Heroic Expectations: How Prize Competitions Boost Industry Outsiders in Space Exploration

Stories about prize winners carry a heroic tone and raise expectations of breakthroughs. This study seeks to understand why these narratives consistently favor industry outsiders. To begin, I review “heroic inventor” discourse, where status and stories are the product of competing interests. In studies on prize competitions and accounts of famous winners, expectations appear positive and politically motivated. I investigate these expectations by applying theoretical work on how skilled strategic actors use cultural framing to gain position and power in industries. This provides an analytic lens for my case study of the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition for the first team without government funding to land a robotic probe on the Moon. Drawing on interviews with competition administrators and leaders of outsider and industry-affiliated teams, I find team prospects to win the prize depend far more on technical and financial capacity than cultural identity or motivation. Nevertheless, administrators raise “heroic expectations” of small, risk-taking teams challenging traditional industry culture. I argue that prize competitions use cultural framing in two strategic ways: by influencing how teams interpret and pursue opportunities, and by inducing cooperation within the space industry establishment. To conclude, I set the case in its historic context and suggest practical implications of heroic expectations.