Market vs. availability, chicken vs. egg, either way can be a solution, I think this would work (and I also think you would relatively quickly have more than 10 different contestants involved).

If there is more money to spend, spend it on creating a market – prizes for propellant depots, etc. Then let the market create the RLV, not some artificial prize.

It is also nice if one can pay for the ultimate result only, this greatly reduces gaming and generally has better accountability. But this does delay revenue – hopefully market revenue can help here, get competitors market and investor focused from the initial design stage. The prizes could then be a bonus for actually creating a good business, instead of just tech candy.

Pete.

Safety would be a major concern that I skipped. I’m not sure what the proper response is to that.

Winning prize money is not a sustainable strategy past the time the prize money stops. NASCAR is a group that has a very long history of operation with prize money being the visible goal. Sponsorship is the real goal there, and participants should be motivated to collect any cash lying around in this as well.

The idea was to outgame the gamers. Set it up so that the inevitable gaming of the rules creates the result you had in mind at the start. It is hard to believe that some rediculous idea like this could deliver even less useful results than der Griffenshaft.

IMO, at 5 years there would be several orbital vehicles with rapid turnaround that could be easily converted to useful capability.

When Armadillo had problems with the early LLC flights, they could have fixed and flown a month later and repeated until getting a prize. Then go for it again next month. That level of funding stream for delivered results could have considerably ramped up their efforts.

It seems likely that Scaled would not have built a vehicle that would be retired as soon as the minimum requirements were met. They would have been leaving scads of green on the table.

Many of the other teams and interested parties would have been able to secure funding if there was another oportunity each month with second through tenth prizes still being substantial assistance to the financier. While many of the teams were fantasy based, the solid ones could have made a business case.

There is also the issue that winning prize money does not really seem like a sound business strategy. The revenue stream is not reliable (sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you won’t), and it does not explicitly encourage the development of sustainable markets. You could also get teams optimizing their vehicle to game the rules of the competition rather than to satisfy the requirements for accomplishing more practical mission objectives.

Granted these are worst case scenarios, but these issues or similar problems could potentially crop up.

For example, $150M, $100M and $50M respectively to the first three groups to do a hundred orbital flights at least 10% of which must be manned.

Here the primary metric being targeted is flight number, with biases towards multiple winners (building industry), manned operation (safety), RLVs (high flight number), low cost operation (low prize value), incremental development (long term, high flight number), no stunts endurance race (long term, high flight number), building supplementary market (low prize value, long term, high flight number), etc.