NASA is using variations of this approach for developing commercial crew services, the Gateway lunar station, and Artemis lunar lander programs. The hybrid approach retains a prize-like incentivization for participants to compete, innovate, and control costs. It also ensures that the public interest is represented during development, with the outcome more likely to address the long-term needs of the space program compared to prize-only incentives.

An Abdication of Public Policymaking

Defining and implementing policy within a democracy requires coalition-building, shared goals, and broad incentives. Democracy—and in particular the democracy as outlined in the U.S. constitution—is designed to be slow and inefficient, providing many avenues for input from various constituencies.

It is no surprise, then, that space exploration as a function of public policy can itself be slow and inefficient. In order to allocate funds for such large spaceflight projects, individuals and constituencies throughout the nation must participate, and many seek immediate benefit. In NASA’s case, that tends to mean that contracts and work are distributed throughout the country, creating jobs and political goodwill in the districts of the elected officials supporting the spending. And because these expenditures come from the public purse, the public’s representatives in government are thus expected to exercise oversight over these efforts, which can slow down, stymie, or otherwise disrupt long-term projects.

In that sense, massive projects like the International Space Station (ISS) are triumphs of agreement. They are the products of years, if not decades, of coalition-building, which, though frustrating to endure, can yield stability over decades. The ISS program, once controversial enough to survive a congressional effort to defund the program by a single vote in 1993, now finds itself with no significant political opposition. The ISS was neither cheap nor fast, but it worked and will endure for decades.

Prize competitions—and in particular the one proposed by Gingrich—are expressly designed to avoid the very coalition-building efforts that consume such time and money. They largely eschew the messy work of democracy, depending instead on the far less democratic—though usually far more nimble—work of hierarchical, unaccountable companies and private entities.

And since prize competitions only define outcomes and generally avoid regulatory control of development, they effectively remove public oversight from the process of using public funds.

As a consequence, the public policy behind such efforts is to have no public policy at all—a fundamental abdication of public oversight.

Therein lies the risk: the outcome of a hands-off competition is indeterminate. Absent some form of oversight and control during the development process, the government assumes significant risk if it intends to rely on the outcome of a competition—such as a human-capable lunar landing architecture—going forward.

Is Human Spaceflight a Priority or Lark?

When you listen to Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, talk about the Space Launch System rocket, you will notice he defines it in terms of a national capability. Much like an aircraft carrier, the SLS is not designed to compete in the commercial sector, but to provide a guaranteed capability to serve the national interest. This is why the U.S. government does not purchase aircraft carrier services from a private market, but instead funds companies (the "push" model) to design and build them to meet specific national security needs. The capability is too important to leave purely to the private sector to develop and maintain.

While you may disagree with this characterization of the SLS, the central idea is worth considering in the realm of human spaceflight at the Moon.

Because prize competitions only set expectations for outcomes, entrants are incentivized to solve for problems that will win them the prize, and not for long-term reliability. The Ansari XPRIZE provides an excellent case study. After winning the $10 million for performing 2 flights into space within 2 weeks in October of 2004, Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic began working on SpaceShipTwo, promising regular tourist flights within just a few years. 15 years later, Scaled Composites no longer works with Virgin Galactic and SpaceShipTwo not yet carried paying customers. Consider the analogy: if U.S. government awarded a $2 billion "lunar crew prize" which then saw no additional missions for 15 years, the outcome could be considered nothing less than a failure from a policy perspective. In that sense, the $2 billion would have been wasted, despite only paying for the "success" the competition's objectives.

So the question becomes, is human spaceflight to the Moon a matter of national priority? Or is it not? National priorities, by virtue of their importance, demand significant funds and strong political coalitions. Having a democratic consensus, in other words, tends to drive up costs. But if human spaceflight at the Moon is not much of a priority, then more risks can be taken, because a bad outcome is fundamentally acceptable in service of a higher-performing—and less democratic—result.

Again, the Gingrich plan anticipates this risk, stating that the award should exist in augmentation to existing plans. That helps address some of the issues relating to reliability, but not the responsibility of public oversight and the political will to see a program to its fruition.

Politics and Space

In the end, Gringrich’s plan is unlikely to be implemented, not just because of the policy pitfalls outlined above, but because of its intent to avoid the very political system it abhors. Prize competitions obviously have their place and have already done much to inspire and motivate people around, but in the realm of public policy, they must be targeted and modest.

A prize competition at the scale of billions of dollars would divert funds from established programs, avoid oversight and input from Congress, and yield unpredictable political benefits. By its very nature, it provides a weak political motivation to potential supporters while strongly motivating its opponents. By sidestepping the democratic process, it can’t develop the advocates it needs to succeed within it.