Fly Google to the moon, win $20 million

Google's sponsering a new X Prize, and this one has its sights set a bit higher than suborbital. The new contest wants competitors to send a robotic rover to the moon and beam back a gigabyte of data -- including pictures and video -- of the trip. The rover also has to travel 1,312 feet across the surface of the moon. Contest entrants are required to pony up for the launch vehicle themselves, by building it from scratch or contracting with an existing company; like the last X Prize there's no government freeloading to be had here. If somebody is successful in this feat by 2012 they'll win the $20 million, while $5 million goes to second place, and another $5 million bonus goes to teams able to surpass the minum requirements. The prize drops to $15 million after 2012 and expires in 2014 if nobody manages to win by then. More details will be announced at the WIRED Nextfest in LA this weekend.

[ming @ Sep 13th 2007 4:03PM]

don't you mean $30 million?

[Ellianth @ Sep 13th 2007 5:40PM]

No.

[dv @ Sep 13th 2007 6:08PM]

assuming i could build the vehicle and launch equipment, isn't there some US law that will get me arrested for actually launching the thing?

[Phour ZwanZig @ Sep 13th 2007 9:36PM]

Thats exactly what I was thinkin DV.. Because of HomeLand Security and the FAA, Im sure that if a person could they would have to jump through alot of hoops to get the right permits.. Hell in most states even Bottle Rockets are illegal, mind you they are much smaller than something with a payload.. Which just made me think, how is it even legal anymore to fire off Model Rockets.. HMMM...?

[gregory @ Sep 13th 2007 4:11PM]

albino

[Nate @ Sep 13th 2007 4:14PM]

I love Google

[Phillip Black @ Sep 13th 2007 5:22PM]

Who doesn't? :)

[Ellianth @ Sep 13th 2007 5:43PM]

It's rivals?

[zz @ Sep 13th 2007 4:14PM]

$20 + $5 + $5 = $30

[Ellianth @ Sep 13th 2007 5:43PM]

but 20 and 5 and 5 is not 30. It's 20 and 5 and 5 (and that last 5 is split between a bunch of people, maybe.)

[Calviin @ Sep 14th 2007 11:23AM]

Yeah, The winner doesn't get the 20+5+5. They only get the 20. The other 5 + 5 are for someones else.

[zz @ Sep 13th 2007 4:15PM]

$20 + $5 + $5 = $30 mill.

[Mercury7 Science Center @ Sep 13th 2007 4:18PM]

Fantastic! Hoping a precision landing can be accomplished to explore one of the Apollo landing sites.

[Mercury7 Science Center @ Sep 13th 2007 4:22PM]

I think we may have found a use for sonys rollie :) lol

[JohnTitor @ Sep 13th 2007 4:41PM]

The White House and NASA must be scrambling as we speak. Now Google will have a gigabyte of data proving the moon landings were fake before they go for real in 2020 to plant them there.

[F3 @ Sep 13th 2007 4:50PM]

JohnTitor, are you being funny ha-ha or funny weird?

[Mercury7 Science Center @ Sep 13th 2007 5:31PM]

lol....it would be kinda cool to put all the conspiracy folks out of business...but I am sure they would all say the rover was a hoax too :)

[Le Master @ Sep 13th 2007 9:20PM]

User JohnTitor making claims of a hoax...anyone else getting a kick out of the irony?

[daniel @ Sep 13th 2007 4:19PM]

i think this project will be cancelled somehow, now nasa is thinking about they have 5 more years to put an american flag there on the right position ;)

[octoberasian @ Sep 13th 2007 5:24PM]

NASA official #1: Crap! Google is encouraging people to enter a contest to land on the moon.

NASA official #2: What's so bad about that? The winner gets $20 million out of it.

NASA official #1: Bad? What would happen if they sent their makeshift rover to where the flag was planted and there was no flag there in the first place?

NASA official #2: Well, that could be a problem... How much money would Google accept to cancel this project?

NASA official #1: Let's call the GAO. Man, this is going to come out of NASA's annual budget.

NASA official #2: Not like we need it anyway. It's going to the International Space Station mostly and to keep people quiet about the moon landing back in 1969.

[Ahmed Alzayani @ Sep 13th 2007 4:18PM]

is it hard to just robot to the moon .... i can do it (i just need 1 million)

here is my plan:

1- make the robot small, very small .... i mean PDA size small
2- Launch the robot like a bullet, using some kind of cannon , direct to the moon
3- just to be safe, launch 3 or 4 robots, on of them will do it

[Jake @ Sep 13th 2007 4:44PM]

4. Burn up on entry
5. ???
6. PROFIT?

[F3 @ Sep 13th 2007 4:52PM]

What entry?

[paloooz @ Sep 13th 2007 5:14PM]

The moon does not have an atmosphere.

[dv @ Sep 13th 2007 6:14PM]

you'll have to actually find a way of launching the thing that fast. even your average bullet from a gun isn't fast enough to escape the earth, so to launch something bigger, like a PDA-sized object, takes considerably more effort. to whoever said you won't burn up, you have to worry about burning up while exiting the earth, too, if you don't control your speed. as an alternative to shooting it really fast to escape the earth, you can have it self-powered so it can leave the earth, powering itself up, in which case you now have the problem of fuel storage, release. then you have the problem of actually leaving the earth in the right direction -- if you go off track the earth will suck you back in. then you have to get to the moon -- it's easy to get pulled away from your path due to gravity. then, when you get to the moon, you'll have to make a soft landing on the moon from that shooting speed which is pretty tough; it may involve precision control to get yourself into a good orbit trajectory first and slowly descend from there. parachutes don't work on the moon, for one thing. finally, you have to get your data back to the earth, which is yet another challenge.

[Ahmed Alzayani @ Sep 14th 2007 3:49AM]

The concept of launching like bullet is to avoid all the fuel to be carried onboard, which is need more fuel to left up that extra load of fuel ….. And so on … I think it easier to not Carrey fuel at all, and for all the heat and burning up, is easy to solve, just by putting protective shield, it not an issue if the protective shield end up burring, as it is one way trip, for the landing … just inflate a big balloon or something like that, few second before hitting the moon surface.. it don’t need to be 100% soft landing , and for the 1 GB data, we simply use very powerful receive here on earth. And send the data slowly using lots of extra correction information and checksums. It may take a while (say a few days). But I will end up 19 million richer.

[Dan @ Sep 13th 2007 4:19PM]

It should say $30 mil. nowhere in that post. What are you talking about?

[Richard Walker @ Sep 13th 2007 4:20PM]

thats not really much of an incentive! its gonna cost a hell of a lot more than that to get a lunar rover there! But if i won the lottery, it would be on my 'to do' list! lol

[Mercury7 Science Center @ Sep 13th 2007 4:30PM]

yeah, obviously building a rover is the easy part, the hard part is contracting a rocket capable of getting it there.....but it is a cool thing to do and someone will do it, I am sure spaceship one far exceeded the prize money offered to be successful....it is far more about the challenge, I bet scaled composites is having a meeting about it as we write this.

[Sma @ Sep 13th 2007 7:03PM]

I'm most likely wrong about this but i think space ship one cost less than the prize money to build, fuel and fly, but the R&D cost to develope something like that was higher. I like the idea though, it'll be neat to see if someone actually gets something up that works :)

[Richard Walker @ Sep 13th 2007 7:16PM]

@ Mercury7 Science Center: Yeah i'm sure Burt is having a wet dream as we speak!! lol

@ SMA: It cost $25 million (estimated) to build Space Ship One and the Ansari X PRIZE reward was just $10 million, so yeah your a bit out! But yeah i would be really cool. i would love to be part of one of the teams!!

[rhys @ Sep 13th 2007 4:25PM]

If you're being paid to write, shouldn't you at least know how to spell "sponsoring?" :)

[Michael @ Sep 13th 2007 8:01PM]

Goodness, I thought I was the only one who noticed that!

[pr_master @ Sep 13th 2007 4:28PM]

Did Google got inspire watching "The Astronaut Farmer"??? they should star watching less crappy movies to get inspiration, lol

[farfisa @ Sep 13th 2007 4:33PM]

The moon? That thing still there?

[Javi0084 @ Sep 13th 2007 4:50PM]

How long have you been in your mom's basement?

[farfisa @ Sep 13th 2007 4:53PM]

Oh wait. I was thinking "zune."
But the moon's bound to just crash into the Earth eventually. It's called "patience," Google. Patience.

[farfisa @ Sep 13th 2007 4:56PM]

Or, what I should have said was:
"It's your mom's. And I don't like to call it her 'basement.'"

[Patuxentbball @ Sep 13th 2007 6:04PM]

to farfisa--- actually, we should hurry, it's getting farther away every year on the order of inches *gasp*

[jbcaro @ Sep 13th 2007 4:33PM]

Now what did I do with that Saturn V model rocket I had as a kid?

[Dias @ Sep 13th 2007 4:39PM]

I guess the problem here is to deal with "bigs", there no way you can leave planet Earth without being noticed. Your 4 years project will be nuked by USA/Russia/China missiles collision before reaching the stratosphere, lol. -_-'

[R. C. @ Sep 13th 2007 7:53PM]

Why would they do that?

[Ray-- @ Sep 13th 2007 4:41PM]

so can like anybody fire objects at the moon or what? its not like i can actually build something I think would reach the moon and launch it can i? Isn't some law about attacking the moon?

[Javi0084 @ Sep 13th 2007 4:56PM]

Thats what I was wondering. What if one of the "spaceship" only makes it a few hundred feet then comes crashing back to earth?

[ilh @ Sep 13th 2007 6:06PM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOORJzf6Zxs

Much like the top gear Reliant Robin Shuttle? Best episode ever!

[LondonConsultant @ Sep 14th 2007 5:22AM]

I just re-watched the video clip of the Reliant Robin Shuttle in the reply above. I first saw that a few months ago and it's still so cool... I wonder if Top Gear won any TV awards for that episode.

[John @ Sep 13th 2007 4:41PM]

If you've got the kind of money and ability to put a robot on the moon, I don't think you're going to be doing it just for some prize from google.

[CharlieX @ Sep 13th 2007 4:45PM]

1312 feet? What's the significance of that number?

[tiuk @ Sep 13th 2007 4:49PM]

It's probably like the smallest amount of sapce that Google Moon supports or something.

[daniel gary @ Sep 13th 2007 4:51PM]

Its 400 meters almost exactly.