Google's $30m moon mission
2007-09-14 07:24
Cape Canaveral - Web search leader
Google will sponsor a $30m competition for an
unmanned lunar landing, following up on the $10m Ansari
X Prize that spurred a private sector race to space.
Like the Ansari X Prize, which was claimed in 2004 by
aircraft designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen for a
pair of flights by SpaceShipOne, the Google Lunar X Prize is
open to private industry and non-government entities worldwide,
organisers said before an official announcement on Thursday.
First prize is $20m for the group that can land a
lunar rover - an unmanned robotic probe - on the moon, take
it on a 500m trek and broadcast video back to
Earth by December 31 2012.
The prize falls to $15m if the landing takes place
by December 31 2014.
A second-place winner will receive five million dollars. In addition,
at least five million dollars in bonuses are available for milestones
such as finding relics from the US Apollo moon landings, or
from Soviet lunar explorations, detecting water ice or keeping
the rover alive on the lunar surface overnight.
"Our hope is to educate and change public views about the
moon," X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis told Reuters
in an interview last week. "The moon is an offshore island of
Earth that has valuable resources which will benefit us as we
grow as a species. We should look at it in that fashion."
'Nasa is kind of an interested bystander'
The programme was to be officially unveiled at Wired
magazine's NextFest technology showcase, which opened on Thursday
in Los Angeles.
Nasa had considered a similar venture as part of its
Centennial Challenges programme, but the agency so far has been
able to fund prizes only up to $750 000. The Nasa competitions also are closed to non-Americans.
"Nasa is kind of an interested bystander," said Pete
Worden, director of Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California
and a longtime commercial space and lunar development advocate.
"If a private company perfects a process to get payloads to the
moon, Nasa will have a lot interest in that."
The United States plans to retire its space shuttles in
2010 and develop new vehicles that can fly people to the
International Space Station as well as the moon.
Nasa, which landed six crews on the moon between 1969 and
1972 under the Apollo programme, hopes to return astronauts to
the lunar surface by 2020.
They may find it a busy place, as Russia, Japan, India and
China have announced their own lunar ambitions.