Elon Musk - Heading For The Stars

When Elon Musk - the South African-born founder of PayPal, Space-X and Tesla Motors says that "this is the greatest thing we can do for science, engineering and maths", you know he is talking about something world-changing. What you might not expect, however, is that the world-changing takes place a few thousand kilometres from our home planet.

The subject of his praise is the Google Lunar X Prize, a follow up to the hugely successful X Prizes which have inspired countless teams from the private sector to compete to solve feats which governments appear incapable of surmounting. The $10m Ansari X Prize, in which 26 teams from seven countries competed to fly a reusable spacecraft 100 kilometres above the Earth, spawned a number of high profile success stories, such as Musk's own Falcon-X rockets, and Paul Allen's SpaceShipOne, which went on to become the Virgin Galactic design.

However, this time round there is both more money to play for, and a more audacious goal to complete. The aim of the contest is to encourage privately funded teams to compete to be the first team to successfully land a robotic rover on the moon, have it travel a distance of 500 metres, and beam back images from its travels back to Earth.

James Cameron, who was present (via videophone) at the launch and is a major patron of the project, summed up the excitement surrounding the event; "We're going back to the moon not because of a massive government programme... This is Moon 2.0 with private industry... kick-starting the future of space exploration," Cameron said.

There are time constraints, too, for the budding lunar explorers. While the prize purse of $20 Million may seem enormous, the goal of getting to the moon, and completing the tasks in time is an massive one. The main prize falls to $15 Million after December 2012, so there is an enormous hurry to complete the task in time and get as much as possible from the Prize Purse. Especially since the competition closes in 2014. By then, if no one has managed to achieve the goals of the contest, all contestants will walk away empty-handed.

But, what is more important to the founders and funders of the prize is the effect that they will have on those who won't even compete. From Larry Page of Google, to Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, the non-profit prize-generating group behind the contest, all believe that the most important function of the event is to encourage kids to become more interested in the fields of science, engineering and mathematics.

As Diamandis himself explains; "The Google Lunar X Prize calls on entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries from around the world to return us to the lunar surface and explore this environment for the benefit of all humanity... Having Google fund the purse and title the competition punctuates our desire for breakthrough approaches and global participation. We look forward to bringing the historic private space race into every home and classroom."


by Sebastian Stent