(there's a second page to the article not copied here).MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - Google and X PRIZE officials unveiled nine new privately funded teams today that will compete for $30 million in the Google Lunar X PRIZE challenge, a race to the moon.
"It's not just a new mission," said Peter Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, during the announcement here at Google's headquarters. "It's a new way of doing business."
The new teams join the Isle of Man-based Odyssey Moon team that was the first group to take up the challenge.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he was amazed that so many competitors had signed up so soon after the prize's announcement.
"I was floored," Brin told the team members and reporters who attended the press conference. "We had no such expectation."
Brin credited Google's participation to conversation he had had with Diamandis and mutual friend and Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-rocket builder, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX.
Large companies often invest money in entertainment ventures or sponsor competitions and competitors in events like boat races, Brin said. But those ventures are limited in their purpose.
"We should be doing new kinds of things as companies," Brin said. "If we're going to sponsoring things it should be for discoveries."
The Google Lunar X PRIZE Cup organizers also announced their partnership with Space Florida, a group vested in drawing the Sunshine State onto the commercial spaceflight map. Voted into creation in 2006, the local organization is offering launch site services and $2 million in extra prize money to the winning team if they blast off from Florida.
"The folks at Space Florida are really offering to enhance the prize purse at a significant level," Brett Alexander, executive director of space prizes for the X PRIZE Foundation, told SPACE.com. "It lowers the bar and makes it easier for teams to compete."
Steve Kohler, Space Florida president, said that launching a commercial spacecraft to the moon from Florida would add to the state's rich spaceflight history as home to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
"Florida's long been recognized as a preeminent leader in any activity that involves our exploration of the moon," Kohler said. "Part of our effort as a state and as an organization is to continue that legacy. We believe (this competition) will allow the state to become a future hub for commercial projects."
According to Google Lunar X PRIZE rules, 90 percent of a winning team's funding must come from the private sector to qualify for a piece of $30 million in total prize money.
The first team to land their robot on the moon and complete a gauntlet of tasks with it by Dec. 31, 2012, will snatch the $20 million grand prize. In 2013, the first-place purse drops to $15 million and will expire on Dec. 31, 2014.
Here's what I was contemplating-- this picture and it's caption in particular:
An artist's view of the "Moondancer" lander/rover at the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 touched down in 1969. Quantum3, the spacecraft's designer, hopes to win the top Google Lunar X PRIZE Cup purse.
Maybe it's just me, thinking in terms as a historian, but I'd think that the site of the original 1969 Neil Armstrong Moon landing would be/should be an internationally recognised historical preserve.
Admittedly, I just saw this story and posted here, and my concerns may already be addressed-- I don't know if I should look to NASA or UN information, or what-- but I think that making the area of the first Moon landing a historical preserve, so that all these private companies have to keep their dick-skinners off of the ...remains? Wreckage? -- is in the interests of all humanity.
I do, to be clear, wholly applaud the idea of getting private companies motivated to carry the space race, but am I being overly sentimental in feeling that humanity's greatest "first" should not end up paved over in the process?
