The X PRIZE Foundation was founded by Dr. Peter Diamandis. It's a nonprofit organization that offers prizes for the benefit of humanity. They design and launch amazingly large incentive prizes ($10 million) to award innovative competitions that motivate individuals, organizations, and companies to achieve breakthroughs.
Google is sponsoring the Lunar X PRIZE to create a global private race to the Moon. It's been decades since we explored the surface of it, but still we got little-to-no public involvement. And since that territory is tamed, the motivation has disappeared, and who knows when any government will return there again. This private race is provocative!
This race is all about stimulating excitement for and interest in the exploration of space; it's certainly something that would benefit human kind as a whole. We need projects that involve people all around, and the X PRIZE foundation knows that incentives are always motivating. Due to this, they couldn't find a better main sponsor and partner than Google. Indeed!
The aforementioned robotic race has a remarkable $30 million prize purse. Now what about the objectives? Some of the mission objectives are launching and landing a robotic rover that would wander around for at least 500 meters on the surface of Moon. During this process it'd constantly transmit videos and images back to the Earth.
"The Google Lunar X PRIZE calls on entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries from around the world to return us to the lunar surface and explore this environment for the benefit of all humanity. Having Google fund the purse and title the competition punctuates our desire for breakthrough approaches and global participation.
By working with the Google team, we look forward to bringing this historic private space race into every home and classroom. We hope to ignite the imagination of children around the world."
- Dr. Peter H. Diamandis
It is funny how some call this mission Moon 2.0. The first era of lunar exploration was just a historic quest between two superpowers (the USA and the then-Soviet Union), just for "flags and footprints." This 2.0 version, however, assumes a different quest. It's all about reaching the Moon to actually stay there. It's really important to send probes to explore the surface of it because it's still a stepping stone toward our own environmental evolution.
The $30 million prize purse is split into a $20 million grand prize, $5 million for the second prize, while the remaining $5 million is for bonus prizes. The first deadline is December 31, 2012. If this isn't met it will be extended by two years, but the grand prize gets reduced to $15 million. That means we should get things started!
The crème de la crème benefit for the public of Lunar X PRIZE is the ability to view it live (online via the X PRIZE website) and the broadcasted data that's going to be transmitted from the winning team once some rover reaches its destination.
Notwithstanding, the future of this lunar exploration is really encouraging and it seems like we have only two choices: innovate or wait to see what happens. It can change human kind because it pushes innovation. We know about the possibility of capturing clean solar energy from the moon (but this requires tons of experiments, thus lots of funding), but it's also akin to going beyond, exploring deep into space...
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