The conditions of this Prize have been varied over the years as it became apparent that no one was going to make the original deadlines.

However it appears that the committee is going to put their foot down.

The current deadline is that the milestones have to be achieved by Dec 2017, and that one company has to have a launch contract in place by Dec 2015.

Currently, two teams have pooled their resources to share a launch vehicle, a Dragon 9. After that, their missions will go separate ways and they will be competing. These are the Astrobotic and Hakuto teams. The Hakuto team is sending two rovers.

The objective is to land a rover on the moon, make it travel 500 metres, and send images and other data. The first prize is 20 million USD, second prize is 5 million, and there is several million dollars available for various other technical milestones.

So it could end up being quite a race.

A third team, to my knowledge, is fairly well placed to have a launch contract in place by Dec 2015, which is the Indus team.

we’ll see

the hardest part of the trip, the most energy sapping is getting to LEO, then you’ve got the van allen belts

we’ll see

the hardest part of the trip, the most energy sapping is getting to LEO, then you’ve got the van allen belts

whats a little worrying is that they will be sending something to the moon without once being able to see if it can survive even in LEO

no satellites or fully functioning mock up of the craft that’s going to the moon has ever been launched

so presumably they’ll be trying to fly to the moon with an unproven technology – even if you were a bonafide space technologist, wouldn’t you at least want to see if the thing you intend to talk to can even talk back to the earth and survive for some reasonable time?

I’ve always suspected that it will cost far more than USD 20 million to accomplish such a project.

I dunno, I think they will run it close.

most likely , especially if you are paying for a ride into LEO

assuming the rocket taking you there doesn’t explode

When the prize was started there was no available launcher that had all three of reliability, load-carrying capacity and cost. There was also no device that could take the craft from LEO to Lunar Orbit. Then there was the problem of landing without crashing. Every part of it was initially very marginal, without two spare grams to rub together. The use of duplication (or triplication) of any part to improve reliability was completely out of the question.

Designing a lunar rover was never a serious problem – except that there were so many possibilities that getting two designers to agree was practically impossible.

The problem of LEO to Lunar Orbit may have been solved because the USSR has greatly improved the best device it had for the task by replacing the fuel pump.

Getting a launcher is very much about who you know and how much you are willing to risk losing the lot on the launch pad. Launch prices have gone up significantly since the Google X-prize was announced, in line with reliability.

Another problem is that the boss of the front-running team has been very good at raising funds – from an American movie maker and from the United Arab Emirates – but shockingly bad at spending it correctly, wasting money converting a good off-the-shelf orbital transfer vehicle to run on the wrong fuel, and spending zilch on design and testing.