Google backs $30M moon-rover contest

LOS ANGELES — Google is bankrolling a $30 million contest that could boost the commercial space industry and spur the first nongovernmental flight to the moon.

The bulk of the money will go to the first company that can land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images and video to Earth, the Internet search leader said Thursday.

Google partnered with the X Prize Foundation for the moon challenge, which is open to companies worldwide. The Santa Monica nonprofit institute is best-known for hosting the Ansari X Prize contest, which led to the first manned private spaceflight in 2004. That prize was won by SpaceShipOne, a manned spacecraft designed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and paid for by Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft.

The Google Lunar X Prize joins another prize dangling in front of potential competitors: $50 million that hotel magnate Robert Bigelow is offering the first private U.S. team to rocket a manned craft into orbit by 2010.

The race to the moon won't be easy or cheap. But whoever fills the requirements in the Google contest by the end of 2012 gets $20 million.

There is also a $5 million second-place prize and $5 million in bonus money to teams that go beyond the minimum requirements.

The winning spacecraft must be tough enough to survive a landing and be equipped with high-definition video and still cameras. It must also be "smart" enough to journey at least 1,312 feet on the moon and send self-portraits, panoramic views and near-real-time videos back to Earth that will be streamed on Google's Web site.

"I hope that a ... very ambitious team of people will allow us all to virtually go back to the moon very soon. I couldn't be more excited about that," Google co-founder Larry Page said at Wired magazine's technology show in Los Angeles.

Participants must secure a launch vehicle for the probe, either by building it or contracting with an existing private rocket company.

If there is no winner, the purse will drop to $15 million until the end of 2014, when the contest expires.

At least one group has expressed interest. Famed roboticist William "Red" Whittaker, of Carnegie Mellon University, said he is putting together a team to build a lunar rover. Last year, Whittaker was in charge of two autonomous vehicles that competed in a robot race across the Mojave Desert.

Government agencies in the United States, Europe and Asia are gearing up to return to the moon.

Japan's space agency, JAXA, launched its long-delayed orbiter SELENE — for Selenological and Engineering Explorer — from a remote Pacific Island early today. NASA next year will launch a lunar orbiter and impactor, the first of several lunar robotic projects before astronauts are sent to the moon next decade.

Government lunar missions can cost upward of hundreds of millions of dollars, but the X Prize Foundation and Google hope the private sector can do it for less.

The X Prize Foundation also is holding competitions in rapid genetic decoding and creating superefficient vehicles.