NASA plans prizes for space breakthroughs

'March Madness' for geeks
The Tether Challenge requires teams to create tethers of a standard length, width and weight. The tethers would be paired against each other in a single-elimination tournament to see how much tension they take until one of them breaks.

"It's kinda like March Madness," Sponberg explained of the tether matchoff. "It's the NCAA tourney for materials geeks."

In the end, the winning tether would have to handle at least 50 percent more tension than a reference sample that Sponberg called the "house tether." This year, if the top team's creation beats the house tether by that much, the team would win $50,000 and their tether would likely become the standard to beat the following year..

The following year, NASA would boost the prizes for tethers to $100,000 for first, $40,000 for second and $10,000 for third, Sponberg said.

Both contests would allow the competing teams to retain intellectual property rights and the winners may well be courted by NASA for future contracts. However, Sponberg said the Centennial Challenges program would not be involved in those decisions.

"The purpose of my program is to see if there are neat technologies out there that are of use to other NASA programs," he said.

Removing the 'giggle factor'
NASA's Centennial Challenges are named in honor of the Wright Brothers centennial but also continue a tradition of technological contests as old as the Longitude Prize, awarded in 1773 to clockmaker John Harrison, and as fresh as the $10 million Ansari X Prize, won last autumn by the team behind the SpaceShipOne rocket plane.

REWARDING INVENTION How prizes pushed progress From determining longtitude to private space flight

"For more than 200 years, prizes have played a key role in spurring new achievements in science, technology, engineering and exploration," Craig Steidle, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems, said in a statement. "Centennial Challenges will use prizes to help make the Vision for Space Exploration a reality."

Spaceward's Meekk Shelef gave credit to NASA for looking beyond the "giggle factor" and embracing technologies associated with the space-elevator concept.

Space-elevator researcher Brad Edwards, president of Carbon Designs as well as a member of Spaceward's board, said his company may well compete in the tether contest even though it may mean distancing himself from the foundation to do so.

"It's going to be a challenge, but it's going to be fun," Edwards said.

More contests to come
Sponberg said the two Spaceward contests were announced first simply because NASA wanted to move ahead quickly with some of the smaller "Alliance" challenges, in which the space agency partners with another organization. He said other Alliance-level challenges would be announced in the next few weeks, having to do with autonomous, unmanned air vehicles; methods to convert lunar-type materials into useful resources; and "bioastronautics" — that is, devices that would make an astronaut's job easier.

Sponberg also listed other technologies that may become the focus of future Centennial Challenges, once the rules were settled:

• Aerocapture demonstrations.
• Micro re-entry vehicles.
• Robotic lunar soft landers.
• Station-keeping solar sails.
• Robotic triathlon.
• Human-robotic analog research campaigns.
• Autonomous drills.
• Lunar all-terrain vehicles.
• Precision landers.
• Telerobotic construction.
• Power-storage breakthroughs.
• Radiation-shield breakthroughs.

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