The group whose $10 million prize spurred private rocketeers to send a small piloted craft to the threshold of space in 2004 has issued a new challenge: an unmanned moon shot.
With the audacious new contest comes a bigger prize-as much as $25 million, paid for by Google, the Internet company.
The Google Lunar X Prize was announced Thursday in Los Angeles at Wired Magazine’s NextFest conference.
The contest calls for entrants to land a rover that will be able to travel at least 500 meters and send high-resolution video, still images and other data back home.
The X Prize Foundation saw the new contest as one of “the grand challenges of our time that we can use to move people forward,” said Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the foundation.
The prize for reaching the moon and completing the basic tasks of roving and sending video and data will bring the winner $20 million, according to the contest rules; an additional $5 million would be awarded for additional tasks that include roving more than 5,000 meters or sending back images of manmade artifacts like lunar landers from the Apollo program.
The $20 million grand prize will be available until Dec. 31, 2012, and then will drop to $15 million for two years. The contest would be likely to end after that time.
The new contest follows the path of the original Ansari X Prize, which was won by Space- ShipOne, a manned spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites.
NASA has announced plans to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2020. But without the need to keep humans alive or to make a return trip, the X Prize trips will be simpler missions.