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Google Lunar X-Prize Extends Deadline Through March 2018 (space.com)
schwit1 writes: The Google Lunar X-Prize has announced that it has extended its contest deadline from the end of 2017 to the end of March 2018 for the finalists to complete their lunar rover mission and win the grand prize of $30 million. They also announced several additional consolation prizes that all of the remaining five contestants can win should they achieve lunar orbit ($1.75 million) or successfully achieve a soft landing ($3 million), even if they are not the first to do it. At least one team, Moon Express, will be helped enormously by the extra three months. This gives Rocket Lab just a little extra time to test its rocket before launching Moon Express's rover to the Moon.
Well we see SpaceX is doing well but they have customers like NASA. Inserting satellites and supplying the ISS is where the money is right now. Lunar rocks aren't too lucrative at the moment. And just LANDING there is a complete waste of money. (initially) So yeah, startup costs are high.
There's a name for that but I forget what it is, 'sunk cost' or something like that. Meaning the initial investment just to get your technology figured out (with no other return whatsoever in the process) has the appearance of being a complete waste of money, and can be a difficult or impossible barrier for a new company to overcome trying to create a new market. Nuclear power is an area that's always been that way, and is a topic that's come up recently with the growing interest in thorium. And just like with space exploration, it's hard to say whether or not it'll be profitable in the future. That's what makes it hard to find venture capital to fund it. The x-prize is there to fill in that gap, because we've been waiting years for something to happen and nobody's been able to pull it together. If you can't prove it's possible on paper, nobody wants to loan you money to try to figure out how to do it, or how to do it in a way that can turn a profit. That's just the nature of R&D.
It's also neat to see how failed research can have totally unexpected benefits in other areas. Read up on the military's research on personal jet packs. While those were ultimately a failure, their development of simple and compact jets helped other markets years later. There's lots of other examples like that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
According to this month's National Geographic magazine (subscription link, but you can peruse a paper copy from any number of places), several teams are genuinely close. In order to make the final cut in the successive rounds of elimination, the six remaining teams all had to demonstrate that they had a spot on a rocket flight manifest. Several are ganging together on a SpaceX Falcon 9 flight. One is going with a RocketLab launch. One is sort-of self-certified, in that the team and rocket company are the same entity.
Whether the lunar probes/landers are genuinely flight ready is a different matter. And as we all know, rocket launch schedules are hardly set in stone. So it may be that, rather than have December come and go with a handful of teams just barely missing out, Google decided to extend the deadline in the hopes that several will at least launch by then.