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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.
news at 11
After all we already did land on the moon many times, with current technology and experience it should be piece of cake? Unless we never landed on the moon....
Also, gets s-tons of free "do no evil" PR.
>> CNBC
Although, I'm not sure CNBC exposure is worth anything. It's been a while since I met a geek with cable...
Why is there a deadline at all, anyway?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That is kind of a surprise. I mean we are really close to having a manned mission to Mars. I guess Musk was concentrating on that, and didn't think the Moon was worth it. Once we have our space factories up and running and mining asteroids we will be in good shape for Mars...or beyond?
Why is there a deadline at all, anyway?
Yeah, why not put 1 mil into an endowment fund, let it grow by dividend and then when someone finally reaches the moon, moves the required distance & takes photos, they will receive whatever is in the fund.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
True although to be fair that was basically a crash program where budget constraints weren't really a serious concern. Plus that was a manned mission which is inherently a lot more expensive.
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.
That's putting it mildly. While it certainly can be done cheaper than Apollo, $20 million is just a tiny amount of money for a goal like that. Something more realistic might be $200 million and even that would be doing it on an extremely tight budget. $20 million really isn't very much money at all.
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.
We DID do an awful lot more than just say we stepped on the moon. The money from the spin off technologies alone has more than paid for the entire Apollo program many times over, employed millions of people, and greatly improved our lives in measurable ways. And that's not including the value of telecom and other satellite data.
we are so thrilled with the progress made by these teams over the last ten years
They're thrilled they get to keep the money after getting the essentially free PR for the last decade. No fucking progress has been made.
Sputnik flew in 1957. 12 years later we had humans on the moon. And we brought them all back. We're nearing 5 decades with no real progress in human space flight. We've had some progress in sending little robots to other planets and getting data back, but not by private industry. The private space has only made progress in launching shit into LEO.
Why is there a deadline at all, anyway?
To make it more dramatic and newsworthy. If there was no deadline, there would be no story about it each time a deadline is extended or expired.
Yeah, I'm sure Google would be seriously hurt if it had to fork out $20M for something that would give it amazing publicity around the world. That's why they're cancelling it. Sure.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Economically the moon won't make much money, maybe with space tourism.
But Mars, there's lots of money to be made there and much more to explore and see.
The Moon is just a Harsh Mistress.
Yeah, why not put 1 mil into an endowment fund, let it grow by dividend and then when someone finally reaches the moon, moves the required distance & takes photos, they will receive whatever is in the fund.
Because it's a little late. The prize was originally funded the same way the first X-Prize was funded, as an insurance policy. Google took out a policy, and paid the premiums on it to the insurance company. If the conditions of the prize were met, the insurance policy would pay out. Those premiums have been spent, for a decade now, and Google is letting the policy lapse. The insurance company made a very good bet this time.
If Google had initially funded the prize as a trust, then it could have been growing all this time and might have become a substantial sum of money. Unfortunately they didn't, since they expected the prize would be claimed, and much more quickly than a decade, so in order to keep their own costs low, they chose the insurance method. A $1 million prize a decade ago would have gotten no takers at all.
Yeah, I'm sure Google would be seriously hurt if it had to fork out $20M for something that would give it amazing publicity around the world. That's why they're cancelling it. Sure.
Fair enough, but then ... why?
A Falcon 9 could launch a Lunar X-Prize craft, but the launch will set you back $60 million, so no profit on a $20 million prize.
I found an old storage tank, and I'm pretty sure if I heat water hot enough, I can make it hit the moon. Maybe we can attach a long dable so we can just pull it back when done?
Planning on aiming for the Expiration Date site.
Kill yourself, vermin.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
$6.5 B was the cost of the whole Saturn program, not the per-vehicle cost. The Google X-prize contestants aren't developing a rocket, they're buying a launch on a vehicle developed by somebody else.
And the Google X-prize contestants aren't sending a human mission to the moon, they don't need a Saturn class booster. They're more like the Surveyor missions, which launched on Atlases. But you can do it with a much smaller vehicle now-- electronics are a lot better than in the Surveyor program in 1964. You don't need an Atlas.
Do you giggle to yourself when you write this?
I expect he did; the post was clearly intended to be at least partly parody.
Interesting, though, it's parody that is based on an actual knowledge of what the space visionaries talk about. Notice that nobody mentioned radiation anywhere in the hundred-odd responses to this thread, but his comment discusses regolith shielding.
...But I bet you're proud of this. It's what you do after all - its what gives you meaning in life.
Spoken like a true existentialist. And I agree. We all do what we can to keep the existential blackness at bay.
Lunar Scout is scheduled to launch in March on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. This is still a chance they'll make the deadline.
Unfortunately, "However, a person familiar with the Electron rocket said the Moon Express lander is too heavy for the Electron rocket, making it physically impossible to put the spacecraft into an orbit capable of reaching the moon." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/2...