The drive for private space flight accelerates. SpaceShipOne, the vehicle of Scaled Composites, has just made a second powered flight, this one to Mach 2 at nearly 17 miles high. Meanwhile the US govt has awarded it the first licence to conduct manned spaceflights.
Scaled Composites is among those competing for the $10m X-prize from a private foundation, to be awarded to the first private group to take a manned three-person vehicle into space, and to repeat the flight within two weeks.
The use of prizes to speed progress has a distinguished past. The British spurred on the measurement of longtitude this way, and previous prizes attracted efforts to race the English Channel, cross the Atlantic, and achieve man-powered flight.
An interesting feature of such prizes is that are usually result-driven. That is, they specify the objective, and leave the way open for different creative solutions to be tested. Government regulation, by contrast, is usually process-driven, in that it specifies in detail what technology is to be used to achieve the required result. This limits opportunities for creative thinking, and for more cost-effective and efficient solutions to be developed as alternative to those already known.