Douglas Goldstein: Robert Weiss is the president of XPRIZE.
Could you give us some
background what’s the whole idea of doing an incentive prize as opposed to for example
giving grants to scientific research?
Robert Weiss: There are some definite advantages to incentivized competitions.
They are very efficient because you only award the winner.
Normally, if you’re trying to capitalize some kind of R&D or innovation, you’d have
to be very smart about picking the team that had the right approach and hope that after
the years went by that they had come up with the appropriate solution with a prize, a well-designed
prize, by backing the prize you automatically back the winner.
So you basically get a large group of people trying to solve your problem at their cost.
So it is very efficient that way.
There’s also leveraging phenomenon that happens at the XPRIZE we start when we launched
an XPRIZE with a small amount of money that enables us to put together a purse, that’s
the incentive that draws innovators in.
Those innovators in aggregate spend a large amount of money trying to solve your problems.
So right there, there’s a first step leverage and in the end if we’ve done our job right,
we’ve opened up new market or a new industry.
So the multiplier effect if you will is from the original investment and the prize and
the operations in the purse and then the ultimate bar is how big was that industry that we launched
and we have been successful with this.
Douglas Goldstein: What was the first or the biggest or the most exciting launch that you
ever did?
Robert Weiss: The first XPRIZE was the XPRIZE.
This all started because my colleagues and I were looking for an alternative way to go
to space.
We knew that it was not going to happen by becoming government employees, NASA astronauts
and we knew there had to be another way and it was actually with the [receipt] of the
gift that is all started.
One of my colleagues gave Peter Diamandis who is the chairman CEO of XPRIZE a copy of
Lindbergh’s autobiography.
Charles Lindbergh was the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.
He was doing so not just for bragging rights but as we learned in the course of reading
this book, he was trying to win $25,000 and so we thought why not do a modern version
of this and instead of $25,000 because we’re going to go to space after all not just Paris,
we’ll offer $10 million for folks who can design the first commercially viable that
is reliable and reusable spaceship.
We announced that competition in 1996 and just 8 years later, it was one and we were
happy to award this $10 million because we also launched the personal space light industry.
Douglas Goldstein: If incentive prize are such a good idea and the logic is to restate
is that if you put up let’s say $10 million, you might have many teams each of which is
investing $5 or $10 million or more so the aggregate amount of money invested in your
good idea could be in the hundreds of million.
So could this solve other problems and really major problems for example curing diseases
or world hunger or water problems and if so, why aren’t people are doing that?
Robert Weiss: When we rediscovered this model and that is what we did, we rediscovered it,
we didn’t invent it.
We learned that it had been the way that advances in aviation for example had been made in the
early part of the 28th century.
Prizes were offered, people push the envelope trying to win those prizes and what happened
basically was the Second World War.
When the Second World War happened, there was no longer the luxury of time.
You couldn’t just let things unfold, you needed those technological advances and they
were needed in a hurry, there was a strategic requirement for them.
So instead of umpping up the incentivized competition approach, what happened was money
and lots of it was poured on the problem and this habit of just pouring money on the problem
never stopped even though ultimately the war did.
It is part of what Eisenhauer warned against if you will when he talked about the original
military industrial complex.
It was a beast that needed to be fed and that beast needed lots of money.
So this model, the alternative we have come back to and send in the 21st century could
we not use this leveraging mechanism.
Now an exciting thing happened in 2004 when the first XPRIZE was won, not only were we
able to make that first award but because the model proved out the methodology if you
will was again proven to work, we’ve launched XPRIZEs in other areas like sciences, energy
and the environment, other exploration prizes.
Douglas Goldstein: How
is it that people couldn’t figure this out, in other words for the 50 years between World
War II and when you guys started to get involved, no one could have said “Wait a second, what
if we make an incentive prize then the government doesn’t have to invest billions or private
industry doesn’t have to invest so much money either.”
It seems like we’re missing something and I can’t quite figure it out.
Robert Weiss: It’s a simple question that I think requires kind of a complicated answer.
I think at the root of the answer is the fact that no one sat down at the chutzpah to think
that they could just establish a whole market by doing this.
The idea of setting up this construct that would ultimately result in the market, people
were still thinking small scale about individual point to point efforts if you will and the
idea of actually jumpstarting a whole industry, whole industry was kind of novel.
So I’m not sure why someone didn’t have this idea before or rediscover it the way
that we did.
In our case it’s a matter of necessity.
We were looking for an alternative way to go to space.
Douglas Goldstein: Did you decide that because of the good return or the investment or was
it just the types of guys who got together to think about these, the people who grew
up on watching Star Trek and weird science or that great movie classic like Amazon Women
on
the moon?
Robert Weiss: The notion is that a space was our first XPRIZE because we ourselves were
interested in going.
We had all heard about the overview effect.
We grew up with Apollo, space missions and going back to the moon.
It was now something that was a broken promise if you will.
The expectation back in the day was that we’d all get to go and we would open up spaces
of frontier to boldly go as it were that didn’t happen, that didn’t happen with the economics
and with the government driven model.
So that was one reason.
The second reason we went with space for a first prize is that the planet is facing some
severe problems.
We’re running out of stuff, consumables are disappearing while the fact is there is
all the energy that we could ever need and it’s really close by in space.
There’s material in space.
I could literally change the world’s economy.
To be able to access it and exploit it, we’ve got to be able to work and live in space and
to be able to do that, we’ve got to reduce the risks and cost of going to space and that
is what underlies this competition because in meeting the requirements, you will have
reduce the risks and cost of going to space with this new vehicles that were design to
take passengers.
Douglas Goldstein: What’s the connection between Israel and the XPRIZE?
Robert Weiss: There is an exciting connection between Israel and the XPRIZE.
There is a very active vibrant team called SpaceIL, that’s one of the competitors.
Recently they made the announcement that they had completed the requirements for obtaining
a launch contract and this is the really milestone that signals a real effort.
The fact that they have purchase the launch, they put down a deposit with a launch company
to deliver their spacecraft to the moon means they are for real and that announcement was
made in the president of Israel’s office.
It was a very exciting day for Israel and very exciting day for the XPRIZE.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people follow you and follow what’s going on?
Robert Weiss: To learn more about the Google Lunar XPRIZE and XPRIZE in general, please
go to www.xprize.org and you can read about our competitions that our active and ones
that are coming up and hopefully we can interest you in becoming involved with creating the
future and changing
the world.