Official Announcement
For those who are not aware, the Google Lunar XPrize is an independent prize based space competition to land on the moon. Due to the nature of the competition, it is also referred as Moon 2.0. It was organized by Xprize and sponsored by Google. The official announcement took place at WiredNextFest in 2007. The challenge mainly consists of the first privately funded robotic spacecraft to land on the moon. There are other requirements and cash prizes but we’ll get into that in a bit. As of 2017, only five teams out an initial 32 remain in the competition SpaceIL (Isreal), Moon Express (USA), Synergy Moon (International), Team Indus (India) and Team Hakuto (Japan). They have all secured launch contracts and must launch before the deadline of December 31st, 2017.
What Does The Competition Consist Of
Landing on the moon is obviously the first requirement. After the landing, the robot must travel more than 500 meters (1650 ft) and transmit back HD images and video. The first team to do so will win a cash prize of $20 million dollars. Second place will receive $5 million dollars. An additional $4 million dollars is also up for grabs for going above and beyond. Teams can travel a total of ten times or 5000 meters (3 miles), capture images of the Apollo hardware or other man-made objects, verify the presence of water or ice, or surviving a lunar night. There is also a final $1 million dollar prize for teams who significantly promote ethnic diversity in STEM fields. This is exciting news taking into consideration that at the time the competition was announced the last robotic landing on the moon was in 1976.
Leave a Reply
9 Comments on "Five Google Lunar X Prize Teams Ready To Launch For The Moon"
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Google is gonna take over the world one project at a time
Launch for the moon and if you don’t make you are still in Space that’s far enough
It would be really interesting to witness this on live TV
These private companies and start ups is what really drive innovation and tech advancements
I say they host these types of competitions yearly
Pretty cool competition. I had never heard of it
The value here is really on the discoveries we might make while up there
I hope they put some of this on TV. I’d be interesting to watch
Let the best team win but hopefully we also find some interesting stuff. Isn’t that the point?