This article was taken from the October issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Standing at the lectern at the United Nations building in New York, Peter Diamandis looks the demagogue. He has taken off his coat, and he's sweating slightly as he leans in towards the audience. His deep black hair has fallen across his brow now, and he doesn't pause to sweep it back. He smacks the table before him with the butt of his palm. You could be forgiven for thinking this was a replay of a Khrushchev diatribe and expect the engulfed Greek-American entrepreneur to take off his shoe and spank the lectern. But Diamandis isn't angry, nor is he threatening to crush capitalism. Far from it. Rather, he's impassioned with the vision of a new kind of public capital: prize capital. "If I had a billion dollars," he tells the assembled audience of 300 who have paid $1,800 a head to attend this first ever X Prize conference, "I'd create ten $100 million prizes!"
Welcome to the age of prize philanthropy. Peter Diamandis's X Prize Foundation, founded in 1996 to usher in an era of private space flight, has brought a new era of innovation through competition along with it. In 1997, the total value of philanthropic prizes with purses of $100,000 or more was roughly $74 million. Today that number is $315 million. More than 60 of those prizes were launched after 2000 and now represent the bulk of the money on offer, some $250 million. And in the same years, prizes themselves have changed. Before the X Prize, most of the big awards (again, $100,000 or more) were for prior achievement - stuff like the Nobel Prize or the Man Booker Prize that recognise outstanding accomplishments in a certain field. Today, 78 per cent of the big prize money goes to inducement prizes such as the X Prize - prizes given to the person or team that first or best accomplishes a specific task. The prize ecosphere has also changed what's being rewarded. Whereas the arts were once the primary beneficiaries of such largesse, today they are dwarfed by prizes for big science-oriented competitions: aviation, space, engineering, medicine, mathematics, climate and the environment.
Diamandis's first contest, the Ansari X Prize, awarded $10 million to the first private team that could send a manned flight into space and then repeat the feat. It took nearly a decade, but in 2004 aerospace giant Burt Rutan and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen captured the purse when SpaceShipOne soared 100km into the ether for the second time. Allen and Rutan went on to join up with Richard Branson to form Virgin Galactic, and now hope to do for passenger space travel what Pan Am and TWA did for passenger air travel, eventually making it commonplace. "The large aerospace players laughed at what we were proposing with the Ansari X Prize," says Diamandis, animatedly. "They said that it couldn't be done. And now, there's over a billion dollars invested in this personal-space-flight industry. I think we will see three or four commercial players operating in the next two to three years, offering seats in the $100,000 level."
Yet space was just the beginning. Diamandis now wants to take the X Prize into even more uncharted frontiers. The Progressive Automotive X Prize seeks to revolutionise the roads. The Archon Genomics X Prize hopes to advance the field of personal medicine by awarding $10 million to the team that sequences 100 human genomes in ten days at a cost of less than $10,000 per genome. The Google Lunar X Prize seeks to take us even farther into space, and to get us there will shell out $30 million to the first team to land a robot successfully on the Moon.
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/674x281/a_c/box_x-prize-ecosystem.jpg" alt="X Prize Ecosystem"/>
The next big prize to fall will be the Progressive Automotive X Prize, due to be won within the next year. The competition will award $10 million to the team that wins a series of stage races in 2010. But the race isn't open to just anyone with a hot rod: it's limited by a series of seemingly impossible limits. Cars have to meet strenuous emissions limits that factor in so-called upstream pollutants - so an electric vehicle, even though it produces no exhaust emissions, is held responsible for the greenhouse gases emitted during electricity production - and cannot exceed an average of more than 200 grams of CO2 per mile. Cars have to be production-ready; no concepts, no one-offs, no hyper-expensive pimped-out time-travelling DeLoreans with drivetrains powered by Mr Fusion (unfortunately). Teams must create a business plan demonstrating how the technology can be immediately implemented to produce 10,000 cars per year. That's in the real world - no pie-in-the-sky fantasy plan. Vehicles must run on existing fuel networks - which effectively screens out most hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles and other chicken-and-egg conundrums. And if all that weren't enough, there is the prize's main goal: every car must top the equivalent of at least 100mpg of petrol.
Manage all that, and you get to compete in next year's races, the final of which will be 1,000 miles long. Altogether, some 111 teams with 136 vehicles have signed on. The courses, yet to be announced, will cover all types of terrain, weather conditions and communities across the United States. Vehicles must be able to perform not just in the flatlands of the Midwestern United States, but also in mountains and hills; in snow and in ice; and in hot desert weather. In short, anywhere one might drive a vehicle. Phew.
And you thought LeMans was demanding.
But the ultimate goal is something much bigger than awarding a prize to any one top performer: it's a complete rethink of the automobile. If the X Prize produces just a proof of concept, then it is a failure. Diamandis wants nothing less than to create an entirely new automotive industry of super-efficient vehicles that help end our dependency on oil and stem climate change. If everything works out as planned, the next car you buy could be a 100mpg machine.
The visionary
Peter Diamandis was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1961. His childhood coincided with the golden age of space exploration. It was the era of Apollo, when Armstrong took giant leaps for mankind on the Moon. As a boy Diamandis would look up to the orb in the sky with the full expectation that he, too, might one day stride across its dusty plains. By nine, he told his mother he wanted to be an astronaut and then proceeded to invest his life in the quest. He earned a six-pack of degrees, his BSc, MSc and MD (his father and sister are also medical doctors), and set about getting his pilot and scuba licences. While at MIT, as an undergraduate, he founded Students for the Exploration and Development of Space - his first start-up, a student organisation devoted to promoting space exploration. "I ended up pursuing both medicine and space in parallel," says Diamandis. "One to sort of make my parents happy, the other because it was my calling. At MIT I took the curriculum in molecular genetics, but in the evening I worked on space."
But as Diamandis was gearing up, Nasa was winding down. The last Apollo flight took place in 1972. By the time he entered college the Space Shuttle program had begun, but the priorities of the previous decades had shifted. The space race with the Soviets had largely ended. He realised that, even if he did make it into the astronaut program, and even if he was selected, he might get one flight a decade. And so eventually he gave up on his dream of becoming a Nasa astronaut. But he never gave up on space.
In December 1994, while reading Charles Lindbergh's memoir,
The Spirit of St Louis, Diamandis learned of the Orteig Prize, a competition that offered $25,000 to the first person who could fly nonstop between New York and Paris. He was captivated.
The Shuttle program was, well, boring. And although more than 20 years had passed since man first walked on the Moon, and Diamandis had launched several businesses in the space industry including a space-tourism start-up, he himself was no closer to getting there.
But reading how Raymond Orteig's prize launched transatlantic travel, he realised that a similar prize might jump-start the moribund space program and usher in a new era of private space travel. His idea was to create a $10 million purse to be awarded to the first private team that could successfully send a manned vehicle into space. The X Prize was born.
<img src="http://cdni.wired.co.uk/659x425/a_c/box_x-prize_history.jpg" alt="On giants shoulders"/> "The 'X' in X Prize originally stood for the name of the person who would put up money because I had no idea who would be the Orteig," says Diamandis. But that process took so long that he became enamoured with the name. The "X" invoked both the Roman numeral 10 (as in $10 million) and the word "experimental". And, of course, it's just a damn cool, ominous letter.
In 1996, he announced his prize to the world. The rules were simple, if concrete and hard to achieve: build a spacecraft capable of flying three people 100km high twice within two weeks, and the prize is yours. Next he went about finding sponsors. He had raised an initial $2.5 million in seed money from a business group in the city of St Louis, but it wasn't until 2001 that the Ansari family signed on, giving their name, and some of their fortune, to the prize.
Today, finding sponsors is much easier, thanks to his success with the original X Prize. His board is now filled with influential people, such as Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who helped get Progressive Insurance CEO Glenn Renwick onboard as the title sponsor for the Automotive prize. "I had been reading the story of the British prize, the Longitude Prize," explains Renwick. "I'd hoped to be able to do something that could make a difference like that." So when Kamen called on his chequebook, it seemed a natural fit.
Space tourism still may not be a given - especially in today's economic climate. Yet the era of private spaceflight is now upon us. Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin are all pushing ambitious schedules. Diamandis thinks he can repeat that trick for other industries and fields. "One of my goals with the Progressive Automotive X Prize is to change the paradigm.
You don't have to compromise. You can have a car that is beautiful, affordable, safe, fast, and, by the way, gets over 100 miles per gallon."
But the car itself is just the beginning. The foundation isn't merely interested in having teams prove they can build a car; it wants teams to prove they can build a car company. All the teams are currently scrambling to submit paperwork with business plans showing how they can meet a 10,000-vehicle-per-year production schedule. Teams must describe the minimum set of features that a car would require as a production vehicle and submit a bill of materials to prove what their vehicle will actually cost - both for the one-off initial vehicle to use in the competition and also the cost for in-quantity manufacturing. Foundation judges will then cull teams that don't seem viable, and the rest will progress to the 2010 race events. Teams formed by existing companies such as Tesla, Zap and Tata have a massive advantage - but that hasn't put off smaller teams which embody the can-do spirit of the X Prize.
The dream machine: Team Tri-Hybrid
If the goal of the X Prize is to get innovation unstuck from the grip of conventional wisdom, Jay Perdue is an industrial-sized tube of cognitive lubricant. The Memphis, Tennessee, inventor is already a successful entrepreneur in his own right. He holds a slew of patents in acoustic materials and runs a large business manufacturing ceiling and wall tiles. But he's also kind of a goofball. His X Prize entry isn't his first run at an alternative vehicle; there was the Pedal Paddle, a bicycle with a small 1.6-horsepower gas-motor assist system and two fold-out pontoons that allow it to cross both land and water. In 2004, he rode it all the way across America. "I did a stupid thing to prove my invention worked," Perdue says. "I am accredited as being the first person in history to cross the United States of America on both land and water on the same vehicle. It was an insane thing to do. I should have died a hundred times, in 25 incredibly creative ways."
Perdue spent 49 days criss-crossing the nation, covering some 4,000 miles on his odd contraption while spending equal time on land and water. And in the process, he had an epiphany about the future of transport. "I'm chugging on the side of the road, and mostly it would be dirty diesel trucks coming by making it almost impossible for me to breathe," he explains. "It just got me to thinking two thoughts.
One is that, golly, this pollution thing is real! And then number two was, man, you can really get somewhere if you combine a little human power and a little bit of gasoline help."
Perdue's roadside revelation led him to conceive the Tri-Hybrid Stealth, named after the iconic military plane to which it bears a passing resemblance. The car goes from zero to 60 in just under ten seconds; not fast, but not exactly slow either. Better yet, in its first long-distance test run it averaged a stunning 300mpg, topping out at 320mpg. Of course, that figure will drop as he increases the car's maximum speed: Perdue hopes to have it running at up to 100mph or better.
More to the point, the Stealth may have the most unique drive-train in the competition, running, as it does, on a high-compression diesel engine, an electric engine and human legs - hence the name, Team Tri- Hybrid. All three drive the rear wheel of the vehicle. The diesel engine runs constantly, while the electric motor runs intermittently to boost speed or climb hills - similar to the way the electric assist works in a Honda Civic Hybrid drive-train. The pedals exist as an option to give the car a little extra boost - pedalling can contribute an additional five per cent or so of power to the drive-train. Five per cent doesn't sound like very much, but Perdue takes issue with that criticism - it's clearly something he's got used to hearing. "I kind of chuckle sometimes whenever the engineers and people in the car business say the human effort is only five to ten per cent of the energy. And yet the very same engineers will tell you that every time the auto industry makes a five to ten per cent increase in fuel economy, it's ground-shaking. So it's like, give me a break. Which is true? Is it significant or is it not?"
Perdue sees the Stealth not simply as a chance to solve the problem of pollution and oil dependence, but also as an opportunity to tackle another problem of our times: the obesity epidemic. A recent study by Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that two-thirds of Americans are either obese or overweight, and that obesity-related problems account for one-quarter of healthcare spending in the US. Perdue thinks he has an answer. "Ninety to 95 per cent of Americans who own home fitness equipment or a [health club] membership don't use either one.
Neither one. So you're paying for equipment, you're paying for memberships and you never go and never use it. It boils down to the only logical thing I can conclude: that it's a factor of time," explains Perdue. "So think about it. If you could exercise on the way to work or the way home from work, it's already built into your day. So let's say you don't want to arrive at work all sweaty; don't do it. Don't touch the pedals at all on the way to work. On the way home, get a good cardio and then jump in the shower. And you've got all that time still for your kids, your wife, your family, whatever you want to do, because you get [exercise] on the way home. And that's my sermon on that deal. It's like, golly!
Everybody knows we need exercise; nobody's getting it!"
The favourites: Team Tesla
El Camino Real has seen better days. The old Spanish mission road that runs from San Francisco all the way to San Diego, roughly 500 miles to the south, neatly bisects Silicon Valley with a trail of second-tier fast-food restaurants and blighted strip malls.
Following it south, one abandoned car dealership after another litters the roadside. And then, suddenly, just as you enter the affluent town of Menlo Park, one lonely automotive soldier makes a stand. But it's not an established dealership, stubbornly clinging on among the empty lots. This is the Tesla showroom, which took over a vacated Chevrolet dealership that had gone belly-up.
Tesla is the current king of electric vehicles thanks to its Roadster, and it is the hot favourite to win the Automotive X Prize. It has a 248-horsepower 185kw engine that goes from zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds, with a top, limited, speed of 125 mph and the looks of a Lotus Elise. Indeed, much of the chassis for the two vehicles is the same, and Tesla contracts Lotus to assemble most of the car in the UK before it is shipped to the US where its power-train is installed.
The showroom - or Tesla Store as it's called - is both modern and completely antiseptic. There is neither grease, nor motor oil, nor any oily salesmen lurking around to pressure you into buying a vehicle - but at $100,000 a pop you're not going to be swayed by a fast-talker anyway. A bar with a lone iMac inhabits the centre of the main floor. To the side is a small coffee bar with a Jura-Capresso espresso machine. Plaques and charts on display recount the story of Tesla and the benefits of the electric power-train. If it seems reminiscent of an Apple Store, well, that's the idea. Tesla took cues from the computer giant to create a retail environment where you could hang around all day and just surf the net. But of course the attraction is the cars. Three Roadsters bling out the showroom floor. If it is possible for a car to be parked nonchalantly, these somehow pull it off. There is also a Tesla laid bare, its revolutionary all-electric power-train exposed for the world to see. Finally, off by itself, is the Model S, the next-generation sport sedan and the company's X Prize entry.
The Roadster is a two-seater sports car meant for wealthy early adopters. The Model S, which will cost half as much as the Roadster, is meant for a wider audience. It seats five, with room in the back to stow a surfboard or a labrador retriever. Or both.
It's neither attractive nor ugly, sharing the same bloodless modified-egg design common to so many modern sport sedans. It also doesn't exist yet. The model in the showroom is just that: a model.
You could no more drive it than you could drive a block of wood.
But the Model S is to be Tesla's future. The company will bring the car to market with or without the X Prize, but the competition has nonetheless helped it create a better vehicle. "It forced us to stretch the aerodynamic design and the level of efficiency within the power-train and the chassis to ensure that it achieves the 100mpg equivalent and 200-mile range," explains Roger Evans, head of Tesla's X Prize team. "The competition does force you to look at different aspects of the design. We believe we have a good model to follow with the Roadster, and a huge amount of opportunity with the Model S now that we are doing a ground-up design."
Because no Model S is ready to go yet, Tesla offers to let me take one of its Roadsters out for a spin. I creep it up Sand Hill Road, home of Silicon Valley's great venture-capital firms and the greatest concentration of wealth the world has ever known. On a drive when I encounter plenty of hyper-expensive autos, the red Roadster draws long, envious stares from start to finish. One woman, driving alongside in a Mercedes Benz, even goes so far as to take a photo at the traffic signal. But when I pull it on to the 280, also known as the Northern California Autobahn for drivers' widespread disregard of speed limits, there is no more staring - I am going too damned fast. Without entirely intending to, I have pushed the car up to 120mph, marvelling at the superb handling and the strange lack of an overpowering roar from an internal combustion engine.
Was it wrong to go that fast? Well, obviously. But given the price of the ride, I knew that this was likely my only chance to see what it could do. Even the Model S, if it does indeed start at $50,000, would be well outside of most drivers' price range. The Tesla is a magnificent vehicle. But if this is the future of the electric car, the majority will never be able to afford one.
The green machine: Team 88mph
The entrance to All Power Labs in Berkeley, California, is guarded by a rusting robot and a multi-headed serpent. There is no bell, and from within the sounds of industry and The Velvet Underground drown out any attempts at knocking. Inside, recycled cargo containers have been converted into a rats' nest of makeshift workshops. One cannot walk more than ten feet within the labyrinthine warren of containers without stepping over, on to, or around piles of scrap metal, wood chips, junked cars and tools, tools, tools - everywhere, tools. It's like a hurricane has just deposited its contents. Decrepit boats sit atop trailers. An old carnival train decays in the front of the yard, looking dangerous.
Next to it is a partially completed metal sculpture about 15 feet high by 30 or so feet long, all curves and angles. Build notes stapled on an exterior wall next to it reveal that it is titled "Chimera Sententa". When complete it will be a kinetic sculpture meant to be a cross between a bug and a fish. Based on the Burning Man stickers plastered everywhere, it's a safe assumption that it would be best enjoyed with large doses of hallucinogens.
It is here that I find Jim Mason, head of the 88MPH team - named after the speed Marty McFly's DeLorean had to achieve to break the time barrier in the Back to the Future movies - decked out in cargo shorts and Chelsea boots. He greets me with a soggy handshake and asks if it is really already 3pm. I assure him it is and then discreetly wipe my now-moist palm on the back of my trousers.
The X Prize attracts all types: entrepreneurs hoping to get rich, engineers with bold new designs, car nuts, peak-oilers, environmentalists, teachers and students. Mason's type is one that's distinctly northern California, and particularly Berkeley at that. Take a healthy dose of the do-it-yourself ethic, mix in some environmental activism, stir in belief in open-source solutions, and top the whole thing off with a dab of the irreverent prankster's spirit. "Originally we were going to run the car off the trash produced by the rest of the contest," explains Mason with a wry smile. "We proposed that we'll consume the waste that's generated by running the Auto X Prize in a manner that not only will run the car but will also take some percentage of it into the biochar scenario [the conversion of waste biomass into a charcoal-like substance] and introduce it into gardens along the way. So our participation would be carbon neutral. They didn't like that."
Although the trash-to-power idea ran afoul of the contest rules requiring teams to have a market-ready solution, he remains convinced he could have run through next year's races powered on nothing more than discarded flyers. But they couldn't show the energy content of that, and so had to settle on wood chips, the kind often used in stoves. But the basic idea remains the same.
Instead of using food plants to make fuel - think of the corn and sugar cane used in ethanol production - Mason wants to use waste. "We're up to our necks in the products of photosynthesis, it's everywhere," he explains. "We have a globally installed base. It's free; it's self-installing; it grows and we don't have to build anything. The problem is most of our biofuel is working off the sugars and oils, which are the most valuable parts of the plants; the stuff we use for food. The structural matter - all the cellulose matter - that's what we make fuel out of. It's the structural matter of plants that usually goes to waste."
The contrast between Tesla and All Power Labs is more than skin deep. Whereas the former builds glistening new machines based on a new drive-train technology, the latter is in the process of retrofitting old junkers with a system that's as old as gas lights: biomass gasification. Gasification is a staged combustion process that breaks down biomass into hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases suitable for high-powered clean burns. The 88MPH team is installing one of its gasifiers in the bed of an old pick-up truck. The gas is routed to the air intake on a high-compression diesel engine. The only waste product it leaves behind is charcoal, which can be sequestered in the soil. "It's stable for hundreds, if not thousands of years," says Mason. "You put it in the ground and it stays there, so you remove carbon from the carbon cycle."
And yet despite immediate appearances, 88MPH has more in common with Tesla than most other teams which are just starting out. Like Tesla, Mason already has a retail product. All Power Labs has already built and sold more than 500 gasifiers. They already have a working vehicle. Mason has no designs on becoming a car company; he's more interested in licensing his gasifier to others so they can use it in their vehicles. The challenge isn't proving the technology works, it's applying the technology to this particular contest in order to show it off to the entire world.
On the road
The next step for these and other teams - including the UK's Delta Motorsport - will be road testing. Vehicles have to perform well in real-world driving conditions, including both long-distance stage races and stop-and-go inner-city traffic. The team that performs best while meeting all the requirements will win. Or rather, the teams will win. The X Prize will actually name three winners, one in the mainstream class and another two in the alternative class.
The mainstream class is for vehicles with four wheels, four or more seats, and at least ten cubic feet of cargo space. In other words, your basic family vehicle. They have to hit zero to 60 in less than 15 seconds, and have a range of at least 200 miles without refuelling. They must have a heater, an air-conditioner and an audio system. There is no cupholder requirement.
Yet to call it "mainstream" is an injustice to some of the vehicles in the competition. A team out of Colorado, Boulder Electric Vehicle, for example, is entering an all-electric 12-seater work van that can refuel both by being plugged in and via a series of solar panels on the roof. A team called Alternative Fuel Sciences (which plans to enter a car in each category) is running the only hydrogen vehicles to be found in the race. It uses as its fuel a common fertiliser compound called carbamide, or urea, mixed with water in a 50/50 ratio. A reformer splits the mix into clean-burning ammonia and hydrogen, solving the where-do-I-get-it problem with hydrogen, as it need not have a network of hydrogen stations to travel long distances.
But the alternative class is where the real bleeding edge is. It has fewer design restrictions, no restrictions on the number of wheels and a range of just 100 miles. It also has two subsets, one for side-by-side vehicles, and another with tandems. Many look like no car you've ever seen. The entire class is filled with the future, made up of vehicles like the three-wheeled all-electric Aptera, a space-age automobile that looks like a cross between a plane and what you wanted your dream car to look like when you were a child. Freed from design constraints, teams are experimenting with cameras instead of mirrors, pressing aerodynamics far below the most drag-resistant vehicles on the road today, and testing every sort of power-train imaginable.
Once the race begins, the foundation is going to broadcast it on TV and online. Each vehicle will have an acquisition system to send performance data back to the web. Users online will be able to examine how a driver's performance affects fuel efficiency, where they are, and how often they have to refuel. They'll be able to check out real-time metrics on acceleration, speed, distance and, of course, fuel economy. The idea is to make the public hungry for one of these cars by letting them see how they really perform, in real time.
Curiously, teams may willingly spend many times over on R&D what they hope to take home in prize money. During the original Ansari X Prize, 26 teams collectively spent more than $100 million in pursuit of the $10 million purse. The winning team alone spent more than double the purse. "Burt Rutan thought he could do it for $10 million or less," says Diamandis, "and it cost him $26 million."
Teams spend more on their projects than the prize money, claims Diamandis, precisely because all X Prizes incorporate a back-end business model. The prize purse offsets costs to an extent, but the real value from the competition is the marketing platform. If the prize can create interest in the marketplace, it can drive demand.
Jack Hidary is a wealthy finance and technology-industry entrepreneur who runs the Freedom Prize, an award for ending US oil dependency, and who ponied up the seed money for the Automotive Prize. He claims it's not really about the prize money. It's about creating new expectations that lead the public to a new way of thinking. Hidary an enthusiastic man who tends to speak in long, animated bursts. "When you turn it into a prize concept, the monetary aspect of it is somewhat important, but actually not the key thing," he says. "It's actually aimed at creating a community and ecosystem around the prize. Take a big prize, like the Automotive X Prize. Today we have over 100 teams competing. But the Automotive X Prize came out of that same kind of thinking, that we needed to break the log jam of imagination. It wasn't a technology log jam, it was an imagination log jam. It was an imagination log jam because we know that it's possible to create a higher-mpg car.
But the car companies say again and again it's not possible to do so. And so we said no, that's probably not the case. How about we actually open it up to a wider range of competitors than the Detroit car companies? Sure enough, our 110 teams have said, we think it's possible. So I think that's what a prize does. It puts a challenge out there. Highlights the issue, draws out non-traditional innovators and ultimately changes the conventional wisdom. Ideas often seem the craziest right before they become the new conventional wisdom."
The purpose of the X Prize is to fulfill a dream. To spark the imagination and try to make things work better.
As for Diamandis, he is still pushing the dream forward. "My personal calling remains space," he says. "It always will be - but I've gotten excited about the potential use of prizes to drive innovation. And I've gotten really very interested in the thinking of breakthroughs."
To that end he's moving into new directions, to tackle new dreams. He just partnered with WellPoint to create a prize to reform the US's broken healthcare system. He's working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a prize for a better tuberculosis diagnostic tool. A Village Utility X Prize aims to provide power, clean drinking water and connectivity to villages in the developing world. And all the while the foundation is researching prizes for preserving biodiversity, mapping the oceans, developing clean aviation fuels, energy storage, sustainable housing and carbon sequestration. In short, through the X Prize, Peter Diamandis seeks nothing less than to remake the world.
The boy who dreamt of being an astronaut became the man who will bring space travel to the masses - and he has yet to take the trip himself. But he's not worried about it. He'll get there. He's confident. It's just another task. Another problem. And he's OK with that. "Fundamentally," says Diamandis, "I believe that all problems can be solved."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
