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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.
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...
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.
Yes but in the 1960s microprocessors were very slow. Today the processor in my phone is much much more powerful and has more memory then all of the Saturn era launch computers combined. Therefore it must be that much easier and cheaper to go to the Moon today.
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.
Yes but in the 1960s microprocessors were very slow. Today the processor in my phone is much much more powerful and has more memory then all of the Saturn era launch computers combined. Therefore it must be that much easier and cheaper to go to the Moon today.
So one part of the launch vehicle, which is probably a small fraction of a percent of the total cost, has gone down dramatically. While the cost of metal, fuel, salaries, etc. have all gone up with inflationary pressures. I seriously doubt the cost of computing power has any noticeable affect on launch costs.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
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.
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.
Bringing a few people up to near earth orbit is massively (pun intended) different than launching an actual spaceship that can reach the moon, land and take off again and then fly back
Completely true, Anonymous Coward, but those aren't (weren't) the requirements for the Google Lunar X prize. Contestants had to land a probe on the moon, and have it travel 500 meters while trasnmitting HD video back to earth.
It didn't have to return to earth and it could be as small as required to meet the objectives.