Engineer John Carmack, creator of the video games Quake and Doom, who founded and funded Armadillo Aerospace (which placed second in the competition), summed up this point nicely: “I think the biggest benefit that NASA can possibly get out of this is to witness an operation like ours go from concept to (almost) successful flight in under six months with a team of eight parttime people for a total cost of only $200,000. That should shame some of their current contractors who are going to be spending tens of billions of dollars doing different things.”
