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Google's $20 Million Race To the Moon Will End With No Winner -- and Google is OK With That (cnbc.com)
Michael Sheetz, reporting for CNBC: More than ten years after it was announced -- and extended over and over -- the Google-sponsored race to win $20 million by landing on the moon will end with no winners. The four teams racing to win the Google Lunar Xprize, which requires a company to land a spacecraft on the moon by March 31, are either short of money or unable to launch this year, three people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Meanwhile, Google -- which extended the deadline from 2012 to 2014 and then eventually to 2018 -- is not willing to push out the date further. "Google does not have plans at this time to extend the deadline again, however we are so thrilled with the progress made by these teams over the last ten years," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. The commercial space industry has written off the Lunar Xprize as improbable, and not worth pursuing, according to sources.
Yup.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult. Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that, or the insurance for if it happens to explode on the launchpad.
Not viable. Especially if you are only fronting that money in the hope of winning the prize.
The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.
More surprisingly is that they were ever authorised at all, not that the sheer volume of money thrown at them actually resulted in success.