NASA Was about to Eat Itself — Then Private Enterprise Stepped In | Juli...

source: Big Think    2016年10月12日
Are you a maverick or are you a mouse? Author Julian Guthrie brings us one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time in 'How to Make a Spaceship'. Guthrie's book is "How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and The Birth of Private Spaceflight" (https://goo.gl/AKhQxa).
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/julian-gut...

Transcript - I came to the story, this book, originally through an interview that I did with Peter Diamandis for the San Francisco Chronicle. And I asked him this seemingly simple question of how did this whole XPrize thing start. And he said, "Well, how much do you know about the private space flight prize?" And I said, "Not so much." So he started telling me and I'm like oh my god that is an amazing story.
So Peter, when he was reading The Spirit of St. Louis in late 1993, he's reading this book and he lands on this passage where he realizes that Lindbergh didn't fly as a stunt in 1927 but he indeed flew to win this $25,000 prize. And it was an ah-ha moment for him or for sure to take a page from the golden age of aviation when after Lindbergh flew it really sparked this commercial airline industry. All of a sudden every day folks thought that commercial air travel was safe so Peter thought he could use that model, that incentive prize model to spur innovation and spur breakthroughs in spaceflight. So that was really it. And the incentive prize model also has a habit of attracting kind of these off the grid think different types who wouldn't necessarily do anything that is affiliated with the government, who work in small teams, who like to innovate or tinker or they're kind of the hackers or the makers or the tinkers of today. So it seems to attract those types and it has throughout history. People didn't think Lindbergh, who was 25 years old when he made this flight, and no one thought that he would be able to make that momentous flight, which after he landed in Paris made him the most famous man on earth. Read Full Transcript Here:https://goo.gl/6E1eZ4.