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NASA poses $2-million lunar rocket challenge (Associated Press, 5/08/06)

NASA said Friday it is sponsoring a $2 million (U.S.) contest to spur aerospace designers to build and demonstrate versatile rockets that may one day support a lunar mission.

The competition is part of the space agency's Centennial Challenges program, which aims to foster innovation by offering prizes to teams that can solve a range of problems.

Competing teams have to build a rocket that can launch vertically, climb to a certain altitude and suspend in the air, land at a target over 90 metres away and then return to its original launch pad.

The competition has two levels of difficulties and several prizes will be awarded. The largest prize is $1.2-million.

The next X-Prize: How about a 250 m.p.g. car? (Mark Clayton, 5/08/06, The Christian Science Monitor

The challenge: Build the world's most fuel-efficient production car - one that gets maybe 250 miles per gallon and causes little or no pollution. The payoff: prize money from the group that awarded $10 million for the world's first private spaceflight two years ago.

When the X-Prize Foundation unveils its new high-mileage car contest later this year, it will join a small but growing number of competitive prizes for energy development. Instead of watching President Bush and Congress wrangle for months to just get Detroit to boost fuel efficiency by a few miles per gallon, why not offer fat cash prizes to the private sector for breakthrough technologies? Proponents say it's a cheaper and faster way to unhook America from its oil dependency.

Why not have Congress offer the first folks to sell a few thousand of them several billion dollars, paid for from a hike in gas taxes?

MORE:
Gas prices fuel telecommuting (Marilyn Gardner, 5/08/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Laurie] Shannon is in the vanguard of a quietly growing band of Americans turning to telecommuting to reduce gas costs. As they work at home, typically a day or two a week, they are spurring a shift that could eventually turn the United States into what workplace analyst John Challenger calls a "telecommuter nation."

"Companies are just beginning to become aware that employees are coming to them here and there, asking for help," says Mr. Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm headquartered in Chicago. "They're seeing more absences. It's still under the radar, but as gas prices hit $3 a gallon, it's beginning to make a real impact on people's decisions with their employer."

A push for cars to get better gas mileage: A key dispute is whether proposed fuel standards should apply equally to all vehicles. (Brad Knickerbocker, 5/08/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Like the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental group of scientists and citizens, as well as other supporters of more rigorous CAFE standards, Mr. Becker asserts that the technology already exists to make all new vehicles average 40 miles per gallon within 10 years.

"Taking this step would save the average driver over $5,000 over the lifetime of their vehicle, even after accounting for the added cost of the fuel-saving technology," he says. "At the same time, raising fuel economy standards would save 4 million barrels of oil per day - an amount equal to what America currently imports from the entire Persian Gulf and could ever get out of the Arctic Refuge, combined."

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2006 6:34 PM