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Original air date:
11.7.07
Revolution Through Competition
Peter Diamandis has a motto: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” For Diamandis, the future is best created through competition. Founder of the X Prize Foundation, Diamandis has created an arena for the greatest minds in various scientific and technical fields to do just that.
Born in the Bronx in 1961, Diamandis grew up, like many of his generation, enamored of the images sent back from the Apollo missions. The fascination for Diamandiswas more than just the stuff of childhood distraction. As he told WIRED magazine in 2000, “"I was in fifth grade, and it hit me that the space frontier was my purpose in life."
While attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Diamandis began preparing himself in the NASA model. Diamandis co-founded the organization Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) and would go on to receive his MD from Harvard Medical School, hoping to sate NASA’s desire for astronauts with medical training. It was during that period that Diamandis had a shift in thinking about space travel. The NASA route seemed stifling with its rigid structure and meager payoff of limited, if any, space travel.
Diamandis headed back to MIT to study aerospace engineering. By 1988 he had founded International MicroSpace, a space technologies company that specialized in low-cost launch services. They managed to score a contract with the Pentagon for services related to the Strategic Defense Initiative. During that same period Diamandis co-founded and served as director of the Space Generation Foundation, which is dedicated to engaging and facilitating people inspired to use space to make a difference in the world.
In 1994 Diamandis co-founded Space Adventures, Ltd. Diamandis and his partners longed to make space travel the purview of the private sector, thus making it available to private citizens. In May of 2001, the company made good on its promise when it orchestrated sending American businessman Dennis Tito to the International Space Station, making him the world’s very first space tourist. Since then Diamandis has also served as the CEO of the Zero Gravity Corporation, which offers private citizens a chance at weightlessness by taking a parabolic flight on a Boeing 727 (the same method NASA has used to train its astronauts for the last 45 years).
After learning about the Orteig Prize, which inspired Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, Diamandis thought a similar competitive format could initiate a revolution in the private spaceflight industry. In 1996 the X Prize foundation was born with the mission to inspire revolution through competition. Its first prize, The Ansari X Prize, would award $10 million the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The prize was awarded to the SpaceShipOne team led by designer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Since then, Diamandis and his X Prize Foundation have offered up prizes beyond space technology, including a Genomics X Prize and an Automotive X Prize. Diamandis has predicted a future of scientific and technological achievement by challenging the world’s greatest minds to create it.
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11.7.07 11:21 PM PST
Charles Wilder
Peter,
100 mpg cars? Great, now all we need to do is keep destroying the environment by building more roads for all those fuel efficient cars.
Fewer cars is the real answer. Americans simply consume too much.
Will we ever learn?
Charles
11.27.07 1:42 PM PST
David
Where do I post a suggestion for an x prixe?
A prize to the doctor who discovers how to, activate the "placebo response" in patients without giving any kind of pill (i.e., conversationally). And to prevent the cure from being labeled as a "miracle cure," a "faith healing," or a "spontaneous remission," the doctor needs to facilitate the "response" in several patients with a process that can be duplicated by (qualified) others.
To sell the idea, you can speak of it as, perfecting the art of assisting a persons "natural recuperative powers."
8.14.08 4:29 PM PDT
george demmy
The singular challenge to the scientific community which will enable all others is the perfection of the process of generating energy through fusion
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