Google's Lunar XPrize, a $30 million (£21 million, AU$37 million) bounty for landing a craft on the moon's surface, will go unclaimed when the space competition expires at the end of March. The Google Lunar Xprize, a decade-long competition to put a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, may have come to an anticlimactic end but organizers aren't conceding defeat just yet. The organization was founded by three young engineers: Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub who answered the international challenge presented by Google Lunar XPRIZE: to build, launch and land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. Manned lunar exploration used to be the exclusive purview of governmental agencies until the $2M Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander XCHALLENGE paved the way for a new class of lunar vehicles. The Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP), sometimes referred to as Moon 2.0, was a 2007–2018 inducement prize space competition organized by the X Prize Foundation, and sponsored by Google.The challenge called for privately funded teams to be the first to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit back to Earth high-definition video and images.
Three other teams are competing to win Google’s Lunar XPrize for the first ever private moon landing, worth $20m. When Narayan signed up, at the end of 2011, there were 30 teams in the running. The $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE aims to create an avatar system that can transport human presence to a remote location in real time. The Google Lunar XPRIZE was created with two goals in mind. With $6 million up for grabs in 2014, Google's Lunar XPrize is heating up with the ultimate reward in sight -- $20 million cash for landing on the moon. Even with Google dangling millions of dollars in prize money, it was a moonshot no one could land.