Centennial Challenges - Origin

Origin

NASA's Centennial Challenge Program directly engages the public at large in the process of advanced technology development that is of value to NASA’s missions and to the aerospace community. CCP offers challenges set up as competitions that award prize money to the individuals or teams to achieve the specified technology challenge. The prize contests are named "Centennial" in honor of the 100 years since the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903. The Wright Brothers' pioneering inventions embody the spirit of the challenges.

The Centennial Challenges are based on a long history of technology prize contests, including the Longitude prize (won by John Harrison), the Orteig Prize (won by Charles Lindbergh), the Ansari X PRIZE (won by Scaled Composites), and the DARPA Grand Challenge (won by Stanford University in 2005 and Carnegie Mellon University in 2007). A key advantage of prizes over traditional grants is that money is only paid when the goal is achieved. A 1999 National Academy of Engineering committee report recommended that "Congress encourage federal agencies to experiment more extensively with inducement prize contests in science and technology". A 2003 NASA Space Architect study, assisted by the X PRIZE Foundation, led to the establishment of the Centennial Challenges.

As a federal agency, NASA has one of the federal government's three largest procurement budgets. The Energy Department (DOE) and the Defense Department (DOD) round out the trio. With the subsequent proposal in Congress of "H Prize" funding for breakthroughs in hydrogen fuel-related technology, the Department of Energy is poised to join NASA and DARPA's Defense Department in fortifying this paradigm shift favoring a growing quantity of technology experimenters who might otherwise be neglected by traditional government contractors and federal procurement officials.