JERRY POURNELLE: “Obama says McCain was silly to offer his prize. Kennedy didn’t offer a prize. He built NASA and had the government spend $30 billion dollars. I don’t know what would have happened had Kennedy instead offered $15 billion tax free to the first American to land on the Moon and return, but had he done that it might have worked out better than NASA: we might not have built an enormous standing army of development scientists who conceived Shuttle as full employment insurance. . . . Government can try to influence the future, and should, but government often mucks things up. Prizes and X Projects are ways that have been effective in the past. Of the two, prizes have the least effect on everything else: they don’t build bureaucracies, and nothing is paid unless the technology is developed and demonstrated.”

Prizes, of course, played a very important role in the development of aviation, something of which Obama’s speechwriters are probably ignorant. They might find some useful information here, and here.

UPDATE: More on prizes here.