Who will be next to land something on the Moon? Perhaps it will be a privately funded enterprise.
Credit: Apollo Project
BOSTON: Forty years ago, NASA astronauts first walked on the Moon. But the next successful mission to the Moon may be run by privately funded researchers.
To encourage non-government agencies, there is $30 million available for the first privately funded lunar landing. So far it's encouraged 19 teams of researchers to start designing new spacecraft to reach the Moon's surface.
"We're now entering this new area of Moon exploration – what we like to call Moon 2.0," Will Pomerantz, the senior director of space prizes at the X Prize Foundation.
Another X Prize
The Google Lunar X Prize, run by the X Prize Foundation, is an international contest to develop a robot that can safely land on the Moon, travel 500 m over its surface, and transmit data back to Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded, ruling out the government space agencies that have dominated space exploration thus far.
The first successful team will receive $20 million – if they accomplish the goal by the end of 2012. If not, the prize money drops to $15 million. The second team receives $5 million, and another $5 million will be handed out as bonus prizes for completing tasks such as travelling more than 5 km across the Moon. The deadline is December 31, 2014.
The X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit organisation based in California, offers large incentive prizes to further research. Another challenge currently underway is the Archon X Prize for Genomics, a $10 million contest to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days.
Moon 2.0
The Foundation established its lunar competition in 2007 in hopes that private organisations would pioneer an economically stable way to explore the Moon, said Pomerantz.
The first era of lunar exploration did not continue, he said, "because the motivation was so political, not scientific or economic … It proved not to be a sustainable model."
When political reasons for reaching the Moon fizzled, the whole project faded away. Pomerantz says the same should not happen with privately funded organisations that have an economic stake in lunar landings.
get a grip
What a load of s^%t, 30 million to go to the moon a dead rock orbiting the earth. I’m so sick of this ridiculous quest for space, and exploration of mars blah blah blah, like the answers to our worlds problems will be found on the moon. Something like 16000 species went extinct last year and you want to go to the moon, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with this picture? Dont get me wrong i fervently support science and i am marveled by its discoveries daily but there seems to be a lack in perspective, which is and can be such a dangerous thing.
Exploring space helps Earth
Going into space does not mean we're ignoring Earth - it may actually help save it. The pictures of Earth taken by the returning Apollo astronauts helped trigger the modern environmental movement, showing all just how fragile our world is, a blue globe suspend in the dark cold of space.
And if it hadn't been for space exploration, we wouldn't have known about the greenhouse effect or the ozone hole. It was while trying to understand why Venus was so horribly hot that scientists discovered the greenhouse effect and that this might also occur on Earth. And it was the odd behaviour of chlorine in Venus's upper atmosphere that led allowed to stumble across the ozone hole over Antarctica.
Studies of Mars and its occasional planet-wide dust storms which led to plunging temperatures on the surface led scientists to the realisation that a decades-long ice age could be triggered on Earth by a nuclear exchange, the so-called nuclear winter effect. One of the most respected scientists in climate change research today, James Hansen of NASA, did his doctorate on the atmosphere of Venus.
So space has made a fabulous contribution, not just in accelerating technology and giving us things like computers and mobile phones, but in giving us important clues to problems here on Earth. So going into space is one of the best things we can do to save our world, and ourselves.
Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief, COSMOS
get a grip 2.0
I know what you are saying is true, and I don’t deny the advances in technology and world-understanding space has brought us. It just frustrates me that so much money seems to be dumped into the pockets of researchers looking up, and not enough by my understanding is lining the pockets of the ones looking down. This planet is so fragile and so near the 59th min that I don’t see the practicality in looking for a future landing on the moon, when earths future is under such a globalised threat now. Halve the world’s expenditure on space exploration for 10 years and use it on the ground instead. Then when we have a future where 1/3 of the earth’s mammals aren’t facing extinction, sure give them back their money.