DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
16 December 2008
Breakthroughs for Humanity
This article is excerpted from the IIP publication Sketchbook USA, a richly illustrated volume that depicts Americans at work, at play, in their communities, and engaging in civic life. View and download the fully formatted Sketchbook.
What this world really needs is a car that goes 160 kilometers on a liter of gasoline. Or maybe what the world really needs is a foothold on the moon as a stepping stone to outer space. Then again, maybe the world needs a better understanding of the human genome as a key to developing personalized preventive medicine.
Visionary thinkers at the California-based X Prize Foundation believe the world needs all those things, and it is tantalizing the world’s inventors and innovators with millions of dollars in prize money to encourage these discoveries. The foundation is an educational, nonprofit institute devoted to motivating the competitive and entrepreneurial spirit of others to achieve “breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity,” according to the organization’s mission statement.
The proof that this strategy can work came in 2004, when Mojave Aerospace Ventures built and flew the world’s first private spaceship and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize sponsored by the X Prize Foundation and funded by Iranian-American telecommunications entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari and her family.
Google Inc. is putting up $20 million for the Lunar X Prize, announced in September 2007. To win, a team must use a privately funded spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the moon by the end of 2012. They also have to release a robotic rover for at least a 500-meter (1,640-foot) stroll on the surface, and transmit a specific set of video, images, and data back to Earth.
“The Google Lunar X Prize seeks to create a global, private race to the moon that excites and involves people around the world and accelerates space exploration for the benefit of all humanity,” said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the X Prize Foundation, when the prize was announced. “The use of space has dramatically enhanced the quality of life and may ultimately lead to solutions to some of the most pressing environmental challenges that we face on Earth — energy independence and climate change.”
More than 30 teams from various nations have said they intend to compete for the automotive prize, to be awarded based upon performance of the vehicle entries in a series of races expected to be held in 2009 and 2010.
And competitors began working in 2006 trying to win the $10 million Archon X Prize for Genomics. It will be awarded to the team that develops technology to successfully map 100 human genomes in 10 days.
