Five privately funded teams have secured verified launch contracts to blast their robotic spacecraft toward the moon, keeping them eligible for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP), contest organizers announced today (Jan. 24).
The remaining teams are Florida-based Moon Express, Israel's SpaceIL, India's Team Indus, Hakuto of Japan and the international outfit Synergy Moon. Eleven other teams had been in the running, but they failed to lock up a verified launch deal by the deadline of Dec. 31, 2016.
The GLXP offers $20 million to the first private team that lands a spacecraft on the moon, moves it 1,640 feet (500 meters) and has the vehicle beam high-resolution photos and videos back to Earth. A successful mission must lift off by Dec. 31, 2017, for the team to claim this prize. The second team to accomplish all of this by the deadline will receive $5 million. An additional $5 million is available for various special accomplishments (such as detecting water ice on the moon), bringing the total purse up to $30 million, contest organizers have said.
Google announced the five finalists this week, dashing the hopes of 11 other teams from around the world that are now out of the running for the top US$20 million prize.While that prize money is a big incentive to make it to space, competitors already need considerable resources, know-how, and contacts just to keep up in the high-stakes space-faring contest. For the 16 teams that made it through up to this point, it was mandatory to secure a launch contract with a rocket services company by 31 December 2016 – a condition that the five finalists all satisfied.
"In entering the final stretch, we wanted to see and prove that these teams were on manifested launches," XPRIZE senior director Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer told Jonathan Amos at BBC News.
"That's important because it shows they must have money in place because they're now having to make payments to those launch providers. That gives us a lot of confidence. And we're now working with the teams on developing their mission profiles and in setting up the process to judge them." That process will take place over what's set to be a dramatic final year for the competition. For the finalists with launch contracts in place, they must now take off by 31 December 2017.
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