I don't recall us discussing a national "prize" for innovations and new designs as much as I recall us talking about large, publicly available grants to qualified applicants that could show measurable progress in design and innovation... but perhaps that is simply more of my manic obsession with clarity and semantics.
None the less, the national prize is an outstanding idea. It worked for the British to find a way to accurately measure longitude when John Harrison won the equivalent of £6.6 million in 1764. Charles Lindbergh won a whopping $25k for crossing non-stop from New York to Paris and winning the Orteig Prize. The very first civilian space flight, financed by Microsoft founder Paul Allen, won the Ansari X Prize of $10 million in 2004.
What will $300 million net the nation? A way to triple the mileage of a gallon of gas? A battery that will run a car for 200 miles between charges at highway speeds? Cost-effective hydroelectric plants powered by tidal flow or wave motion? What if a series of prizes were offered for various types of innovations? What if we offered $100 million for a means to cost-effectively extract usable oil from oil-shale? Or $250 million for a room-temperature superconductor?
For the cost of a company of M1 Abrams tanks (roughly $700 million)... or better yet, for what was spent on the Democratic primary race in only 4 months... we could have the brightest thinkers in the country working towards solutions to problems we have been arguing about for nearly a decade. How can THAT not be money well spent? How much is viable "cold fusion" worth to the Federal Government? $200 million? $500 million? This nations spends that much every month on the fuels to operate JUST our coal and oil power plants.
This kind of thinking and incentive should have been made public on September 12, 2001.
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