Google sets $30m prize for moon landing

Google announced on Thursday plans to sponsor the Google Lunar X Prize, a robotic race to the moon with a purse of $30m (£15m).

The contest invites private teams from around the world to build a robotic rover capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 metres and then sending video, images and data back to Earth, among other feats. The idea behind the challenge is to urge private industry to develop new robotic and virtual presence technology to reduce the cost of space exploration.

"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," said Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit prize-generating group.

"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," Diamandis added.

The X Prize Foundation staged a splashy event to announce the contest at the Wired NextFest conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Diamandis, Google co-founder Larry Page and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin were all on hand to talk about the prize. The press conference also featured video commentary from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Tesla Motors backer Elon Musk and filmmaker James Cameron, who applauded new private industry efforts in space exploration.

The contest comes at a time when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on new spacecraft and technology to take man back to the moon within the next 12 years. At a recent artificial intelligence conference, Peter Norvig, the former head of computation at NASA Ames facility who is now Google's director of research, suggested that the space agency was taking the more expensive approach in trying to send astronauts to the moon and that it should focus on robotics.

Page, who is a trustee of the X Prize Foundation, said that he and Google co-founder Brin were excited to fund the prize because they wanted to get kids around the world excited about engineering, maths and science.

"I gave a speech recently, saying that science has a serious marketing problem. This is a solution to that," said Page, who began conversations with Diamandis in March about backing the prize. "These kinds of contests are a good way to improve the state of... humanity in the world."

To that end, Google and X Prize launched a Web site for classrooms to learn about the project at Googlelunarxprize.org.

The challenge is the largest ever for the X Prize Foundation and the first major prize event for Google, which earlier this year threw a party at the Googleplex to benefit the nonprofit organisation. The X Prize is best known for the $10m Ansari X-Prize, in which 26 teams from seven countries competed to fly a reusable spacecraft 100km above the Earth.