Sept. 13, 2007 — Following on its successful $10-million contest for a pair of suborbital spaceflights, the X Prize Foundation is unveiling a new competition for a privately financed jaunt to the moon.
First-place winners would receive $20 million for landing a robotic rover on the moon by 2012, driving it around and relaying a video broadcast from the lunar surface. There's an extra $5 million in bonus money for finding water-ice, old Apollo or Russian hardware, or simply surviving a lunar night.
Like the successful 2004 Ansari X Prize, organizers hope the competition, which is being sponsored by Google Inc., will spur commercial space endeavors. In the wake of the suborbital piloted spaceflights of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic, an aspiring space tourism firm owned by Richard Branson, ordered a fleet of passenger spaceships that currently are under construction.
"We're out to prove a number of things," X Prize founder Peter Diamandis told Discovery News in advance of Thursday's official announcement in Los Angeles. "Number one is that space exploration, in particular lunar exploration, can be conducted by private enterprise and hopefully reduce the cost of this by orders of magnitude."
He estimates that teams will need between $20 million and $60 million to build, fly and operate a rover on the moon. Like SpaceShipOne builder Burt Rutan, the Lunar X Prize winner may find future business waiting.
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"I think there will be a lot of potential customers if this works out," said Pete Warden, the director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and a long-time proponent of lunar development.
"There's a lot of scientific interest to put hardware on the moon if you can get there affordably. NASA can eventually become a customer," he added.
