A Google-sponsored competition for a civilian moon mission has fallen short. More than 10 years after the XPRIZE Foundation announced a contest for proposals to send a robot to the moon, none of the participating teams will meet the deadline. Therefore, no one gets the $20 million prize provided by Google in a partnership with XPRIZE. The competition called for privately funded teams to develop, launch and land a spacecraft on the moon, and then drive it across the lunar surface for at least 1,640 feet and send back high-resolution videos and photos. The first team to complete the mission would receive $20 million and the second would get $5 million.
“After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar XPRIZE teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the moon by the March 31, 2018, deadline,” wrote Peter Diamandis and Marcus Shingles, the heads of the XPRIZE Foundation that led the competition, in a post on Tuesday, according to The Atlantic.
More than 30 teams entered the contest and the deadline was set in 2014. Five finalists were selected in 2017: Moon Express of the United States, SpaceIL of Israel, HAKUTO of Japan, TeamIndus of India, and Synergy Moon, an international team. They made significant progress and had all signed contracts with launch companies to send their spacecraft to the moon, including one with SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company.
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