Google to sponsor space race to moon
Lunar exploration has a corporate benefactor: Google Inc.
The Internet search giant hopes to fuel a new technological revolution by sponsoring the Google Lunar X Prize, which would award as much as $30 million in prizes for landing unmanned rovers on the moon and having them perform certain tasks.
Before Google held its initial public offering in August 2004, its founders cautioned that they were not running “a conventional company.” Spending corporate earnings on moon missions puts that pledge to the test.
But that philosophy has carried Google investors on a rocket-ship ride of their own -- those who bought IPO shares have since seen their holdings rise 517%.
Plus, $30 million is a rounding error for a company that generated $11 billion in revenue last year and is still growing fast.
Google’s shares gained $2.13 to $524.78 after the announcement.
“This will probably frustrate investors at first glance, but when they see what this does for the Google brand, I think they will get their money’s worth,” said Gene Munster, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. “If you are going to do something creative with your marketing dollars, you might as well shoot for the moon -- literally.”
The international competition challenges entrants to land a robotic vehicle on the moon, have it travel at least 500 meters and beam video images and other data back to Earth. The first company to win the private-sector space race by 2012 would take home $20 million.
The grand prize drops to $15 million if the mission isn’t completed by 2014. The winner can also pick up at least $5 million in bonuses for finding relics from the U.S. Apollo moon landings or detecting water ice.
Peter Diamandis, founder of the Santa Monica-based X Prize Foundation, estimates the cost of building and landing the rover at $20 million to $40 million.
He said the contest already had spurred interest from potential competitors, including a major aerospace company and Carnegie Mellon University roboticist William “Red” Whittaker.
The contest is modeled on the $10-million Ansari X Prize, claimed in 2004 by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen for launching SpaceShipOne into space twice in two weeks. The ship -- a replica of which sits in Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters -- inspired plans for the construction of a fleet of commercial spacecraft for Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.
Diamandis pitched the new X Prize idea during a March fundraiser to foundation trustee Larry Page, who started Google with Sergey Brin. The co-founders quickly agreed to join the effort.
“Our hope is that the technology coming out of this will really spark a commercial revolution that will see new types of companies and new types of robotics used to explore the moon, asteroids and beyond,” said Diamandis, whose foundation also offers prizes for feats in automobile design, genomics and other fields.
Space travel has long captured the imagination of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, a PayPal founder, has developed rockets through his company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. “The Sims” video game designer Will Wright’s latest effort is “Spore,” in which players evolve a species from a single-celled organism to a space-exploring civilization.
Now Google has a team working on Moon 2.0, which supporters hope will be a launching pad for exploring the solar system. Google products including Google Earth, which was recently updated with moonscape images, and YouTube will support the teams building the moon rovers, said Dylan Casey, Google’s manager for the project.
“The entire team at Google is honored to participate in something that will have such a profound effect on all of humankind,” Casey said.--
