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That's when Scaled Composites will have a go at winning the illustrious Ansari XPrize. This challenge offers a handsome payment of US$10 million to the first privately built craft to fly into space twice within a 14 day period.

If this attempt at the price is successful it will truly be a milestone in the development of private space flight and has the potential to dramatically slash the cost of such excursions -- while also opening up a massive new market.

Even more amazing is that the first contestant to actually have a go at the prize-winning flight isn't a major aerospace player like Boeing, BAE Systems and the like -- but a small company that had its beginnings in designing home-built light aircraft.

The speed with which Scaled Composites have designed, built and tested their craft is nothing short of astonishing when compared to the normal rate at which such things are done.

It's also important to grasp the magnitude of the challenge they're undertaking.

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They've had to cope with issues such as breaking the sound barrier, coping with the near-vacuum and extremely low temperatures encountered at an altitude of 100Kms, coping with the tricky business of re-entry, and making sure that their craft is ready to be flown again within just two weeks.

I've always held the Rutans' work in high regard but the advances that have been made during this project leave me gobsmacked.

But there's more to this whole thing that meets the eye.

Quite frankly, I think the whole ".... Prize" concept is a brilliant way to promote rapid advances in technology at minimum cost.

Most of the time, major advances in technology occur at a relatively liesurely pace and are balanced by commercial pressures. Let's face it -- there's no point in making something that is a thousand percent better than your competitors' products when being 10 percent better will do just as well.

And look at how many projects are directly funded or heavily subsidised with government funding (aka taxpayer's money). It seems that when they're spending other people's money, many in R&D work quite a bit slower than when they're spending their own hard-earned cash.

Perhaps there's a valuable lesson to be learned here.

Instead of simply handing out taxpayer funds to any individual, company or organisation that does a good job of filling out a technology grant application form -- might it not be a good idea for a few government-sponsored technology prizes to be offered here in NZ?

The great thing about this is that (as is the case with the XPrize) the prize money can actually be much less than the total cost of the R&D required to win it -- that doesn't seem to matter. The driving force in such challenges is the competitive urge and the desire/need to win.

High achievers and go-getters are naturally attracted to such challenges and will organise their own funding and resources in a quest to win that prize.

Should the government set-aside even a small amount of the money it currently hands out to good "form-fillers" and use it to run such competitive challenges?

Can you imagine how much publicity and boosted profile *this* country would have received if it had been the one to offer and administer the XPrize?

From where I sit, it would have been a very good investment of US$10 million.

What kind of technology challenges could we offer that would help get NZ on the technology map and promote a rapid upswing in privately funded R&D?

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