NASA’s competitions arose, in part, from a desire to return to the moon, as well as to hand off part of NASA’s old mission to the private sector — that mission being to make low-orbit space travel a mere extension of planes, trains and automobiles. Of course, the competitions are also a sign of a bureaucracy trying to revive itself. From tragic shuttle explosions to diapered astronaut stalkers, NASA hasn’t had a good decade since “I Dream of Jeannie” was canceled. Congress has appropriated for NASA a $12 million contest budget, nearly all of which — $10.9 million — is prize money. The competitions themselves are organized and run by private nonprofits like Volanz Aerospace. The winners retain the rights to their inventions. So if it works out as planned, everybody wins: the inventors make money, the companies get good publicity and NASA gets its technology.

So far this has not been easy. Even as Gary Harris and his Russian colleague were brainstorming at Harris’s house in Florida, not a single one of these contests had had a winner, and NASA had not paid out its first dollar — not an easy thing to pull off for a government bureaucracy under pressure to make a show of success.

Some contests have been achingly close. Last year’s beam-power competition came within seconds of having a winner. And this May, a contest known as the Regolith Excavation Challenge attracted another diverse mix of entrants: two graduate students at the University of Missouri at Rolla; a guy who runs the boilers for the Detroit public schools; and a programmer for Pacific Gas and Electric named Jim Greenhaw, who wore a cap promoting an organization of his called Technology Ranch. The contest was particularly tough: you had to dig and move 330 pounds of simulated regolith (the powdery dirt that covers the moon) from a large sandbox to a scale in less than 30 minutes using only 30 watts of power — roughly the energy needed to light one of those small bulbs in the back of refrigerator. Most of the machines failed immediately, digging into the particulate and grinding to a halt. But Greenhaw’s device, a souped-up conveyor belt fitted with little scoops, managed to haul a lot of regolith. (When I asked Greenhaw where Technology Ranch was located, he smiled and pointed to his forehead. “Right here,” he said.) Unfortunately, Greenhaw’s digger lacked sidewalls along a chute that carried the regolith, and as a result much of the dirt was pushed off the side and onto the ground. With just a few pieces of duct tape and a couple more scoops fitted to the belt, Greenhaw might well have won the $125,000.

“One of the reasons Congress was telling us they weren’t giving us any more money,” Ken Davidian, the NASA administrator of the challenges, told me, “was because we had not awarded any money.” Davidian is a small compact man with a bit of a Dudley Do-Right chin and a swift, busy manner. At any of the contests, he can be found setting up his traveling triptych (actually five panels, a pentatych) of promotional material. “I wasn’t disappointed we weren’t giving money away,” he said, “because we had good company, and it shows that the prizes were hard to win.”

The “good company” Davidian refers to is the recent surge in prize offerings from government and private sponsors alike. Perhaps the most well known is the Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million to the first designer to build a vehicle capable of making a round trip into suborbital space twice in two weeks. (The legendary engineer Burt Rutan won it in 2004.) The unlikely sponsor of a robot-car race started in 2004 was the Pentagon’s own lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. In 2005, a Stanford team won that competition’s $2 million purse with “Stanley,” an unmanned car that finished a 132-mile desert course in a first-place time of just less than seven hours. This fall, contestants in the robot-car race will compete on an urban race course. Congress is also currently considering the H-Prize Act, a bill that would provide purses of up to $10 million in six contests for breakthroughs related to hydrogen energy. All of these contests probably owe their origins to an influential 1999 report by the National Academy of Engineering, whose recommendation can be deciphered from its clunky title, “Concerning Federally Sponsored Inducement Prizes in Engineering and Science.”

Image Reaching for the stars: Peter Homer's space-glove design. Credit... Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

Americans, perhaps more so than people of other nations, have great faith in the idea of the outsider inventor. The stories of inventors who made it out of their garages (Steve Jobs) and those who stayed there (Philo T. Farnsworth) are part of the national mythology. Ever since Benjamin Franklin broke with his apprenticeship in Boston as a teenager and recreated himself as a freethinker and fearless inventor (a narrative, some say, he simply repeated and wrote large with the founding of the nation), amateurism has taken on different connotations in this country. Old World use of the word “amateur” intimated lower-class status, even incompetency, but in America, the land of second acts, “amateur” has accrued some of the more positive meanings we associate with the concept of the autodidact. Americans seem drawn to the story of the outsider-made-good with an intensity that has riveted the nation from the earliest amateur contests featured regularly in Vaudeville to the latest versions of such shows, like “American Idol.” In America, the self-made citizen is a kind of superhero.