Why Getting Back to the Moon Is so Damn Hard
The $20 million Lunar X Prize was supposed to send startups into space. The cost turned out to be far higher than the reward — but the competitors were never really in it for the trophy
Published in
8 min readApr 2, 2018
By Erin Winick
Rovers owned by private citizens should be playing lunar golf by now. Instead, the moon sits quiet as the deadline for the Google Lunar X Prize quietly passed at the end of March.
Over 10 years ago, Google and X Prize offered a $20 million prize for the first nongovernmental organization to complete a lunar mission as it defined one. After multiple extensions of the deadline from the original date in 2012, the competition was officially killed in January when it became clear no private company would make it to the moon by the final deadline: March 31, 2018.
The prize required a private team to successfully perform three tasks to claim the cash and glory:
- Successfully place a spacecraft on the surface of the moon
- Travel 500 meters on the moon’s surface
- Transmit high-definition videos and images back to Earth
