Funny when you think about $20 million being thrown after a $10 million prize. Course, Paul Allen obviously has no qualms with shitting inordinate amounts of loose cash.. but the idea of this prize was to develop really cheap space travel and the prize was supposed to be comparatively a good sum of money as a reward. So this is somewhat along the lines of... NASA jumping in and saying "yay we did it we are awesome".

Sorry.

I was hoping reporters would touch more on other ongoing science prizes, such as the Meth Mouse prize. I also think there should be a brain exploration prize. How about some prizes that encourage amateurs/entrepreneurs to cure XYZ disease. Or come up with ever lower cost methods for sequencing genomes. I used to feel more for the romantic idea of space exploration but when it comes down to it, there's a lot more useful stuff to explore right here on Earth. Especially when you consider the amounts of money NASA thinks it needs to do stuff (compare half a trillion dollars to the $20b that Robert Zubrin, author of "Case For Mars", says he would need.)

But compared to trillions of dollars, this low-cost-seeking approach to space exploration is great.

I agree that the 10M prize vs. 20M investment (which hasn't paid off yet) is kind of funny/ironic. SpaceShipOne certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything new or innovative, they just built their own rocket. But it is good to see someone outside of NASA doing it, and $20M isn't much when you think about it.

I bet a lot of drug companies would pay (and possibly have paid) a considerable sum to *prevent* XYZ disease from being cured.

I just heard an interesting story over the weekend.. I guess there were some researchers who were very close to curing herpes. But before they could finish their research, they were shut up by some drug company (probably the one they worked for, I forget). Scary. But I'm sure it happens all the time. This story was just made public due to some whistleblower. Health care in this country is indeed more aptly disease care. Is this when it's appropriate for a group that looks out for the best interest of society (I hear government falls under that category) to fill in the holes that industry will fail to fill?

And, yup, neither $10 nor $20 million are piss compared to either Paul Allen or NASA.