
Henry, I made the assumption that he who gets there firstest with the mostest
wins. 

Ohhh, you want to put in FINE PRINT which says "Thou shall do wonderous R&D
rather than use off-the-shelf hardware"? Sorry, didn't see that in my copy.
Most of the Pournellesque proposals run along the lines of <some dollar
amount> reward for <some simple goal>.  

You go ahead and do your development, I'll buy off the shelf at higher cost (or
even Russian; but I also assume that there'd be some "Buy US" provos in there)
and be camped out in the Moon while you are launching and assembling little
itty-bitty payloads in LEO with your laser or gas gun.  And working out the
bugs of assembly & integration in LEO. 

Oh, hey, could I get a couple of CanadARMs tuned for the lunar environment?  I
wanna do some teleoperated prospecting while I'm up there...


