Google Lunar X Prize Teams Now In a Race With China As Well As Each Other

The X Prize thing is based on insurance, you realize. Google itself isn't paying the prize. Google is paying an insurance premium, betting that someone will fulfill the conditions of the prize, thereby causing the insurance company to pay out. The insurance company is betting no one will fulfill the conditions of the prize at all, thereby pocketing Google's money and walking away. The clause to reduce the payout if China successfully lands first is part of the deal.

The first X Prize was established the same way. It's basically a bet, using one of the blue sky insurance companies who will insure things like an actress's legs, and similarly odd things. But blue sky or not, they weren't going to take the deal, or indeed, the first deal, without a hard deadline. The first X Prize had an expiration time. So does the Lunar X Prize.

The closing date for the competition was originally announced to be Dec 31, 2012 for the 'Grand Prize' of $20M and 2014 for the reduced prize of $15M.[5][6] In 2010 the closing date was extended to Dec 31, 2015.

That was Google agreeing to pay more premiums, and the insurance company pointing out that China plans to get there before 2015.

Hard to say if any of the registered teams has a realistic chance or not, despite the offers of a discounted launch from SpaceX and free air time on one of the radio telescopes. The rover itself is hard enough. A lunar transfer vehicle and a lunar lander are each major efforts all their own. This is literally rocket science. Of course, the science itself isn't the problem. An undergraduate can run the numbers to calculate the rocket burns and the orbits. The problem is, it's also rocket engineering. And that's hard enough that even the major aerospace contractors screw it up on a regular basis. Hell, even SpaceX, the darling of Slashdot and geeks everywhere, had an engine blowout during their last Falcon 9 launch. If Elon Musk hadn't studied all the recorded rocket launch failures of history and insisted on a design that could withstand the most common cause of failure, that launch may have been a total failure, instead of fulfilling its primary mission of resupplying the Space Station. The people trying to win the Lunar X Prize don't have to deal with maximum dynamic pressure (Earth's atmosphere) and the full brunt of Earth's gravity, but they do have to deal with vacuum, radiation, Van Allen belts, and the Moon's gravity right down to the surface. It would be a tall order even for SpaceX, and they're building rockets already. The competing teams? Not so much.

So you see why the insurance company was willing to take the bet. They think the odds are with them, and that they'll get to keep Google's money.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/R9URT2Jx12Q/story01.htm

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