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player ready...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,” said Dr. Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the foundation.
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 likely end after that.