While the Washington Post has covered the notion of prizes before, I'm not aware that that news service which anti-entrepreneurial Lockheed Martin heavily subsidized (at least prior to campaign finance reform) has ever covered competitive SPACE-related prizes in such detail as it has today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35582-2004Jun11.html

The best quotes:

Also, Diamandis added in a telephone interview from Santa Monica, Calif., the X Prize serves to "to create a business model," to show that the private sector can fly to space for only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars that it costs for a NASA space shuttle mission, or even the estimated $20 million that space tourists Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttlesworth paid to ride on the Russian Soyuz.

and:

The "prize model" has also drawn interest from NASA, which is hosting a conference next week on how to use similar competitions to enlist private know-how in overcoming hurdles posed by President Bush's proposal for exploring the moon and Mars. "We see prizes as a good way to do that," said Brant Sponberg, program manager for Centennial Challenge, NASA's prize initiative. The agency has asked for a budget of $20 million for it in 2005.

Sponberg is contemplating contests including "land ten kilos [23 pounds] on the moon very cheaply," and "develop a system to land very precisely on the
moon or Mars" without a satellite navigation system. "I'm sure there's some genius kid out there who can probably figure it out." he said.