That doesn't necessarily rule out the stupid ones though, just the ones with a poor memory for details. I'm incredibly intelligent in most respects - math, science, english/literature, they all come easy to me - the common thread seemingly being that they can be distilled to a relatively small subset of guiding principles that can be assembled into towering edifices with sufficient skill. History though? Anatomy? Foreign languages? Anything that requires memorizing lots of random, disjointed details and I'm sunk.
I managed to pass history classes by being good at looking up information - tests and quizzes that relied on memorization I struggled to do well enough to keep my average from plummeting. The only history class I ever excelled at was one in college, where the professor focused heavily on historical trends rather than details, and the tests were dominated by essay questions of the "draw parallels between past and current events" variety. I had to take Spanish classes practically every year from grade-school through high - Got good at the conjugation and grammar part, and could give an information-free "politician's answer" to most questions just by grammatically rearranging the words, without actually having any idea what I was saying - the quintessential "Chinese room".
Meanwhile, I've known plenty of people who could damn near quote you a history book, but couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag.
He is very often a humble, gently-spoken guy. It's *also* not uncommon for him to act the raging asshole on the mailing lists when he believes someone is badly out of line. The two are not mutually exclusive, and as he stated, on reflection he's realized years later that at least some of his outbursts didn't serve anyone's interests (due to his misunderstandings, or otherwise)
I'm not suggesting lynch mobs, I'm just pointing out that laws are pretty much always created to benefit one group at the expense of the rest, so pretending that there is nothing to hold that group accountable for just because they made their crimes legal is disingenuous.
Or, as I heard it expressed recently "Laws are a complex set of rules establishing who is allowed to steal from who."
As for changing the laws - how would you suggest doing that? Here in the U.S. the first-past-the-post electoral system makes it virtually impossible for 3rd party candidates to be viable, and both primary parties are pretty firmly under the control of the oligarchs making the laws. The end result being that the only laws the electorate can strongly influence, are the ones the oligarchs don't care about.
I will admit though that the last couple of years have given me hope - the actions of the Trump administration suggest that there is a power struggle among the oligarchs, which often opens the doors to at least one faction collaborating with the commoners to gain advantage over their rivals. And the Democratic fiasco has led to an apparently strong and growing democratic faction within that party, so there's some hope the commoners may manage to consolidate some power through that. Unfortunately I don't see that happening in the Republican party unless there is a schism in the alliance between the oligarchs and church officials - and that seems very unlikely. Their interests are too well aligned, and largely non-overlapping. Their corruption is mutually supportive, as it has been throughout history.
As a rule that's not the powerful though - that's just the politicians, and they're disposable. The powerful are the ones funding their election campaigns, along with the campaigns of their opponents.
There are places that institute a wealth tax, so obviously it's possible to do. I would suggest a general rule is "if you sold it today, what would it be worth"
1) Sounds like your house is severely under-appraised and you're illegally dodging property taxes 2) Your father's brick was worth $50k when he bought it, $35k today, and who knows how much tomorrow. Wealth fluctuates - deal with it. 3) Your sister is either in possession of a house of known approximate value, or in possession of a contract entitling her to receive said house in the near future - either one is worth the value of the house. 4) Your friend isn't broke, he just doesn't have liquid assets - wealth doesn't care about that. If we paid wealth taxes he would have screwed up badly - he'd have to liquidate some of his assets at a potentially severe loss to pay his taxes.
Time will tell. However, the moons surface consists of solid rock and vacuum-welded dust, which hasn't given any other landers any problems. At worst the BFS will need a more conventional lander to precede it to create a stable landing pad.
I assumed that was sarcasm - my point was that when the equipment didn't fail catastrophically, lunar landings haven't been a problem. Essentially - we've landed on the moon many times, and all the evidence suggests that there's nothing particularly difficult about it. The failures have all been because the hardware itself was flawed, not because a moon landing is more difficult than one on Earth.
And I said nothing about perfectly. SpaceX's failure rate is about the same as any other rocket line with the same number of launches. A little better than some, a little worse than others, but pretty much within the realm of statistical noise. Still not enough of a track record for my personal comfort - but I wouldn't be any more worried about landing on the Moon than on Earth. At least not after they established a solid, reliable landing pad there.
Yeah. Even if most personality quizzes were answered honestly, rather than giving ridiculous answers being practically the point of taking them, the data set would still suffer a horrible selection bias in that it only evaluates the sort of people who like taking obviously nonsensical personality quizzes.
>Better prenatal and childhood nutrition could cut that in half.
Don't be ridiculous - it'd just mean we had to increase the number of laws and severity of punishment to keep up the quotas. We're not the number one nation for incarceration (by far) because our population is significantly more violent or immoral than most./sarcasm/sort of
>.as opposed to the flights where the equipment function perfectly and yet still failed to land Exactly. When you blow up in the air, it says nothing about the difficulty of landing, just that your rocket was flawed - and this rocket will have been very well tested on Earth and in orbit before it ever gets near the moon. The rockets that did work, had no problems nlanding.
And why would they train Maezawa? SpaceX rockets don't need a pilot.
Yes, the BFR first stage looks to be similar to the Falcon in function. The BFS however doesn't have any normal aerodynamic surfaces - those fins aren't aerodynamic surfaces like you'd see on a plane, they're for stabilization during hyper-sonic aerobraking, when they're hitting the air broadside. It doesn't fly through the atmosphere, it belly-flops, and the fins have more in common with a parachute than wings. Once it slows down to subsonic speeds and approaches the landing site it finally rotates ass-forward and begins a power-controlled fall - at which point the fins orientation and location makes them largely useless as control surfaces.
That said, yes, they'll no doubt have some aerodynamic impact - but I'd bet that their impact is intentionally minimized since it's not particularly stable. The trailing nose fins might still be in play, but their effect is going to be minor - they're just too small to generate any substantial torque (There's a reason the F9 uses grid fins instead - those things are crazy powerful for their size.), and they aren't actuated in the directions you'd want them to be for that purpose anyway. Look at the control surfaces on a plane, they're all actuated perpendicularly to the line of travel so that lift and drag can be modulated. Whereas once the BFS stops aerobraking for the final approach it's fins are all actuated parallel to the line of motion. They're useless for drag, and any lift they could generate would only serve to spin the rocket around its long axis.
Landing on the moon, aerobraking isn't an option, so they jump straight to a much longer high-power controlled fall.
Absolutely, there are *always* exceptions to any rule. But as a general rule most people's incomes don't change much from year to year. Assets might make a better guideline, but given the skill of the wealthy in hiding assets, and the fact that there's no accepted authority for measuring them (unlike the IRS for income), it can be difficult to gauge accurately.
Firstly, intelligence and wealth don't correlate very well. Plenty of stupid-to-mediocre people have become rich (most athletes and actors spring to mind), and plenty of brilliant ones "waste" their life in intellectual pursuits rather than accumulating wealth.
Also, the genetics of intelligence are not so simple. There's plenty of brilliant kids born to mediocre parents, and plenty of mediocre kids born to brilliant parents. Society is best served if the poor, smart ones are able to develop their intelligence into valuable skills, rather than pursuing whatever dead-end stream of jobs keeps food in their belly. Of course, that means added competition for the stupid rich kids, so the wealthy are often opposed to the idea.
Well, that is generally a good guideline for socialized programs isn't it? Don't waste resources on people who don't actually want them, or can't substantially benefit from them. College is not actually terribly useful to many people, maybe most people. You need to have both the interest and the aptitude or you're just wasting everyone's time, and both you and society would be better off if you pursued an apprenticeship or other, less intellectual, career path.
How many college educated people do you know that ended up in careers that have nothing to do with their degree? Seems like most of them to me. All those people basically wasted their time in college.
Reread TFS. $65k income = free tuition plus grants to cover room, board, fees, etc. $65k - $130k = free tuition $130k - $200k = grants to cover at least half of tuition. So they're expecting you to cough up $23k/year, plus living expenses. Maybe not such a good idea to live in the luxury on-campus dorms if you don't come from money though
True, but wealth is a lot harder to measure accurately, and estimates paint such a bleak picture that nobody but the rich wants to look at it - and they'd just as soon the rest of us avoided looking as well.
Did you miss the part where they included the middle class? $130k is upper middle class, though the precise bounds are rather poorly defined. Pew Research defines middle class as people making between 2/3s to double the median U.S. income, which gives a range of about $42k to $135k
First off, as you say, nobody is talking about landing tourists on the moon any time soon. I would fully expect no tourist landings until they at least have a landing pad and possibly even a second ship standing by on the moon in case of problems.
No, it's not hard vacuum on the moon, but it's not remotely an atmosphere either for navigation purposes - it's not relevant to anything but geology and maybe some gas analysis projects. It's orders of magnitude thinner than the atmosphere in low earth orbit, which is already only really relevant in terms of long-term orbital decay.
Final result of an incredibly expensive competition with no prize, is that nobody seriously tries to win. What other outcome would you expect? It is a shame that we didn't get any added experience, but I doubt we would have gotten anything valuable from the sort of unrealistic amateurs that would bother to try anyway.
Meanwhile the U.S. has managed six manned moon landings, all successful, and numerous unmanned landers, almost all successful if they managed to reach lunar orbit in one piece. Even the ones that failed the descent were due to equipment failure before reaching the surface - problems that would be equally applicable to landing on Earth.
Basically we've already established that actually landing on the moon is relatively easy - it's keeping your hardware from failing before you get there that's the hard part. And any BFR moon landings will be attempted after the rocket has already been well tested on Earth and in space.
The only real challenge will be dealing with the lack of a proper landing pad. Finding a place to land that's flat and solid enough to support the rocket will be its own challenge - if the ground shifts a bit under one foot and the rocket tips over, there's really not any way to recover from that. There are however ways to practice dealing with it - e.g. repeatedly landing the rocket someplace remote and unstable, like White Sands. It remains to be seen if the BFR will be able to hover - but if so then there's hope that they could attempt a landing, throttle down slowly, and take off again if the ship starts to tip to try again a short distance away. If fuel use starts eating into the safety margins before you find a solid landing spot, then you'd simply return without ever fully landing. If it can't hover on the moon, and has to hover-slam like the Falcon 9, then it's all down to locating a sufficiently solid-looking landing spot and praying very quickly as the engine shuts off.
I think they may be overreaching to claim the targeting system itself is discriminatory (in a protected sense). As other's have said, if you're marketing a product only relevant to a specific group, it makes sense to target that group. No point marketting strong sunscreen to dark-skinned people, or feminine products to men.
What *is* a problem is using the targeting system to exclude groups that your specific product (jobs and housing) are legally forbidden from discriminating against.
The point is - most of the problems of flying a rocket in vacuum are solved, and the rocket doesn't really care much what gravity is doing unless it's in contact with the surface. In the absence of atmosphere the moment you leave the surface you're in free-fall and the only effect of gravity is to change how fast your position is changing in response to the acceleration being provided. Well, at least not until you lean over enough for uneven weight distribution to start applying some torque - but that's far less of an issue on the Moon than Earth.
> flying inside an (pseudo-)atmosphere What atmosphere? Mars has some atmosphere, for most practical purposes the Moon is hard vacuum all the way down (80 molecules per cubic centimeter, versus 3x10^16 on Earth. To get the force of a 1mph wind on Earth, you'd have to be going 400,000,000,000,000mph, or 24x light speed), which makes control *much* simpler than on Earth because you're not fighting atmospheric turbulence. If you were trying to land a Falcon, the grid fins would be useless, but the guidance thrusters would still work just fine. And the BFR has no grid fins or similar, it's designed for purely thruster-based maneuvering
That's not to say you could get me to ride on the first landing attempt - but I'd put even money that even the first test lands successfully. And takeoff is trivial - as soon as the rocket clears its own exhaust backsplash it isn't going to care in the slightest that it's fighting the Moon's gravity - flight behavior will be almost identical to flying in free space.
And what does the Lunar X prize have to do with anything? That was about designing autonomous lunar rovers and booking flights to the moon - the first part is nothing that hasn't been done before, though the implied , and the second part is hard because there's nobody selling out-of-the-box trips to the moon, and the $20million first prize wouldn't even cover 10% of the cost of a launch to orbit anyway.
Basically, the entire competition was doomed to failure - there's just no business incentive to win, much less play. Unlike the Ansari X Prize, where the prize was a nice little carrot along the way, but the real prize was having developed reusable rocket technology applicable to larger orbital launch vehicles that could dramatically undercut the current market. What would a lunar X-prize winner have won? A tiny bit of their launch costs refunded, and they've developed some autonomous rover technology that could be developed just as easily here.
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That doesn't necessarily rule out the stupid ones though, just the ones with a poor memory for details. I'm incredibly intelligent in most respects - math, science, english/literature, they all come easy to me - the common thread seemingly being that they can be distilled to a relatively small subset of guiding principles that can be assembled into towering edifices with sufficient skill. History though? Anatomy? Foreign languages? Anything that requires memorizing lots of random, disjointed details and I'm sunk.
I managed to pass history classes by being good at looking up information - tests and quizzes that relied on memorization I struggled to do well enough to keep my average from plummeting. The only history class I ever excelled at was one in college, where the professor focused heavily on historical trends rather than details, and the tests were dominated by essay questions of the "draw parallels between past and current events" variety. I had to take Spanish classes practically every year from grade-school through high - Got good at the conjugation and grammar part, and could give an information-free "politician's answer" to most questions just by grammatically rearranging the words, without actually having any idea what I was saying - the quintessential "Chinese room".
Meanwhile, I've known plenty of people who could damn near quote you a history book, but couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag.
He is very often a humble, gently-spoken guy. It's *also* not uncommon for him to act the raging asshole on the mailing lists when he believes someone is badly out of line. The two are not mutually exclusive, and as he stated, on reflection he's realized years later that at least some of his outbursts didn't serve anyone's interests (due to his misunderstandings, or otherwise)
I'm not suggesting lynch mobs, I'm just pointing out that laws are pretty much always created to benefit one group at the expense of the rest, so pretending that there is nothing to hold that group accountable for just because they made their crimes legal is disingenuous.
Or, as I heard it expressed recently "Laws are a complex set of rules establishing who is allowed to steal from who."
As for changing the laws - how would you suggest doing that? Here in the U.S. the first-past-the-post electoral system makes it virtually impossible for 3rd party candidates to be viable, and both primary parties are pretty firmly under the control of the oligarchs making the laws. The end result being that the only laws the electorate can strongly influence, are the ones the oligarchs don't care about.
I will admit though that the last couple of years have given me hope - the actions of the Trump administration suggest that there is a power struggle among the oligarchs, which often opens the doors to at least one faction collaborating with the commoners to gain advantage over their rivals. And the Democratic fiasco has led to an apparently strong and growing democratic faction within that party, so there's some hope the commoners may manage to consolidate some power through that. Unfortunately I don't see that happening in the Republican party unless there is a schism in the alliance between the oligarchs and church officials - and that seems very unlikely. Their interests are too well aligned, and largely non-overlapping. Their corruption is mutually supportive, as it has been throughout history.
And that's why you don't try to get a 50+% increase in your paper's length using such tricks. If the teacher noticed, it wasn't a "slight" difference.
>it is illegitimate to hold people "accountable" for exercising their power within the bounds of the law.
Really? Even when the powerful shape the law to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else?
Every malevolent dictator in the history of the world was exercising their power within the bounds of the law.
As a rule that's not the powerful though - that's just the politicians, and they're disposable. The powerful are the ones funding their election campaigns, along with the campaigns of their opponents.
Increased CO2 boosts crop yields, but reduces the nutrition level, for a net loss.
There are places that institute a wealth tax, so obviously it's possible to do. I would suggest a general rule is "if you sold it today, what would it be worth"
1) Sounds like your house is severely under-appraised and you're illegally dodging property taxes
2) Your father's brick was worth $50k when he bought it, $35k today, and who knows how much tomorrow. Wealth fluctuates - deal with it.
3) Your sister is either in possession of a house of known approximate value, or in possession of a contract entitling her to receive said house in the near future - either one is worth the value of the house.
4) Your friend isn't broke, he just doesn't have liquid assets - wealth doesn't care about that. If we paid wealth taxes he would have screwed up badly - he'd have to liquidate some of his assets at a potentially severe loss to pay his taxes.
Wish someone had pointed that out a couple decades ago.
Time will tell. However, the moons surface consists of solid rock and vacuum-welded dust, which hasn't given any other landers any problems. At worst the BFS will need a more conventional lander to precede it to create a stable landing pad.
I assumed that was sarcasm - my point was that when the equipment didn't fail catastrophically, lunar landings haven't been a problem. Essentially - we've landed on the moon many times, and all the evidence suggests that there's nothing particularly difficult about it. The failures have all been because the hardware itself was flawed, not because a moon landing is more difficult than one on Earth.
And I said nothing about perfectly. SpaceX's failure rate is about the same as any other rocket line with the same number of launches. A little better than some, a little worse than others, but pretty much within the realm of statistical noise. Still not enough of a track record for my personal comfort - but I wouldn't be any more worried about landing on the Moon than on Earth. At least not after they established a solid, reliable landing pad there.
Yeah. Even if most personality quizzes were answered honestly, rather than giving ridiculous answers being practically the point of taking them, the data set would still suffer a horrible selection bias in that it only evaluates the sort of people who like taking obviously nonsensical personality quizzes.
>Better prenatal and childhood nutrition could cut that in half.
Don't be ridiculous - it'd just mean we had to increase the number of laws and severity of punishment to keep up the quotas. We're not the number one nation for incarceration (by far) because our population is significantly more violent or immoral than most. /sarcasm /sort of
>.as opposed to the flights where the equipment function perfectly and yet still failed to land
Exactly. When you blow up in the air, it says nothing about the difficulty of landing, just that your rocket was flawed - and this rocket will have been very well tested on Earth and in orbit before it ever gets near the moon. The rockets that did work, had no problems nlanding.
And why would they train Maezawa? SpaceX rockets don't need a pilot.
Yes, the BFR first stage looks to be similar to the Falcon in function. The BFS however doesn't have any normal aerodynamic surfaces - those fins aren't aerodynamic surfaces like you'd see on a plane, they're for stabilization during hyper-sonic aerobraking, when they're hitting the air broadside. It doesn't fly through the atmosphere, it belly-flops, and the fins have more in common with a parachute than wings. Once it slows down to subsonic speeds and approaches the landing site it finally rotates ass-forward and begins a power-controlled fall - at which point the fins orientation and location makes them largely useless as control surfaces.
That said, yes, they'll no doubt have some aerodynamic impact - but I'd bet that their impact is intentionally minimized since it's not particularly stable. The trailing nose fins might still be in play, but their effect is going to be minor - they're just too small to generate any substantial torque (There's a reason the F9 uses grid fins instead - those things are crazy powerful for their size.), and they aren't actuated in the directions you'd want them to be for that purpose anyway. Look at the control surfaces on a plane, they're all actuated perpendicularly to the line of travel so that lift and drag can be modulated. Whereas once the BFS stops aerobraking for the final approach it's fins are all actuated parallel to the line of motion. They're useless for drag, and any lift they could generate would only serve to spin the rocket around its long axis.
Landing on the moon, aerobraking isn't an option, so they jump straight to a much longer high-power controlled fall.
Absolutely, there are *always* exceptions to any rule. But as a general rule most people's incomes don't change much from year to year. Assets might make a better guideline, but given the skill of the wealthy in hiding assets, and the fact that there's no accepted authority for measuring them (unlike the IRS for income), it can be difficult to gauge accurately.
Firstly, intelligence and wealth don't correlate very well. Plenty of stupid-to-mediocre people have become rich (most athletes and actors spring to mind), and plenty of brilliant ones "waste" their life in intellectual pursuits rather than accumulating wealth.
Also, the genetics of intelligence are not so simple. There's plenty of brilliant kids born to mediocre parents, and plenty of mediocre kids born to brilliant parents. Society is best served if the poor, smart ones are able to develop their intelligence into valuable skills, rather than pursuing whatever dead-end stream of jobs keeps food in their belly. Of course, that means added competition for the stupid rich kids, so the wealthy are often opposed to the idea.
Well, that is generally a good guideline for socialized programs isn't it? Don't waste resources on people who don't actually want them, or can't substantially benefit from them. College is not actually terribly useful to many people, maybe most people. You need to have both the interest and the aptitude or you're just wasting everyone's time, and both you and society would be better off if you pursued an apprenticeship or other, less intellectual, career path.
How many college educated people do you know that ended up in careers that have nothing to do with their degree? Seems like most of them to me. All those people basically wasted their time in college.
Reread TFS.
$65k income = free tuition plus grants to cover room, board, fees, etc.
$65k - $130k = free tuition
$130k - $200k = grants to cover at least half of tuition.
So they're expecting you to cough up $23k/year, plus living expenses. Maybe not such a good idea to live in the luxury on-campus dorms if you don't come from money though
True, but wealth is a lot harder to measure accurately, and estimates paint such a bleak picture that nobody but the rich wants to look at it - and they'd just as soon the rest of us avoided looking as well.
Did you miss the part where they included the middle class?
$130k is upper middle class, though the precise bounds are rather poorly defined. Pew Research defines middle class as people making between 2/3s to double the median U.S. income, which gives a range of about $42k to $135k
First off, as you say, nobody is talking about landing tourists on the moon any time soon. I would fully expect no tourist landings until they at least have a landing pad and possibly even a second ship standing by on the moon in case of problems.
No, it's not hard vacuum on the moon, but it's not remotely an atmosphere either for navigation purposes - it's not relevant to anything but geology and maybe some gas analysis projects. It's orders of magnitude thinner than the atmosphere in low earth orbit, which is already only really relevant in terms of long-term orbital decay.
Final result of an incredibly expensive competition with no prize, is that nobody seriously tries to win. What other outcome would you expect? It is a shame that we didn't get any added experience, but I doubt we would have gotten anything valuable from the sort of unrealistic amateurs that would bother to try anyway.
Meanwhile the U.S. has managed six manned moon landings, all successful, and numerous unmanned landers, almost all successful if they managed to reach lunar orbit in one piece. Even the ones that failed the descent were due to equipment failure before reaching the surface - problems that would be equally applicable to landing on Earth.
Basically we've already established that actually landing on the moon is relatively easy - it's keeping your hardware from failing before you get there that's the hard part. And any BFR moon landings will be attempted after the rocket has already been well tested on Earth and in space.
The only real challenge will be dealing with the lack of a proper landing pad. Finding a place to land that's flat and solid enough to support the rocket will be its own challenge - if the ground shifts a bit under one foot and the rocket tips over, there's really not any way to recover from that. There are however ways to practice dealing with it - e.g. repeatedly landing the rocket someplace remote and unstable, like White Sands. It remains to be seen if the BFR will be able to hover - but if so then there's hope that they could attempt a landing, throttle down slowly, and take off again if the ship starts to tip to try again a short distance away. If fuel use starts eating into the safety margins before you find a solid landing spot, then you'd simply return without ever fully landing. If it can't hover on the moon, and has to hover-slam like the Falcon 9, then it's all down to locating a sufficiently solid-looking landing spot and praying very quickly as the engine shuts off.
I think they may be overreaching to claim the targeting system itself is discriminatory (in a protected sense). As other's have said, if you're marketing a product only relevant to a specific group, it makes sense to target that group. No point marketting strong sunscreen to dark-skinned people, or feminine products to men.
What *is* a problem is using the targeting system to exclude groups that your specific product (jobs and housing) are legally forbidden from discriminating against.
The point is - most of the problems of flying a rocket in vacuum are solved, and the rocket doesn't really care much what gravity is doing unless it's in contact with the surface. In the absence of atmosphere the moment you leave the surface you're in free-fall and the only effect of gravity is to change how fast your position is changing in response to the acceleration being provided. Well, at least not until you lean over enough for uneven weight distribution to start applying some torque - but that's far less of an issue on the Moon than Earth.
> flying inside an (pseudo-)atmosphere
What atmosphere? Mars has some atmosphere, for most practical purposes the Moon is hard vacuum all the way down (80 molecules per cubic centimeter, versus 3x10^16 on Earth. To get the force of a 1mph wind on Earth, you'd have to be going 400,000,000,000,000mph, or 24x light speed), which makes control *much* simpler than on Earth because you're not fighting atmospheric turbulence. If you were trying to land a Falcon, the grid fins would be useless, but the guidance thrusters would still work just fine. And the BFR has no grid fins or similar, it's designed for purely thruster-based maneuvering
That's not to say you could get me to ride on the first landing attempt - but I'd put even money that even the first test lands successfully. And takeoff is trivial - as soon as the rocket clears its own exhaust backsplash it isn't going to care in the slightest that it's fighting the Moon's gravity - flight behavior will be almost identical to flying in free space.
And what does the Lunar X prize have to do with anything? That was about designing autonomous lunar rovers and booking flights to the moon - the first part is nothing that hasn't been done before, though the implied , and the second part is hard because there's nobody selling out-of-the-box trips to the moon, and the $20million first prize wouldn't even cover 10% of the cost of a launch to orbit anyway.
Basically, the entire competition was doomed to failure - there's just no business incentive to win, much less play. Unlike the Ansari X Prize, where the prize was a nice little carrot along the way, but the real prize was having developed reusable rocket technology applicable to larger orbital launch vehicles that could dramatically undercut the current market. What would a lunar X-prize winner have won? A tiny bit of their launch costs refunded, and they've developed some autonomous rover technology that could be developed just as easily here.