Want To Make Some Easy Money?
Remember the group who offered a $10 million prize to the rocket builder who could send a small piloted craft into space in 2004? Read about their latest challenge - an unmanned moon shot. The prize is up to $25 million and will be paid by Google, the Internet company who have become part of our daily lives.
The "Google Lunar X Prize" was announced this week in Los Angeles. The contest calls for entrants to land a rover on the moon that will be able to travel at least 500 meters and send high-resolution video, still pictures and other data back home. It is being thought of as one of "the grand challenges of our time that we can use to move people forward." 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 rules. An additional $5 million will be awarded for other tasks that include roving more than 500 meters or sending back images of abandoned artifacts like the lunar modules 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 probably end after that time, though Google and the foundation could extend it. The new contest follows the path of the original Ansari X Prize, which was won by SpaceShipOne, a manned spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and financed by Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft.
So if you are having a hard time raising this kind of money, here's your chance. All you need is a small select team of people with knowledge in about 50 different related subjects including acceleration, physics, chemistry, math, geography, meteorology, and "well you name it" you need it.
