lunar rover The Google Lunar XPRIZE was announced in 2007. Similar to the way in which the
Ansari XPRIZE was formed, the Google Lunar XPRIZE was created out of a former venture of Peter Diamandis to achieve a similar goal. Diamandis served as CEO of
BlastOff! Corporation, a commercial initiative to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon as a mix of entertainment, internet, and space. Although it was ultimately unsuccessful, the BlastOff! initiative paved the way for the Google Lunar X Prize. Initially,
NASA was the planned sponsor and the prize purse was just US$20 million. As NASA is a federal agency of the United States government, and thus funded by U.S. tax money, the prize would only have been available to teams from the United States. The original intention was to propose the idea to other national space agencies, including the
European Space Agency and the
Japanese space agency, in the hope that they would offer similar prize purses. However, budget setbacks stopped NASA from sponsoring the prize. Peter Diamandis then presented the idea to
Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, at an
XPRIZE fundraiser. They agreed to sponsor it, and also to increase the prize purse to US$30 million, allowing for a second place prize, as well as bonus prizes. with a $20 million prize to the winner if the landing was achieved by 2012; the prize decreased to $15M until the end of 2014, at which point the contest would conclude. The five-year deadline was optimistic about schedule. Jeff Foust commented in
Space Review that as the end of 2012 approached, "no team appeared that close to mounting a reasonable bid to win it." In 2010, the deadline was extended by one year, with the prize to expire at the end of December 2015, and the reduction of the grand prize from $20 million to $15 million changed from originally 2012 to "if a government mission successfully lands on the lunar surface." On 16 December 2014, XPRIZE announced another extension in the prize deadline from 31 December 2015 to 31 December 2016. In May 2015, the foundation announced another extension of the deadline. The deadline for winning the prize was now December 2017, but contingent on at least one team showing by 31 December 2015 that they have a secured contract for launch. On 9 October 2015, team
SpaceIL announced their officially verified launch contract with
SpaceX, therefore extending the competition until the end of 2017. None of the remaining teams were able to claim the Google X-Prize money due to the inability to launch before the final deadline.
Objections to the Heritage Bonus Prizes Some observers have raised objections to the inclusion of the two "Heritage Bonus Prizes," particularly the Apollo Heritage Bonus Prize, which was to award an additional estimated US$1 million to the first group that successfully delivers images and videos of the landing site of one of the
Apollo Program landing sites, such as
Tranquility Base, after landing on the lunar surface. Such sites are widely regarded as archaeologically and culturally significant, and some have expressed concern that a team attempting to win this heritage bonus might inadvertently damage or destroy such a site, either during the landing phase of the mission, or by piloting a rover around the site. As a result, some archaeologists went on record calling for the Foundation to cancel the heritage bonus and to ban groups from targeting landing zones within of previous sites. In turn, the Foundation noted that, as part of the competition's educational goals, these bonuses fostered debate about how to respectfully visit previous lunar landing sites, but that it does not see itself as the appropriate adjudicator of such an internationally relevant and interdisciplinary issue. This response left detractors unsatisfied. The Foundation pointed to the historical precedent set by the
Apollo 12 mission, which landed nearby the previous
Surveyor 3 robotic probe.
Pete Conrad and
Alan Bean approached and inspected Surveyor 3 and even removed some parts from it to be returned to Earth for study; new scientific results from that heritage visit, on the exposure of manmade objects to conditions in outer space, were still being published in leading papers nearly four decades later. However, as Surveyor 3 and Apollo 12 were both NASA missions, there was no controversy at the time. In January 2011, NASA's manager for lunar commercial space noted on Twitter that work was underway to provide insight and guidelines on how lunar heritage sites could be protected while still allowing visitations that could yield critical science. And in July 2011, NASA issued
Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts. These guidelines were developed with the assistance of Beth O'Leary, an anthropology professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, and a recognized leader in the emerging field of
space archaeology. However, these are only guidelines and recommendations and are not enforceable beyond the possibility of "moral sanctions." An organization called
For All Moonkind, Inc. is now working to develop an international treaty that will include enforceable provisions designed to manage access to the Apollo sites and protect and preserve those sites, as well as others on the Moon, as the common heritage of all humankind. Nevertheless, some of the Apollo astronauts themselves have expressed support for the bonus, with
Apollo 11 Moonwalker
Buzz Aldrin appearing at the Google Lunar XPRIZE's initial announcement and reading a plaque signed by the majority of his fellow surviving Apollo Astronauts.
Prize not won On 23 January 2018, the X Prize Foundation announced that "no team would be able to make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the [31 March 2018] deadline ... and the Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed." On 11 April 2019, the foundation awarded a US$1 million award to
SpaceIL after its Beresheet craft crashed on the Moon. ==Competitors and their status as of end of GLXP competition==