https://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/important-update-google-lunar-xprize

wookiemeister said:

https://lunar.xprize.org/news/blog/important-update-google-lunar-xprize

“After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar XPRIZE teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline. The grand prize of the $30M Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed.”

The advantage of offering a prize. If you make it difficult enough then you can spur development at no cost. … Sorry, that’s too cynical … There have been other associated minor prizes that have been claimed.

What was the original final date, it was postponed at least once if not twice. I see, in 2015, XPRIZE announced that the competition deadline would be extended to December 2017 if at least one team could secure a verified launch contract by 31 December 2015. Two teams secured such a launch contract, and the deadline was extended.

XPRIZE announced the five finalists to be SpaceIL, Moon Express, Synergy Moon, Team Indus, and Hakuto having secured verified launch contracts for 2017 with SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Interorbital Systems and ISRO respectively for the first four. For Hakuta, launch is planned for 2020 on the Peregrine lander by Astrobotic Technology, to be launched on an Atlas V rocket.

makes me wonder if the respective teams had joined into one entity they might have done it sooner ?

wookiemeister said:

makes me wonder if the respective teams had joined into one entity they might have done it sooner ?

No, then they would have just failed over in-fighting and petty rivalries.

wookiemeister said:

makes me wonder if the respective teams had joined into one entity they might have done it sooner ?

A bigger team certainly would have helped. The first step would have been to get almost all members to agree on the method, or at least to agree on a suitably intelligent despotic leader. There’s a problem when a team leader makes a bad decision, such as changing the fuel of an orbital transfer vehicle, which every member of the crew knew was a bad decision, that happened to one team.

party_pants said:

wookiemeister said:

makes me wonder if the respective teams had joined into one entity they might have done it sooner ?

No, then they would have just failed over in-fighting and petty rivalries.

Not necessarily the case. I was reading about the origins of CERN. There was certainly a lot of in-fighting and petty rivalries in the beginning few months, but it all sorted itself out within a year.

looking back on it they should have just paid the russians to launch it and concentrated on a lander without vehicle to move around the moon (there were still bucks in landing)

wookiemeister said:

looking back on it they should have just paid the russians to launch it and concentrated on a lander without vehicle to move around the moon (there were still bucks in landing)

Looking back on it, the prize money initially offered was nowhere near high enough. It wouldn’t cover launch cost and orbital transfer vehicle cost, with vehicles that are both big enough and reliable enough.