Official: No One Is Going To Win the Google Lunar X Prize Competition (theverge.com) 33
The X Prize Foundation announced today that no one is going to win the foundation's competition to send a spacecraft to the Moon. "Only five finalists remained in the Google-sponsored Lunar X Prize competition, and in order to win any grand prize money, the teams had to launch and complete their missions to the Moon before March 31st, 2018," reports The Verge. "But with only two months until the deadline, no team is ready to launch, so Google will keep the prize money instead." From the report: The Google Lunar X Prize was established in 2007 as a way to help lower the cost of getting to space. So far, only government agencies have landed on the lunar surface, with missions that have cost many millions and even billions of dollars. That's why the X Prize Foundation, which sets up global competitions, challenged teams with developing and launching robotic lunar landers using mostly private funding. The idea was to make them come up with creative methods for getting to the Moon on the cheap. Landing on the lunar surface was only part of the challenge. Teams had to travel up to 1,640 feet (500 meters) on the Moon too, as well as do live broadcasts. The first to fulfill all these requirements before the deadline would receive $20 million, while the second place team would get $5 million. Other smaller purses would be awarded to teams that did special tasks, such as completing an orbit around the Moon before landing. "As a result of this competition, we have sparked the conversation and changed expectations with regard to who can land on the Moon," the X Prize Foundation said in its statement. "Many now believe it's no longer the sole purview of a few government agencies, but now may be achieved by small teams of entrepreneurs, engineers, and innovators from around the world." A Google spokesperson also told CNBC that the company is "thrilled with the progress made by these teams over the last ten years."
dupe (Score:5, Informative)
And two days old, in true slashdot fashion:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
-- And Slashdot is OK with that!
Re: (Score:1)
Yes $20 would be a bit low. Even $20 million is a bit light. However it was never the idea that the prize money would be enough for the winner to recoup all their development costs. Think about it; most entrants know they are not likely to win, so they go in knowing it's unlikely they'll get any prize money. Yet they still entered the competition. The point of the competition was to focus minds on the task, and you can't have a competition without a prize, but I very much doubt that the entrants were in it
Old dumb news (Score:1)
Why would any private enterprise want to waste money going to space? So far nobody has made money going to the Moon, and certainly not any further to Mars.
Getting to space is the least costly, its staying in space that's the real issue. People would be living on the Moon now if it was riddled with diamonds or had some valuable commodity. Then you would see companies running to invest.
Re: Old dumb news (Score:1)
We don't need that kind of research anymore. Science at its current status pretty much provides for our real-life needs and some. There are no benefits in investing more. We're never going to colonize the Solar System, we're never going to travel to the stars, we're never going anywhere. That's a cold fact and science pretty much drove the nails into the coffin of any hope of space-based future. It's not going to happen, period. So, we don't need any more science. The future is going to be less technologica
Re: (Score:1)
I strongly disagree......
The only way we will not be colonizing the solar system is if we wipe ourselves out.
Short of that, with the current economic models, which require infinite growth or it will collapse (and the growth is exponential, not linear), there is no way in hell we will not colonize the solar system.
It's only a matter of time before the cost of colonizing the solar system profits from exploiting the near infinite resources. The technology is already available.
As for interstellar travel and
If only there was a prize for detecting dupes... (Score:4, Funny)