Google Offers Moon Challenge

The space race has slowed back down since Burt Rutan won the Ansari X-Prize a couple of years ago as the first privately funded team to put a vessel into low orbit in space. Before that NASA pretty much had the stranglehold on space exploration, and not much has changed since. Just because the X-Prize was won didn’t change matters the way you might have expected.

Google, the little search engine that could, is hopefully offering enough incentive to start moving things forward again. The company has put up an announced $30 million in prize money for the next level of space exploration: a lunar landing.

The first privately financed expedition to successfully land a robotic rover on the moon will win $20 million of that pot, according to MSN/MSNBC. To win, the expedition has to land a rover which then has to travel at least 500 meters and send back video and data from the surface of the moon. No, your math isn’t bad. The other $10 million put up by Google is reserved for second place (presumably the second team able to accomplish the same) and other set objectives such as traveling a longer distance or discovering ice on the moon’s surface.

This follows Google’s announcement earlier this week that it would be working in tandem with NASA, building a headquarters on NASA property, utilizing their runways and Moffett Field for the Google-owned private jet, and reportedly placing equipment on board future space missions to bring more space images and other information to Google product users, such as Google Earth, which added a space element within the past month.

Google definitely appears interested in exploring their boundaries beyond our planet’s gravity. It’s interesting to watch this unfold. As people keep expecting the announcement of a Google operating system or a branded phone to compete with Apple’s iPhone, Google looks to be revealing expansion interests in different areas completely. Still, the unexpected and unexplored areas have paid off for Google so far. Who’s to say that this investment won’t prove equally beneficial for Google. Who knows – looking at space now might position the company to be more useful than Microsoft or Apple when the time comes that the human race truly moves to the stars.