[JumpCrisscross]

> teams be rewarded with significant monetary renumeration if they achieve a milestone and curtail the subcontracting disease that permeates government purchasing

This has a poor track record for basic research and complex technologies. The Ansari XPRIZE recipient’s SpaceShipOne is a prime example.

[modeless]

DARPA Grand Challenges worked well. Created Velodyne Lidar and the team that became Waymo among others.

[idiotsecant]

These sorts of challenges work great for engineering problems where a little bit of money and a lot of sweat is all that is required to figure something out.

Fusion research is not that- it needs very large equipment investments for decades for even the most trivial experiments.

If we had tried to get to the moon with the same model we'd still be waiting!

[nimish]

> engineering problems

This is what is holding fusion from commercial viability.

Give me a modern tokamak with 75 years of known dynamics, increase the size and magnetic field (i.e. bring high temp superconducting wires to market).

At the very least you get something as a consolation prize that has real uses vs. decades of wacky research ideas that more than likely will go nowhere.

IMO thinking of fusion as needing a "silver bullet" to viability is one of the major issues. Everyone wants the sexy new reactor concept, but nobody wants to be improving the boring donut design that's on the edge of practicality.

[r3012]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

“It will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment and the largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor.”

Does the $3.9B spent on ITER not count?

https://www.science.org/content/article/cost-skyrockets-unit...

[vlovich123]

$80 Billion was spent between 2014 and 2017 on R&D of autonomous vehicles [1]. That's 12 Billion / year (& numbers from a while back - I'm sure investment has kept going). The US government spends ~18 Billion on the entire DOE, the majority of which appears to be keeping facilities running / maintenance (even though it classifies all of that as R&D) [2]. Fusion saw about ~4.7 Billion in funding in 2022 [3].

Orders of magnitude matter and fission / fusion R&D has been criminally underfunded for decades.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/gauging-investment-in-sel...

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/our-budget

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/nuclear-fusion-report-private-inves...

[vlovich123]

Self driving is a little bit of money and a lot of sweat? Umm... I don't think I've ever seen such a major understatement.

The DARPA challenge kicked off a many many billions of dollars arms race of private capital and we're only just starting to see a trickle of self driving cars on the road some 18 years later. Not to mention meaningful R&D advancements in AI, sensing software algorithms, HW sensing capabilities, etc that have seen applications outside of self driving.

[dotnet00]

To be fair, a decent part of the current model for getting to the Moon does involve milestone based payments, with the general idea being that it's cheaper, more efficient and has fewer bad incentives than just endlessly funding until the desired outcome is achieved. IIRC pretty much everything in Artemis besides SLS+Orion is using a milestone based funding model (the lander, the space station, the various research orbiters and landers that started launching this year).

[neuronexmachina]

I think NASA's commercial cargo and crew programs were another good example, leading to the SpaceX Dragon and Orbital Cygnus. Of course, the Boeing Starliner's been having issues, but that's why competition is important.

[JumpCrisscross]

> DARPA Grand Challenges worked well

Agreed. But the dollar amounts were small. And in many cases, every qualifying team received a grant.

[modeless]

I believe most of the grant money was conditional on meeting significant intermediate milestones.

[cbsks]

What was the issue with the Ansari XPRIZE? I’m not aware of any controversy about it or the winner.