The problem isn’t bandwidth — Wi-Fi has enough capacity to support voice calling with software like Skype. And it’s not hardware — several cell-phone manufacturers have recently released handsets with the ability to place calls via Wi-Fi. Rather, it’s the patchy distribution of today’s Wi-Fi networks, which makes cellular-type roaming impossible.

“If making calls from hotspots were really a successful model, then where are all the pay phones?” says David Chamberlain, principal wireless analyst at In-Stat, a high-tech consultancy in Scottsdale, AZ. “The value of mobility far outweighs any cost factors,” he says, leading people to use more expensive cellular service, even if cheap, fixed options are available.

Spanish startup Fon wants to change that predilection for cellular, with a rapidly growing Wi-Fi network owned by its users, rather than a big telecommunications company, and based on shared access. In order to create a large network of hotspots, the company is encouraging network members — mostly, average consumers — to give away Wi-Fi access in exchange for getting free access at other Fon hotspots. Members can use that access, in turn, for Web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging — or Skype-like Internet phone calling.

Since its launch in late February, the startup has amassed a network of 31,000 registered users (“Foneros”), and is currently adding 200 new users each day. If each of those users were to set up special Fon Wi-Fi routers, Fon would instantly become one of the world’s largest networks of Wi-Fi hotspots. To date, though, only a minority of them have acquired Fon routers — the company won’t say exactly how many, but it expects that a large number of them will do so, given that there’s no benefit to registering without also creating a Fon hotspot.

Fon founder Martin Varsavsky has set his sights well beyond, though. “If you really want to create a ubiquitous Wi-Fi signal, being the largest network in the world is not enough,” he says. “We need maybe a million hotspots — that would be a number where you would find Fon very frequently everywhere you go.” As many as 300,000 of those hotspots would be in the United States, he projects, with the rest in Europe and China, Japan, and Korea — areas where Fon is concentrating its marketing efforts. By contrast, the largest current network of hotspots, iPass, has around 43,500 hotspots worldwide, with some 13,400 in the United States, according to JiWire, a South San Francisco, CA-based company that tracks hotspot locations worldwide.

Fon’s service provides Wi-Fi access for any application, including Web surfing, downloading music, or playing games. But the company’s ambitious plans for coverage make it especially attractive for telephoning services — that’s one reason eBay’s Skype division has invested in the company.

At the heart of Fon is a simple principle: Let me use your hotspot, and I’ll let you use mine. Fon users join the network either by purchasing special routers from Fon or by installing the company’s firmware on a compatible Wi-Fi router. Fon routers do not provide open access: all users must sign in.

Once registered, future Fon users will have a choice of participating in one of two ways (named in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Microsoft founder Bill Gates). “Linus” users’ access points will provide free access to other Fon users, and in exchange Linuses will be able to use any Fon hotspot in the world free of charge. “Bill” users, like nonmembers of Fon, will pay $2 per day for access to other people’s Fon hotspots; but, in return, they’ll be able to charge $2 per day for access to their own hotspots, a fee that Fon will split with them 50-50.

The Fon network, which is in beta testing, currently supports only Linus users. A second version of the network software, with support for Bills, will be released by the end of May, Varsavsky says.

The company also plans to let users customize their routers’ welcome pages, so that people who sign on at a Fon hotspot can see information placed there by the owner, such as a map of the neighborhood or list of favorite local cafes. “People will socialize through their Wi-Fi,” says Varsavsky. “You move to a neighborhood, nobody knows you, and then you start sending your Wi-Fi signal, and people will get to know you.”

Internet service providers (ISPs) have traditionally cast a jaundiced eye on users who allow neighbors and passers-by to share their broadband Internet access via Wi-Fi. However, Varsavsky claims that ISPs are fans of Fon, because it discourages freeloading. Fon routers are open only to other Fon users — who by definition have their own routers and broadband connections elsewhere — or to non-Fon users who are paying the $2 daily fee.

Indeed, Fon has already signed co-marketing agreements with two European ISPs, Glocalnet in Sweden and Jazztel in Spain, to sell Fon routers to their customers. (Varsavsky is also a cofounder of Jazztel.) Fon has also attracted some high-profile backers, with a $22 million investment from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, eBay’s Skype division, and Google.

“Fon is something that has a tremendous potential,” says William A. Stofega, a research manager at IDC, a market research company based in Framingham, MA. “The question is: Can they execute?” Telecommunications companies that also provide Internet access may prove to be nervous about Fon’s ability to support Internet-based telephony, which would rob them of long-distance minutes, Stofega says. To succeed, he says, Fon will have to scale up quickly and deliver reliable service. Furthermore, in cities rolling out citywide Wi-Fi networks, including Philadelphia and San Francisco, Fon may have trouble convincing people that it’s worthwhile to use a for-fee network.

Other experts are also reserved. “While the Fon model is not a new concept, it’s certainly the best-funded community effort of its kind to date,” says David Blumenfeld, vice president of marketing for JiWire. “Fon’s success will largely be determined by how much prime real estate [urban hotspot coverage] it’s able to secure. However, as Wi-Fi moves beyond the laptop into phones, digital cameras, and gaming devices, the market opportunity is only getting bigger.”

Varsavsky admits his company faces challenges. Still, they’ve gathered a lot of momentum in a very short time. Says Varsavsky, “The idea that you share a little bandwidth at home and in exchange roam the world for free is very appealing to people.”

Link: Fon Hopes Its Hotspots Will Rival Cellular

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There’s only one problem: No one seems to believe the system will help to reduce the amount of spam, some critics think it might actually increase junk e-mail, and some are worried that it will set a dangerous precedent by creating two tiers of e-mail service.

What everyone agrees on, however, is that spam is a big problem. According to Postini, a provider of enterprise e-mail management software, over two-thirds (68.6 percent) of all Internet e-mail messages are now spam. And there’s currently no good solution to this mushrooming problem. Spam filters are, at best, imperfect, too often failing to keep junk mail out of users’ inboxes.

Worse still, such filters occasionally block legitimate mail. Not to mention the effort required to maintain a spam-filtering system, which costs Internet Service Providers (ISPs) time and money.

Enter Goodmail Systems, a provider of e-mail services to ISPs, including AOL. The company’s CertifiedEmail system creates a special class of certified messages that qualified — and paying — companies can send to their customers. These messages include unique cryptographic tokens, supplied by Goodmail, and they appear with a special “certified” icon in users’ inboxes. Both Yahoo and AOL have publicly stated their desire to implement its system — and AOL says it will do so within 30 days.

AOL insists that it will keep offering its free e-mail service indefinitely, that it will continue to aggressively filter spam, and that it will not demote noncertified messages to second-class status. It also plans to continue its existing Postmaster, Whitelist, and Enhanced Whitelist services, which help legitimate organizations send mail to AOL users at no charge. Furthermore, both AOL and Goodmail claim that they will not permit spammers to send certified messages, and that they’ll revoke certification from any company that abuses the system.

Goodmail is not the first company to propose a scheme requiring senders to pay for delivering messages. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2004, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates suggested that e-mail “postage” would eventually eliminate spam by reducing the economic incentive for spammers.

But pay-per-e-mail systems have not met with much success — and every time a new proposal for one has been floated, netizens have reacted with a sound and fury — as AOL found out last week.

A coalition of more than 50 nonprofits, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has launched a campaign to stop the online giant from implementing its certified e-mail program, which, the nonprofits say, would amount to an “e-mail tax” that could stifle free speech online.

The campaign started on February 28 with an open letter to AOL, co-signed by such diverse organizations as MoveOn.org Civic Action, Gun Owners of America, and Craigslist. The letter claims that AOL’s plan to use Goodmail is “the first step down a slippery slope that will harm the Internet itself” by creating a two-tiered mail system, one for paying senders and one for non-paying senders — with a built-in incentive for AOL to shift senders from the latter class into the former.

“What worries us is that AOL is using the spam problem as a stick to encourage us to pay up,” says Danny O’Brien of the Internet watchdog organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It turns the Inbox into a cash box for AOL, instead of something to be protected.”

Goodmail and AOL have not said what they will charge companies for sending certified mail, other than to state that the fee will be based on the number of delivered messages. That’s what has nonprofits worried. Some, like MoveOn.org, send opt-in mail to millions of members, with as many as 25 percent being AOL users. The charges to certify delivery on that scale could be prohibitive for such cash-strapped organizations.

Telecommunications expert and Carnegie-Mellon professor David Farber, who runs the not-for-profit mailing list Interesting People, which covers issues of Internet governance and politics, is skeptical. “The difference between a spammer and a mass mailer gets very hazy, and I don’t think AOL is in the business of making that judgment,” he says. “I think you’ll wind up with a very pro forma response, which will be, ‘You pay us, and we’ll say you’re not a spammer until someone proves you are.’ It won’t cut down on the amount of spam I get — and it may increase it in the long run.”

Richi Jennings, an analyst at Ferris Research, a messaging market research company, says AOL’s economic self-interest dictates that it will continue to aggressively block spammers, whether or not they’re using certification. “AOL’s major revenue stream relies on subscribers,” says Jennings. “If an organization’s mail is generating a significant number of spam complaints, AOL will cease delivering mail from that organization — it’s that simple. Goodmail is nothing to do with reducing spam — it’s to do with outsourcing some of AOL’s Whitelist for senders who see value in paying.”

In other words, Goodmail is about as much of a threat to ordinary e-mail delivery as the U.S. Postal Service’s Certified Mail service is to the delivery of ordinary first-class mail. And it does about as much to combat junk e-mail — which is to say, nothing.

Link: You’ve Got PayMail

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Released last week, Google Desktop 3, the latest version of the company’s desktop search utility, adds a “Search Across Computers” feature that automatically uploads files from a user’s computer onto Google’s servers. Then, when a search is performed on any computer owned by the user, Google Desktop will pull search results from both the Web and information stored on all the user’s computers.

Certainly, such a feature will be handy for anyone trying to coordinate a project from different locations. Yet the idea of turning over private files to a public company is worrisome to privacy advocates. In fact, in a press release, the EFF has urged consumers to avoid the Search Across Computers feature because it would make consumers’ files more vulnerable to subpoenas from government investigators as well as private litigants.

Of course, it’s headlines news that Google (as well as its competitors) has already given in to pressure from a national government, by excluding censored content from its Chinese portal (Google.cn). Although so far the company has resisted a U.S. Department of Justice subpoena asking it to turn over logs for millions of recent search terms, smaller subpoenas — such as those for the search history of a particular user’s IP address — don’t make the news, because they’re often sealed.

EFF staff attorney Kevin Bankston says that files on a service provider’s computers, such as those stored by Google, would be easier for law enforcement to access because a subpoena would be issued to the provider, rather than the user. In some circumstances, as with Patriot Act requests, Google would not even be required to notify the user that their files were being turned over. Because of the secrecy of such investigations, it’s impossible to know how many such subpoenas have actually been issued. However, says Bankston, “It’s fair to assume that Google — and all the other search engines — have received and complied with this kind of request in the past.”

“This is every text document on your computer that you’ve set Google to index,” says Bankston. “Unless you’ve individually marked all of your private files [not to be indexed], you are going to be putting your most private data on Google’s servers.”

Google spokesperson Sonya Boralv counters that the company is taking measures to protect the security and privacy of individuals. For one thing, the Search Across Computer feature gives users control over what they upload to the Google servers, allowing people to exclude specific files or types of files. Furthermore, Google Desktop encrypts files before transmitting them to and from Google, and they’re stored in encrypted form on Google’s servers. In other words, they can’t be easily snooped in transit. Finally, Google deletes personal files from its servers as soon as they’re downloaded to a user’s computer; and if the files aren’t downloaded, Google deletes them after 30 days.

However, Bankston points out that, since Google Desktop uploads files whenever they’re accessed, frequent users will be continually refreshing Google’s servers with the latest copies of their personal files. Google provides a button for clearing all one’s personal files stored on its servers, but deleted files may reside there for as long as 30 days, according to Google’s Boralv.

To be fair, since Google Desktop is intended for power users, its Search Across Computers feature is not turned on until a user indicates his or her acceptance of the company’s privacy policy. “We’ve tried to take really proactive steps to make sure that people know where their data is going, and how it’s going to be handled,” says Boralv. “Our role as a service provider is to make it really easy for them to make an informed decision.”

Despite these controls, though, privacy advocates are concerned that most people won’t understand the implications of uploading their files to a public server. Boralv says that Google has a key to unlock the encrypted files stored on its servers. And, as its privacy policy states, the company will turn over personal information, including users’ stored files, to comply with law enforcement requests. And the ongoing controversy over the federal government’s secret surveillance of U.S. citizens makes such a possibility more than just theoretical.

“There’s a parade of horrible things that could happen” when files are stored on a service provider’s servers, says Jonathan Rosenoer, an attorney and author of Cyberlaw. “You’ll never know if you’re spuriously a target of investigation, and the government has gone fishing through your files.”

To its credit, in its privacy policy, Google informs users of its obligations to law enforcement and discloses how the Search Across Computers feature works — at least it explains it for those who understand it.

“We’re not blaming Google for the state of the law,” says Bankston. “[But] if they want to ‘not be evil,’ they should be mobilizing resources towards reforming the law and educating the public about its risks. And, until then, they should be designing around the law,” for example, by using peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies instead of storing files on Google’s own servers.

Google spokesperson Sonya Boralv counters that the company is taking measures to protect the security and privacy of individuals. For one thing, the Search Across Computer feature gives users control over what they upload to the Google servers, allowing people to exclude specific files or types of files. Furthermore, Google Desktop encrypts files before transmitting them to and from Google, and they’re stored in encrypted form on Google’s servers. In other words, they can’t be easily snooped in transit. Finally, Google deletes personal files from its servers as soon as they’re downloaded to a user’s computer; and if the files aren’t downloaded, Google deletes them after 30 days.

However, Bankston points out that, since Google Desktop uploads files whenever they’re accessed, frequent users will be continually refreshing Google’s servers with the latest copies of their personal files. Google provides a button for clearing all one’s personal files stored on its servers, but deleted files may reside there for as long as 30 days, according to Google’s Boralv.

To be fair, since Google Desktop is intended for power users, its Search Across Computers feature is not turned on until a user indicates his or her acceptance of the company’s privacy policy. “We’ve tried to take really proactive steps to make sure that people know where their data is going, and how it’s going to be handled,” says Boralv. “Our role as a service provider is to make it really easy for them to make an informed decision.”

Despite these controls, though, privacy advocates are concerned that most people won’t understand the implications of uploading their files to a public server. Boralv says that Google has a key to unlock the encrypted files stored on its servers. And, as its privacy policy states, the company will turn over personal information, including users’ stored files, to comply with law enforcement requests. And the ongoing controversy over the federal government’s secret surveillance of U.S. citizens makes such a possibility more than just theoretical.

“There’s a parade of horrible things that could happen” when files are stored on a service provider’s servers, says Jonathan Rosenoer, an attorney and author of Cyberlaw. “You’ll never know if you’re spuriously a target of investigation, and the government has gone fishing through your files.”

To its credit, in its privacy policy, Google informs users of its obligations to law enforcement and discloses how the Search Across Computers feature works — at least it explains it for those who understand it.

“We’re not blaming Google for the state of the law,” says Bankston. “[But] if they want to ‘not be evil,’ they should be mobilizing resources towards reforming the law and educating the public about its risks. And, until then, they should be designing around the law,” for example, by using peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies instead of storing files on Google’s own servers.

Link: Google’s Private Lives

Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

And that’s just the first step. Transmitters in the door will send signals elsewhere in your house, switching on the lights, turning up the heat, warming up the hot tub, queuing up your favorite MP3s on the home theater system, and telling your home computer to power on and download the latest e-mail.

Such fantasies have been a staple of the home automation market for years, of course. They’re already being tested in Japan, and they’re a bit closer to reality now in the United States, with an emerging home networking standard called ZigBee and some close competitors.

“We’re rapidly approaching a world where the most important devices in our lives are ones we don’t even realize exist,” says forecaster and strategist Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto, CA. Just as cheap microprocessors spawned the PC revolution of the 1980s and inexpensive lasers enabled the telecommunications and Internet revolution of the 1990s, Saffo argues that cheap sensors are ushering in a revolution in intelligent, interconnected devices, many of which will operate quietly in the background, without drawing any attention to themselves.

But before a swarm of sensors can turn into an intelligent network, though, they need a way to communicate with each other. Enter ZigBee. Based on an IEEE radio standard called 812.15.4, it allows digital transmissions of up to 1Mbps in one of two frequency ranges, 2.4GHz or 915MHz (in the Americas).

Overseeing what radio engineers call the upper “layers” of the ZigBee specification, the ZigBee Alliance governs such issues as how packets of electronic information are routed between ZigBee transmitters and receivers, and how these devices interface with various software programs. The alliance also certifies compatible devices and promotes the standard — in the same way that the Wi-Fi Alliance promotes, certifies, and helps develop the now-universal IEEE 802.11 set of wireless networking standards.

More than 150 member companies already belong to the ZigBee Alliance, including such electronics heavyweights as Honeywell, Motorola, Philips, and Samsung. Alliance chairman Bob Heile claims that ZigBee will enable any compatible device — regardless of the manufacturer — to communicate with any other ZigBee device, right out of the box. What’s more, the specification allows ZigBee devices to form mesh or cluster networks spontaneously, without any intervention from end users, installers, or (gulp) system administrators.

“When they’re being put together by people who don’t know beans about networking, these devices have to be intelligent enough that they organize themselves into a network and maintain the network if something breaks,” says Heile.

ZigBee doesn’t require high power consumption and makes it easy for devices to go in and out of a low-power sleep mode, so a ZigBee device should be able to run for years on an AA alkaline battery, Heile says.

That may not be an issue for appliances, such as lights, which are plugged into the power grid. But for battery-powered devices, such as remote controls and smoke detectors, power consumption is a key consideration, says Heile. This is a primary reason why existing wireless standards, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, aren’t appropriate for home automation.

ZigBee’s success, however, is far from assured. Because the specification is just one year old, there are very few ZigBee devices currently available to consumers. One exception is a home entertainment and control system from Control4. Heile also points to a test network of 2,000 ZigBee nodes created by South Korea’s SK Telecom, which is investigating the possibility of including ZigBee radios in its cell phones.

Meanwhile, several competing home automation standards are also on the market or under development. A leading contender is Zensys’ proprietary Z-Wave standard, which has been out for several years. Z-Wave is a low-cost, somewhat less capable alternative to ZigBee — but more than 75 compatible products are already available for purchase, which may give Z-Wave a leg up.

Smarthome’s Insteon offers many of the same advantages as ZigBee, say analysts, but — also like ZigBee — it’s unproven in the market. Finally, there are communications systems that transmit information over home powerlines, such as X10. So far, these devices have very limited capabilities, although they have the advantage of tapping into a pre-existing infrastructure.

“We don’t expect ZigBee to have a major impact in this space for at least the next two to three years,” says George West, a senior analyst at West Technology Research Solutions LLC, in Mountain View, CA. That’s primarily because ZigBee devices cost more than alternatives like Z-Wave, and the standard is more complex than most home automation products currently require, says West. For this reason, ZigBee may ultimately be better suited for automation in commercial and industrial environments, such as hospitals, office buildings, and factory floors.

A few years from now, however, the story may be very different. Strategy Analytics predicts that the market for wireless mesh networking chips, including ZigBee, as well as Z-Wave and other proprietary solutions, will reach tens of millions of units annually by 2008.

On the other hand, the hurdles are not trivial: the market is relatively new, there are several competing standards, and there is no pressing consumer demand for home automation. “This stuff feels poised for takeoff — but three years from now, it may still feel poised for takeoff,” says Saffo.

One thing is clear: As more and more consumer products gain sensing capabilities and start interacting with the world around them, the value of networking them will grow. And ZigBee could be the way.

Dylan Tweney is a writer and editor in San Mateo, California.

Link: Esperanto for Toasters

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Even more amazingly, four other teams’ vehicles also completed the course, with slightly slower times.

“It’s kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time,” says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and the leader of the Stanford team.

The Lindbergh analogy is apt. Both the famed aviator and the Stanford team were motivated to accomplish their feat by the tantalizing promise of prize money. In Charles Lindbergh’s case, it was a $25,000 purse that wealthy hotelier Raymond Orteig offered, in 1919, for the first nonstop aircraft flight between New York and Paris. In 1927, a 25-year-old Lindbergh finally captured the prize, by taking off from Long Island and landing in Paris 33 1/2 hours later, in a $10,000, custom-built monoplane named after his financial backers’ hometown, St. Louis.

For the Stanford team, winning the Grand Challenge meant collecting the $2 million prize put up by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) earlier this year. Not a bad return on a project that Thrun estimates cost about $500,000.

The Grand Challenge is just the latest example of how prize money can be an effective — and extremely efficient — way to stimulate rapid technological development. And while prizes might not work in every field of technological research, observers say it might be time to explore the prize model more deeply, particularly as the United States launches several multibillion-dollar projects, such as replacing the Space Shuttle, returning to the Moon, and sending humans to Mars.

DARPA’s mission is to stimulate research in defense-related areas, then leave development of viable applications to others. That’s exactly how this year’s Grand Challenge played out, with 195 teams entering the competition, five teams successfully completing the course — and a whole new crop of inventors, engineers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and even high-school students stimulated to enter the field of autonomous vehicles.

That will undoubtedly pay dividends for the military in the future, since many of the universities and corporations that fielded Grand Challenge teams also work on DARPA projects. Thrun’s work, for instance, has been attracting DARPA funding for more than eight years, and he intends to continue applying for defense grants in the future.

Competing in the Challenge offered benefits to the teams and their sponsors, too, even for those that didn’t win, says Jon Feiber, a managing partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm that cosponsored the Stanford team. Among the payoffs were educating students, raising the level of interest in (and funding for) robotics, forging partnerships between academic engineering departments and industry, and making connections among researchers, students, and DARPA personnel.

Of course the Grand Challenge isn’t the only recent feat of engineering inspired by the tantalizing promise of a pot of lucre for the victors. Last year’s Ansari X Prize paid $10 million to aircraft designer Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne team for completing two suborbital space flights at an altitude of at least 100 kilometers in the span of two weeks.

It’s hard to argue with the success of the X Prize, without which private space flight might still be languishing in an embryonic state. Indeed, several entrepreneurial ventures are now planning commercial space flights, including Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, PayPal founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX, video-game developer John Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.

The Federal Aviation Administration even opened an Office of Commercial Space Transportation after SpaceShipOne’s historic flight, and has begun drafting regulations for commercial space travel that it expects to begin in 2007 or 2008.

If prizes are so effective at motivating research and pushing innovators to new heights, why not offer more of them? DARPA estimates that it spent $22 million on the Grand Challenge, which included the $2 million prize and the cost of organizing, hosting, and publicizing the event. That’s a drop in the bucket compared with DARPA’s 2005 budget of $3 billion. The rest of the agency’s money is doled out primarily through grants and contracts.

“The prize approach is particularly useful in energizing a community and giving people an incentive to become involved in researching a technology area of interest to DOD,” says Jan Walker, a spokesman for DARPA. In fact, DARPA officials are so pleased with the results, says Walker, that they plan to sponsor another Grand Challenge in the future, in a yet-to-be-named field.

Yet contests may be appropriate for only some kinds of research or take research only so far. The highly successful Grand Challenge and the X Prize were both built around a well-defined problem, had clear objectives, and presented challenges that were both difficult and rewarding for a wide variety of contenders to tackle.

“I don’t think the contest model works broadly,” says Mohr Davidow Venture’s Feiber. “It works for certain objectives, but you couldn’t grossly restructure research around this kind of system. But when it does work, it has enormous benefits.”

Stanford’s Thrun agrees. “You could not do everything by a competition of this type, because it’s entirely unsustainable,” Thrun says. “It was an important part of my fundraising that this was a unique event, and that it was really big.” If this year’s event had been the fifth, or the 25th, Grand Challenge instead of the second, Thrun says, he would have been unable to raise the $500,000 to build the machine. In other words, part of the attraction of the Grand Challenge was its uniqueness and headline-worthiness — qualities that could fade fast if similar contests happen every year.

Still, considering the salutary effects of the Grand Challenge and X Prize, it’s reasonable to believe that a few more such contests might be useful for advancing research in key areas.

Here’s a modest proposal: NASA has a five-year, $12 billion budget for creating new spacecraft that can take humans safely to the Moon and, eventually, Mars. Why not devote just one percent of that budget to a prize aimed at encouraging parallel research by private industry?

Although NASA has set up a “Centennial Challenges” program to stimulate innovation by offering prizes, all of the contests so far are relatively minor, such as a $250,000 prize for developing the best new glove for astronauts.

A much larger bounty — say, $120 million for sending humans to orbit the Moon and returning them safely — would be a powerful stimulus to space research. Certainly, it would generate innovation, and it might also produce some commercial spacecraft, launch vehicles, or other tools that NASA would find useful in achieving its own goals. Perhaps most importantly, it would likely boost popular opinion of space travel, turning it from a federal boondoggle into a shared vision and common goal. In short, it might be a winner for an enterprising team of engineers — and NASA.

Link: Eyes on the Prize

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