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Hyperspace Cafe Metaphysical Forum > Hyperspace Member Forums > Space & Astronomy > Google in $30m moon challenge |
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Hyperspace Cafe Metaphysical Forum > Hyperspace Member Forums > Space & Astronomy > Google in $30m moon challenge |
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| Google in $30m moon challenge - Space & Astronomy - Hyperspace Member Forums - Hyperspace Cafe Metaphysical Forum | |||||||||||||||
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Richard Seeker 
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By Richard Watersin San Francisco Google has put up a $30m prize in an effort to trigger a race to put the first privately financed space mission on the moon. The competition, announced yesterday, is modelled on the X Prize Foundation's Ansari prize, which promised $10m for the first private rocket to reach into low earth orbit. That prize was won in 2004 by -aerospace entrepreneur Burt Rutan, who has since joined Richard Branson to try to create a space tourism industry. Also administered by the X Prize group, the new Google competition will pay $20m to the first mission to land a robotic rover on the moon. To win, the rover will have to travel at least 500 metres and beam back video and other data to Earth. Another $10m in prize money is for second place and other achievements, such as travelling a longer distance or discovering ice. The Ansari prize helped to attract public attention at a time when private investment in space exploration was just getting under way, and has been credited with acting as a catalyst in the broader boom in investment in the area. However, some of the biggest achievements in the field, such as the recent launch of the SpaceX rocket into higher, geostationary orbit around the Earth, were not linked to the X Prize. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, had been driven by the commercial opportunities of launching payloads into space at far lower cost than existing alternatives, said Robert Weiss, vice chairman of the X Prize group. "From a business perspective, he saw a market that was underserved," he said. Since new private systems such as this have largely solved the problem of lifting private missions out of Earth's gravitational pull at relatively low cost, the next challenge will be to assemble the skills necessary to land a robotic vehicle on the moon, Mr Weiss said. Google's backing for the project is the latest sign of the long-standing interest of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in space exploration. The company has had close links with Nasa, including working with the US space agency to bring more space images to its search products. Google is also building a new headquarters on Nasa-owned land near its existing location and, according to a report in the New York Times, its founders have an unusual arrangement that allows them to park their private jet on Nasa's nearby Moffett Field. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b490f0ec-625b-11dc-bdf6-0000779fd2ac.html
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