Google’s X Prize Foundation has chosen five private companies to compete for the Google X Lunar Prize, in a growing effort to bring humans back to the moon and renew interest in it.
The deadline has been pushed back several times, but this time, the companies say they can reach the lunar surface by the end of the year. If any of them are successful, the efforts could open doors for entrepreneurship and commercialism on the long-ignored moon, the New York Times reports.
Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer, a senior director at the X Prize Foundation, says,
It’s incentivized this whole business of the niche space economy.
The five finalists come from around the world: Moon Express in the USA, Hakuto in Japan, Team Indus in India, SpaceIL in Israel, and Synergy Moon, a global collaboration.
Founded by entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis, the X Prize Foundation seeks to use such competitions to encourage innovation, like how aviation prizes in the early 20th century made airplanes a common method of transportation.
The first X Prize of $10 million was granted in 2004 to the first private company that was able t take people 62 miles into space. This later led Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic to form Virgin Galactic, which will take tourists up to space for a few minutes.
In 2007, the foundation began a contest to draw attention to the moon. In order to win the $20 million prize, a team’s spacecraft must land on the moon’s surface, move 500 meters and beam back videos and photos. The second team to accomplish this wins $5 million. There are other bonuses, like $5 million for surviving the freezing lunar night, and for moving over 5,000 meters.
In the next 11 months, the finalists are working overtime to finish their designs, assemble their spacecraft and prepare for launching – all with different approaches and methods for conquering the coveted prize, and making lunar history.
