Teams struggling to raise money to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize may get an influx of cash from proposed new prizes worth a combined $14 million.
The Lunar X Prize, established in 2007, offers $20 million to the first private team to land a robot on the moon, have it travel 500 meters, and send pictures and video. They have until 2015 to do this, and the prize drops to $15 million if a government entity reaches the moon first, something China expects to do later this year. There also is a $5 million second-place prize. Google is putting up the money, and the competition is organized by the X Prize foundation, which previously held a contest to produce a private suborbital rocket for tourism that was won by SpaceShipOne.
Alas, things aren't going as well as the X-Prize folks had originally hoped, so they're considering offering additional prizes. This could include $750,000 each for as many as four teams that present completed designs, power consumption plans, navigation, hardware, and operational details on how they'll complete the mission. A similar prize could be awarded to as many as four teams that complete designs for a camera subsystem and create a video with realistic mockups or simulations showing their probe's lunar mission.
But wait. There's more. The new prizes could include a $7 million purse divvied up among the first teams to successfully launch. And one last suggestion is to pay $1 million to the first team to get within 500 kilometers of the lunar surface.
A draft document with the proposed changes was published online Wednesday by Parabolic Arc, a website devoted to commercial space news. The document notes the new rewards include things that teams "would anyway need to accomplish whilst preparing or executing their GLXP missions."
According the NASA Watch, which also keeps tabs on commercial space activity, the draft proposal has been circulating for weeks inside and outside the GLXP community. X Prize spokesman Eric Desatnik told WIRED the document is still in draft form and the foundation is exploring a range of ideas for augmenting the prize.
This would not be the first time that competition rules have been changed. The original plan was to award a winner in 2012, but that date was pushed back when teams didn't show enough progress. There has once again been skepticism that any team could actually win the prize, especially with the new deadline to secure a rocket launch swiftly approaching. Though 2015 is a ways away, launches typically are scheduled two years in advance, meaning any team without a secured place on a rocket by the end of this year is probably out of luck.
NASA Watch's Marc Boucher suggested the changes, if implemented, "could energize a competition which seemingly has stalled."
There are around 23 teams left in the competition. Though many have secured funding, Boucher notes that none of the teams has raised all the money needed to launch and land a robot. Many of the smallest teams have struggled to get even a fraction of what they need. The cost of such a mission has been estimated to cost between $60 and $100 million.
Bob Richards, CEO of Moon Express, one of the teams competing in the Lunar X Prize, welcomed the proposed changes.
"It's a long way to the moon, and the Google Lunar X Prize is largest X Prize challenge of all time, so providing some prize incentives for early milestones is helpful to the competitors," he wrote in an email.
Adam is a Wired Science staff writer. He lives in Oakland, Ca near a lake and enjoys space, physics, and other sciency things.
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news by July 25, 2013 at 08:39PM
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