
Only if he doesn't spend more than a billion dollars doing it, since the
prize is not going to be scaled up to match the level of effort.  You can
spend a billion pretty quickly buying Titan launches.

What's more, if you buy Titans, the prize money is your entire return on
investment.  If you develop a new launch system, it has other uses, and
the prize is just the icing on the cake.

I doubt very much that a billion-dollar prize is going to show enough
return to justify the investment if you are constrained to use current
US launchers.  (There would surely be a buy-American clause in the rules
for such a prize, since it would pretty well have to be government-funded.)
You're going to *have* to invest your front money in building a new launch
system rather than pissing it away on existing ones.  Being there first is
of no importance if you go bankrupt doing it.


I'm sure Spar would offer to develop such a lunar-tuned system and deliver
a couple of them to you for only a couple of hundred million dollars.