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Google's $20 Million Race To the Moon Will End With No Winner -- and Google is OK With That (cnbc.com) 85

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
Michael Sheetz, reporting for CNBC: More than ten years after it was announced -- and extended over and over -- the Google-sponsored race to win $20 million by landing on the moon will end with no winners. The four teams racing to win the Google Lunar Xprize, which requires a company to land a spacecraft on the moon by March 31, are either short of money or unable to launch this year, three people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Meanwhile, Google -- which extended the deadline from 2012 to 2014 and then eventually to 2018 -- is not willing to push out the date further. "Google does not have plans at this time to extend the deadline again, however we are so thrilled with the progress made by these teams over the last ten years," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. The commercial space industry has written off the Lunar Xprize as improbable, and not worth pursuing, according to sources.
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Google's $20 Million Race To the Moon Will End With No Winner -- and Google is OK With That More

Google's $20 Million Race To the Moon Will End With No Winner -- and Google is OK With That

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  • news at 11

    • Also, gets s-tons of free "do no evil" PR.

      >> CNBC

      Although, I'm not sure CNBC exposure is worth anything. It's been a while since I met a geek with cable...
    • Why is there a deadline at all, anyway?

      • Re:Company doesnâ(TM)t spend 20 million, is h (Score:4, Interesting)

        by scottrocket ( 1065416 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @12:07PM (#55978721) Journal

        Why is there a deadline at all, anyway?

        Yeah, why not put 1 mil into an endowment fund, let it grow by dividend and then when someone finally reaches the moon, moves the required distance & takes photos, they will receive whatever is in the fund.

        • Yeah, why not put 1 mil into an endowment fund, let it grow by dividend and then when someone finally reaches the moon, moves the required distance & takes photos, they will receive whatever is in the fund.

          Because it's a little late. The prize was originally funded the same way the first X-Prize was funded, as an insurance policy. Google took out a policy, and paid the premiums on it to the insurance company. If the conditions of the prize were met, the insurance policy would pay out. Those premiums have been spent, for a decade now, and Google is letting the policy lapse. The insurance company made a very good bet this time.

          If Google had initially funded the prize as a trust, then it could have been gro

      • Why is there a deadline at all, anyway?

        To make it more dramatic and newsworthy. If there was no deadline, there would be no story about it each time a deadline is extended or expired.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Yeah, I'm sure Google would be seriously hurt if it had to fork out $20M for something that would give it amazing publicity around the world. That's why they're cancelling it. Sure.

        Fair enough, but then ... why?

  • Shouldn't this be easy? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    After all we already did land on the moon many times, with current technology and experience it should be piece of cake? Unless we never landed on the moon....

    • Re:Shouldn't this be easy? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @12:00PM (#55978663) Homepage

      Yup.

      And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.

      Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult. Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that, or the insurance for if it happens to explode on the launchpad.
        Not viable. Especially if you are only fronting that money in the hope of winning the prize.

      The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.

      More surprisingly is that they were ever authorised at all, not that the sheer volume of money thrown at them actually resulted in success.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by 110010001000 ( 697113 )
        Yes but in the 1960s microprocessors were very slow. Today the processor in my phone is much much more powerful and has more memory then all of the Saturn era launch computers combined. Therefore it must be that much easier and cheaper to go to the Moon today.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nojayuk ( 567177 )

          India is planning an unmanned lunar orbiter, lander and rover mission in 2018. The budget is about $90 million including launch vehicle.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ranton ( 36917 )

          Yes but in the 1960s microprocessors were very slow. Today the processor in my phone is much much more powerful and has more memory then all of the Saturn era launch computers combined. Therefore it must be that much easier and cheaper to go to the Moon today.

          So one part of the launch vehicle, which is probably a small fraction of a percent of the total cost, has gone down dramatically. While the cost of metal, fuel, salaries, etc. have all gone up with inflationary pressures. I seriously doubt the cost of computing power has any noticeable affect on launch costs.

          • But my computer used to only have 8K of RAM and now it has 16GB.

          • The biggest cost is the design and manufacturing of the rocket, and those cost have come down a lot with 3D CAD tools, computer simulations, progress in material sciences, and modern CNC manufacturing.

            • Yes! Think of the labor saved from switching from a drafting table to a 3D CAD tool. That was a major portion of the $25 billion it took to build the Saturn V launch system.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )

          Easier, yes. Cheaper, not so much.... and certainly not until we've been doing it for a while.

          20 million is no more than a tenth of how much it probably actually will cost someone to get there.

          • Right. It only cost about $25 billion in the 1960s to go to the moon. We could do it for about $200 million today. After all, my watch has as much processing power as the Saturn V launch computer!

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mark-t ( 151149 )
              I suggested only that it would probably not cost any *LESS* than $200 million. On account of simple technological advances, I suspect that we probably *could* do it for somewhat less today than the equivalent that was spent in the 1960's, but that doesn't mean that it still isn't going to be one helluvalot of money.

        • Yes but in the 1960s microprocessors were very slow. Today the processor in my phone is much much more powerful and has more memory then all of the Saturn era launch computers combined. Therefore it must be that much easier and cheaper to go to the Moon today.

          There's an app for going to the moon?

          Somehow I suspect more than on-board compute power is needed.

      • And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.

        True although to be fair that was basically a crash program where budget constraints weren't really a serious concern. Plus that was a manned mission which is inherently a lot more expensive.

        Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult.

        That's putting it mildly. While it certainly can be done cheaper than Apollo, $20 million is just a tiny amount of money for a goal like that. Something more realistic might be $200 million and even that would be doing it on an extremely tight budget. $20 million really isn't very much money at all.

        The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.

        We DID do an awfu

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.

          We DID do an awful lot more than just say we stepped on the moon. The money from the spin off technologies alone has more than paid for the entire Apollo program many times over, employed millions of people, and greatly improved our lives in measurable ways. And that's not including the value of telecom and other satellite data.

          Sorry, but the parent is right. Consider the massive benefit space programs would have gained had we not pissed away billions planting flags on our lunar rock to win the bigger-dick space race.

          Exploring space and related technologies would have happened regardless of a moon visit, just as we've advanced for many decades without first insisting we need to piss away a few trillion trying to put a foot on Mars. The fact that we haven't been back to the moon in decades says a lot about the value-add.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that

        Don't think so, a Falcon 9 will get you ~4 tons to Mars which probably means ~6 tons to the Moon which should be plenty for a small lander/rover and according to Musk himself the fuel is only about $200k. Everything else was on the money though, it'll cost way more than $20m to claim those $20m.

        • But I think we could cut costs on the $200,000 fuel bill by launching the Falcon 9 from space, instead of a rock stuck in a gravity well like Earth. You could even create the fuel itself in space, which would eliminate the cost for launching the fuel. Remember, every pound that can be saved during launch is a huge win in terms of costs.

      • The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon".

        Today that money would be burned up in government inefficiencies, pork, corruption and so on.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by erice ( 13380 )

        Yup.

        And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.

        Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult. Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that, or the insurance for if it happens to explode on the launchpad.

        But the Lunar X-Prize isn't trying to re-create Apollo. It is more like the far less ambitious and costly Surveyor [wikipedia.org] missions. The bill came in at $469 million for seven landers.

        It is even closer to Lunokhod-1 [space.com] but being a Soviet mission, cost comparisons are tricky (if you can get the data at all).

      • The sheer amount of money thrown at it, is what makes me thing there was a plan B at hand (fake moon landings). It could not fail.

      • And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.

        $6.5 B was the cost of the whole Saturn program, not the per-vehicle cost. The Google X-prize contestants aren't developing a rocket, they're buying a launch on a vehicle developed by somebody else.

        And the Google X-prize contestants aren't sending a human mission to the moon, they don't need a Saturn class booster. They're more like the Surveyor missions, which launched on Atlases. But you can do it with a much smaller vehicle now-- electronics are a lot better than in the Surveyor program in 1964. You

  • That is kind of a surprise. I mean we are really close to having a manned mission to Mars. I guess Musk was concentrating on that, and didn't think the Moon was worth it. Once we have our space factories up and running and mining asteroids we will be in good shape for Mars...or beyond?

  • we are so thrilled with the progress made by these teams over the last ten years

    They're thrilled they get to keep the money after getting the essentially free PR for the last decade. No fucking progress has been made.

    Sputnik flew in 1957. 12 years later we had humans on the moon. And we brought them all back. We're nearing 5 decades with no real progress in human space flight. We've had some progress in sending little robots to other planets and getting data back, but not by private industry. The private space has only made progress in launching shit into LEO.

    • But Windows 10 came out and it was the best version of Windows ever. And also Intel introduced CPU's which were up to 5% faster than the previous ones. So we are making good progress. Progress is inevitable.

    • no real progress in human space flight.

      Sending robots instead of humans is progress.

    • They're thrilled they get to keep the money after getting the essentially free PR for the last decade. No fucking progress has been made.

      They didn't even get to keep the money. Like the previous X-Prize, it was an insurance policy. Google has been paying the premiums on that policy for 10 years now. Probably much less than $20 million, but still a substantial sum of money. The insurance company came out on the right side of that bet this time. They're the ones who get to keep the money.

      But hey, we got this lovely participation prize [xprize.org] for the children, so it was worth it! Right?

    • I don't think private companies are even at the Sputnik level yet.

  • Economically the moon won't make much money, maybe with space tourism.
    But Mars, there's lots of money to be made there and much more to explore and see.
    The Moon is just a Harsh Mistress.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      I'm curious, what money would you make on Mars that you couldn't make on the moon?

      The moon is close enough and small enough that you might be able to mine it and return the result to Earth economically if you could find anything valuable there, or could potentially be a practical location for dirty industries if environmental costs on Earth got high enough.

      It's certainly where you'd want to supply any kind of Earth orbital industry from, and has lots of the kinds of materials you'd need for that: oxygen, si

  • A Falcon 9 could launch a Lunar X-Prize craft, but the launch will set you back $60 million, so no profit on a $20 million prize.

  • I found an old storage tank, and I'm pretty sure if I heat water hot enough, I can make it hit the moon. Maybe we can attach a long dable so we can just pull it back when done?

    Planning on aiming for the Expiration Date [nasa.gov] site.

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