Google's $30,000,000 Lunar X PRIZE 217
chroma writes "It's been a long time since anyone has explored the surface of the moon. But now Google has teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation to offer a $30,000,000 bounty to the first privately funded organization to land a robotic rover on the moon. Google, of course, has offered the free Google Moon mapping service for a few years now. Looks like the other search engines have some catching up to do in the space exploration department."
Self serving (Score:5, Funny)
Shoot the Moon (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Self serving (Score:5, Funny)
Prediction... (Score:4, Funny)
fuck that, lunar x-games! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shoot the Moon (Score:2, Funny)
robots.txt? (Score:5, Funny)
Will this robotic rover obey the moon's robots.txt? (It's available by querying the Tycho crater).
FYI the robots.txt for Jupiter's Galilean moons looks like this:
Re:Shoot the Moon (Score:5, Funny)
Use a solar-powered antenna to broadcast this [evolution-control.com] on a HAM band. Once a month.
Then kick back and enjoy the FCC going into paroxysms of incoherent rage trying to shut down a pirate radio broadcaster who happens to have a transmitter on The Fucking Moon. (Sure, the FCC can pull your licnese, but it'll still have to divert half its budget into a followup lunar mission to shut the transmitter off!)
Re:Self serving (Score:5, Funny)
We need to up the stakes (Score:5, Funny)
I'll do my part. The pot is now up to $30,000,005.00.
That's cash money!
Privately funded? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean like Congress?
Re:Just one question. (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Man (Score:4, Funny)
Re:robots.txt? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Self serving (Score:3, Funny)
> The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in
> Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) is a fully integrated
> research, development and technology facility at which Google
> will be conducting experiments in entropized information filtering,
> high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo)
Those acronyms have nothing on the Google Open Access Taut Sphincter Explorer, opening on a
Solomon
Re:Shoot the Moon (Score:4, Funny)
Winning the X-prize : $30,000,000.00
The amount of money the FCC wastes to shut down your lunar pirate radio : Priceless.
Re:We need to up the stakes (Score:1, Funny)
$30,000,005.65
Already working on it! (Score:3, Funny)
I've got a subscription to the Iqbot magazine so in about a year I've got the robot covered.
Now for the launcher I'm going to need some help: send me all the rubber bands and pillows you can find. I'll need about 505 million and 4 rubber bands to get the robot into a decaying orbit around the moon. 5000 pillows should be sufficent to give the robot a soft landing.
Ofcourse the launch window has to be exactly right. This has to be Cowboyneals bedroom window, we might need to remove a few walls, roof and floor to accomodated for the rubber band robot launcher. And since we have to launch at exactly 11:23pm, some neighbours may complain about a bit of noise. This should be limited to about the sound of being in the center between 4 jet-engines running at full power, but should last only about 4.3 seconds. The ear ringing might last a week or two.
Ofcourse our research isn't complete yet. We are still working on the radiation protection of the robot, finding the cheapest sunblock creme isn't that easy. But we expect to be ready to launch around newyear 2009.