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First 10 Teams in $30M Google Lunar X Prize Announced

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the go-for-the-green dept.

coondoggie writes to mention that the first ten teams racing for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize have been announced. The competitors will try to be the first team to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon capable of traveling at least 1,600 feet and returning video, images, and data. The teams include Romanian-based ARCA, Italy-based Team Italia, and several different teams from around the US, many of which competed in the Ansari X Prize.

2 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. They're just doing it by Trigun · · Score: 5, Funny

    to see if the U.S. really did land on the moon.

  2. Re:Much better challenge by deopmix · · Score: 5, Informative

    My senior design project is to design a mission from the ground up that could potentially compete in the competition. Our preliminary budgets are coming in around $20-30 million, so it's not impossible to do it for that price. What most people don't realize is that you don't have to send a 1000 kg rover to the moon, we are looking at a mass to the moon of about 75-100 kg. This allows you to use much smaller launch vehicles which are considerably cheaper, in fact we only need to get about 800 kg to LEO which can be done for under $10 million. Additionally most of the technology is already in place to do this, so there wouldn't be a lot of development costs.