>>10905909>$1 millionthey may as well have been offering a purple ribbon that had 'you did it!!' embroidered in gold colored thread.
By switching the prize from being a nothing pat on the back towards being big enough to be possible to actually profit from at the end of the day, they'd see a huge amount more interest, faster progress, real results and in short vastly higher chance of success.
Taking it seriously, even if someone spent a billion dollars developing and building a lunar lander and a lunar transfer stage, and buying a couple Falcon Heavy rockets to put them together into orbit, and a Dragon 2 launch atop a Falcon 9 to transfer crew into their lander in Earth orbit before doing the mission, they'd still stand to make a billion dollars PLUS someone's going to either offer to buy their technology or put up a contract to produce more of their hardware for more missions.
I think large first-past-the-post fund awards to private enterprises is a really good way to push technology as hard as possible. Really rather than a Moon lander we should be putting up $2 billion to the first company to build a Q>1 fusion reactor. That's possible to afford now on a much smaller budget than any major fusion experiment happening right now because we now have superconducting tape that can be produced in very large amounts that works at liquid nitrogen temperatures and produces stronger/denser magnetic fields than anything we've had before. If we can do fusion in a machine that weighs 100 tons and outputs only a few times as much power as it uses to run, we've effectively blown the solar system wide open, because THAT technology in whatever its form allows us to do direct fusion propulsion and therefore achieve flight times to any object even in the outer solar system in just weeks or months rather than decades (or hundreds of years for Oort cloud shit), and we could even start looking towards actually useful interstellar probes.
