Peter Diamandis revels in doing the impossible

X Prize

The phenomenal success of the original X Prize -- where contestants spent over $100 million to win the $10 million purse -- prompted Diamandis to subsequently create a series of contests including the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize (to create a 100 mile-per-gallon gasoline engine), the Archon Genomics X Prize (to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days), the Google Lunar X Prize (to land a robot on the Moon), the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X Challenge (to build a small rocket capable of launching payloads from the Moon), the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge (to create technologies to clean up oil spills), and the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize (to create a portable medical diagnostic device like that used on the television series Star Trek).

One thing most people assume--incorrectly -- is that the “X” in “X Prize” is a placeholder allowing different contests to run under the same banner. However, the real reason is that when Diamandis originally offered the $10 million prize for the first X Prize -- to successfully launch a three-passenger spacecraft into space twice in two weeks--he did not have the money to pay the winner (and thus used the “X” placeholder until he found a donor).

“Everybody said I was crazy when they found out I did not have the $10 million for the first X Prize,” said Diamandis. “But I was confident that someone would step forward to put up the money.”

Lucklily the Anousheh and Hamid Ansari Family eventually helped out by underwriting an insurance policy to cover the $10 million purse, which was subsequently won by Mojave Aerospace Ventures -- a team headed by aviation designer Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

For the future, Diamandis has a head-full of bright ideas for new grand challenges, including an autonomous vehicle challenge to create a vehicle that can navigate from Los Angeles to New York without a driver. Another is an earthquake prediction contest that outperforms the current seismic-based outposts deployed today. His most far-out idea, however, is not about outer space, but inner space -- creation of a laboratory-grown kidney from differentiated stem cells.