Google Wants Lunar Landing

The group whose $10 million prize spurred privately financed rocketeers to send a small piloted craft to the cusp of space in 2004 has issued a new challenge: an unmanned moon shot.

With the audacious new contest comes a much bigger prize - up to $25 million, paid for by Google, the ubiquitous Internet company.

The "Google Lunar X Prize" was announced Thursday in Los Angeles at Wired magazine's NextFest. The contest calls for entrants to land a rover on the moon that will be able to travel at least 500 meters, or 0.31 miles, and send high-resolution video, still images and other data back home.

The X Prize Foundation saw the new contest as one of "the grand challenges of our time that we can use to move people forward," said Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive of the foundation.




The prize for reaching the moon and completing the basic tasks of roving and sending video and data will bring the winner $20 million, according to the contest rules. An additional $5 million would be awarded for other tasks that include roving more than 5,000 meters or sending back images of artifacts like lunar landers from the Apollo program.

Carnegie Mellon University immediately announced that a roboticist on its faculty, William Whittaker, would be pulling together a team to seek the prize.


Why would anyone sign up for a challenge that will almost certainly cost more than the prize will bring? John Logsdon, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said, "There are a variety of reasons to do it, including ego gratification, including loss-leader reputation building, including a fascination with doing things in space. I don't think they're driven by the amount of the prize."

Logsdon said the goal was realistic once a launch vehicle is obtained. "Russia and the U.S. did that sort of thing 40 years ago," he said. "The technologies aren't easy, but with all the experience in industrial robots and sensor devices, I don't see any reason why you couldn't put together a robotic machine that could meet these requirements."

The $20 million grand prize will be available until Dec. 31, 2012, and then will drop to $15 million for two years.

The new contest follows the path of the original Ansari X Prize, which was won by SpaceShipOne, a manned spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and financed by Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft.

That prize was paid for through a special insurance policy secured by Anousheh Ansari, a telecommunications entrepreneur in Texas and a board member of the X Prize Foundation who has since orbited the earth aboard the International Space Station. Rutan is designing a second-generation spacecraft called SpaceShipTwo that will be used by Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic.

The new X Prize, Diamandis said, grew out of research performed last year for NASA as a contest that the space agency would sponsor. The research suggested that six or seven contenders could be expected to try for the prize, but NASA ultimately backed away from financing the project, Diamandis said.


Then, in March, Diamandis pitched the idea to Google's co-founder, Larry Page, who sits on the board of the X Prize foundation. "Sounds like a lot of fun," he told Diamandis. The multimillion-dollar project, Page said, would be "doable," but his Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, would have to sign on as well. This also happened quickly, Diamandis recalled.

NASA has announced plans to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2020. But without the need to keep humans alive or to make a return trip, the X Prize trips will be simpler.

A number of successful entrepreneurs from the world of computing and the Internet, like Allen, have pursued childhood fascination with space with efforts to create real spacecraft. Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, has developed rockets through his company, Space Exploration Technologies, and Jeffrey Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is developing rockets at a facility he owns in West Texas.

Roger Launius, who heads the division of space history at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, expressed enthusiasm for the new competition, which he said "might unleash a kind of furor of innovation" and heighten interest in space exploration.

"It's certainly a challenge that is worthy," he said. But he also expressed worries that the robotic adventurers would head to the site of the Apollo 11 landing, a prospect he said was troubling since "the last thing I want to see happen is to see Tranquility Base disturbed."

Source: International Herald Tribune
Google Logo: Google.com
Lunar Team Image: Cnet.com