tap into private sector capital'' as the current buzz phrase has it, this approach would seem remarkably more effective than issuing yet another RFP destined for an early ignominious death in face of the budget-cutting juggernaut and the procurement system octopus.

Diamandis has assembled an X-Prize Board of Directors peppered with names that are household words in the space community. Right now, it is working out the legal, regulatory and policy issues that are bound to come up as this project gathers momentum. First and foremost is the issue of liability. We're talking real space here, Robert Heinlein-style space, ordinary humans going into space without benefit of astronaut training or test-pilot credentials. That's a risky, adventurous undertaking in any day and age, but doubly so in the risk-averse, psychotically litigious culture of late-20th-Century America. You want to do anything adventurous these days, you want to make sure the lawyers don't assassinate you at the first opportunity.

Diamandis plans to start seeking a sponsor in late fall 1995. In the meantime, to alert the world that the X-Prize is coming, Diamandis and his Board are sponsoring an X-Prize Trophy Competition. The trophy can be anything at all just so long as it is buildable, artistic and creative, with the heaviest emphasis on ``dream, vision, and goal.'' All proposals will be exhibited in an art show and then time-capsuled to be opened a couple of decades hence, say in 2020. (If you want to know more, e-mail your questions to xprize@aol.com)

I find this whole undertaking exciting for one overriding reason, folks: it gives me hope. Americans once accepted risk with gusto, sought the most technologically challenging endeavors and tenaciously pursued them to success. Yet as the century draws to a close, we have turned our back on that heritage to wallow instead in mindless partisanship, an obsessive aversion to risk in any form, and a truly alarming warping of our national scientific agenda to fit the demands of pork-barrel politics. The X-Prize represents a chance to climb out of that swamp and reclaim the adventurousness and vision that once was ours. Any thoughtful American might thus do well to hope for its resounding success.

©1996 Brenda Forman

(Brenda Forman's e-mail address is drbforman@aol.com)

If you write it she will answer.

Last Modified: 10:10, November