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Google teams up with X Prize Foundation to offer $30 million moon prize |
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Written by Derek Kessler on
Thursday, 13 September 2007
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 The goal is rather simple: send a rover to the moon, drive it 500 meters, beam back one gigabyte of data Earth, collect a $20 million prize. Here's the catch: you can't use the government's money to do it. The multi-billion dollar internet giant Google has partnered with the X Prize foundation to help finance the latest competition. Just like the $10 million private spaceflight Ansari X Prize before, the Google Lunar X Prize aims to give a healthy kick and shot of adrenaline to the non-existent private moon flights industry.
In 2004 the first X Prize competition, bankrolled by the Ansari family of software entrepreneurs, was awarded $10 million to Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites (which was backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen). His spacecraft, a combination heavy-lift vehicle (White Knight) and rocket plane named SpaceShipOne, was the first privately-financed and built manned spacecraft. The success of the flight brought Scaled Composites to the attention of Sir Richard Branson (owner and founder of Virgin Group), and now the $25 million development costs of SpaceShipOne are being offset by the design and construction of a several upsized SpaceShipTwo’s that will comprise Virgin Galactic’s suborbital fleet, as well as the purchase of Scaled Composites by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman. Several other companies that competed in the original X Prize have continued their development efforts.
Google is hoping that the much larger prizes of its Lunar X Prize will encourage a similar wave of private investment. To be eligible for the any part of the purse one must successfully launch, land, and operate a rover on the moon’s surface. The first prize of $20 million will be awarded to the first team to move their rover 500 meters and transmit back 1 GB of high definition images and video (which will be made available to the public via the X Prize website). There will be a $5 million second prize (available as a consolation prize if a rover lands but fails to rove), as well as a $5 million in bonuses available to teams that drive their rover over long distances (over 5 kilometers), capture images of man-made moon artifacts (such as the Apollo landers), discover water ice, or survive through the frigid 14-day-long lunar night.
The X Prize has aimed to make space technology not only more accessible to the public, but also more cost effective. By fostering competition between private companies, innovative solutions to the problem proposed are often the result. Two dozen teams registered as part of the Ansari X Prize competition, and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin believe that the Google Lunar X Prize will attract a much wider team, as the requisite technical expertise, financing, and will to put a rover on the moon exist in countries around the world.
Today’s furthest reaching private satellites are a thin halo of communications satellites sitting in a geosynchronous orbit some 24,000 miles above Earth’s surface. The moon orbits the Earth at a distance ten times that, as X Prize founder and chairman Peter Diamandis said, "We want to increase that by an order of magnitude." The Ansari X Prize sat unclaimed for ten years, but Google and X Prize believe that they have set a reasonable set of goals that the Lunar X Prize may be won by 2012 – that’s just over five years from now.
What’s in it for Google, you might ask. For a company that is firmly rooted on terra firma and has branched very little outside of internet search and advertising, not much. "Companies today spend more on stadiums and sailboat races than we will spend on this," said Brin, "Expanding science and technology is a far better way to reflect Google's values."
View: Google Lunar X Prize
Discuss: TrekUnited Forum
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