Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Indeed, and for folks to listen to Acquired, you’ll know that we can’t start our episodes without going back at least 50 years. In this case, we’re going to go back over 100 years. It just makes us so pleased here. We’re going to go back to 1919 and the announcement of the Orteig Prize, which was a $25,000 prize—that’s backed by the Orteig family, I believe, is behind it—for anyone who could fly a plane, an air vehicle nonstop from New York City to Paris or vice-versa. Of course, famously a few years later—actually more years than I would have thought, eight years later in 1927—Charles Lindbergh won that prize in the famous Spirit of St. Louis, which I think is now in the Air and Space Museum in Washington hanging there. It has to be. That was (I believe_ the first major aviation prize to spur innovation. Of course, there would be later prizes after that as well, and that would lead directly into what we’re about to talk about here with the XPRIZE, but this whole idea of using a prize to spur innovation is pretty cool. Totally. I think this is brilliant. I’m not sure this was the intention behind it but all these prizes since then have realized you get an amazing amount of leverage on your dollar. This $25,000 prize (I think) had $400,000 poured into the research and development by all the different teams who are competing for it, so not a bad return there if you had to go to raise that $400,000 100 years ago by yourself. That would’ve been a much taller order to get a similar outcome. Totally. Inspired by this history, we now fast forward about 70 years—past the Lindbergh flight—to 1995 when a gentleman named Peter Diamandis puts forward an idea at a space conference. Not the ASCEND space conference which takes him a while to get traction here. If this were ASCEND it would have been immediate. He puts forward an idea for a similar aeronautical innovation prize, this time for space. He posits if we put forward a $10 million prize for somebody—not a government—to build and launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space. At this point in the mid-90s people are already thinking what the Elon and SpaceX have popularized this idea, that it kind of doesn’t make sense how we do space right how where every time you flew a 747 to a destination, you would scrap the 747 at the end of it and not use it to fly back or fly anywhere else. Reusability can vastly change the economics of going to space.…

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