The organization created by NASA to build the hardware needed to return to the moon and venture to points beyond is planning to put up cash prizes to stimulate innovation in space exploration technologies.

NASA officials said they got their inspiration for the idea from the aviation prizes of the early 20th century, the X Prize Foundation and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first team to build and fly a three-person craft to an altitude of 100 kilometers and back, and then repeat the feat with the same vehicle within two weeks. DARPA is offering $1 million to the winner of an unmanned rover race being held in March.

NASA has yet to announce the first of its so-called Centennial Challenges, but agency officials have said the contests will be designed to encourage advances in fundamental space technologies like propulsion, power, communications, robotics and very low cost space missions.

Brant Sponberg, NASA’s Centennial Challenges program manager, said the agency established the program with the help of the X-Prize Foundation and has worked with NASA field centers and headquarters to come up with an initial list of 129 candidate challenges. That list has since been winnowed to 15. But Sponberg said NASA would not be ready to announce its inaugural list of challenges before a workshop planned this spring. For the time being, NASA only has the authority to put up fairly modest purses of $250,000 or less, according to Sponberg. “Starting next year, we hope to have legislative authority to award purses above this level,” Sponberg said.

NASA is asking Congress for $20 million for the program for 2005 -- and the legal authority to grant much bigger cash prizes.

One key U.S. senator already has endorsed the program and said he will work to get NASA authority similar to that which DARPA already has to make prizes.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Commerce science, technology and space subcommittee, said in a Feb. 25 interview that he will seek to include such a provision in the NASA authorization bill being written this year.

Sponberg said Centennial Challenges competitions will be open to U.S. citizens but not federal employees. Private companies, nonprofit organizations and colleges and universities are all eligible to participate, he said.

Sponberg outlined plans for the cash prizes program March 3 during briefings here at NASA headquarters on the agency’s new Office of Exploration Systems.

Some audience members, who included industry representatives and reporters, were skeptical about how effective the prizes would be in encouraging innovation.

A member of the audience, who identified himself during a question and answer session as an L-3 Communications employee told the NASA panelists it might be difficult for would-be competitors to convince their companies to spend money on an entry with no guarantee of return, and asked if NASA might be willing to provide some support funding. Sponberg said it would be up to the teams to finance their entries. He also said NASA will try to host competitions with the potential to yield breakthroughs with commercial as well as space exploration applications.

Another member of the audience, who did not identify himself, said NASA’s Centennial Challenges program “falls short” because it fails to include “some kind of market guarantee” in addition to the purse. An example might be guaranteed launch contracts to the first five to 10 companies that can build a rocket capable of putting payloads into low Earth orbit for a certain price, he said.

“Investors don’t get excited about winner take all contests, unless they are more of a sponsor than an investor,” he said. Sponsors, he said, do not demand a financial return on their investments.