Dr. Eran Pribman, CEO of the SpaceIL association: "The extension of the competition was necessary in light of the complexity and challenge of the mission" * The teams participating in the competition build a spaceship that will reach the moon and perform certain operations on its surface. A prize of 30 million dollars will be awarded
XPRIZE, a company that runs incentive prize competitions, announced yesterday that the deadline to carry out the flight to the moon has been officially pushed back to December 31, 2016. As part of this revised timeline, at least one team must provide documentation of a planned launch by December 31, 2015, on So that the rest of the teams can also continue in the competition.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, which awards a prize of 30 million dollars, aims to challenge and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs from all over the world to develop low-cost methods for robotic space exploration. To win the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, a privately funded team must successfully land a robot on the surface of the moon that will travel at least 500 meters and transmit high-resolution video and images back to Earth.
"We continue to see significant progress among the Google Lunar XPrize teams, which was recently demonstrated in the competition for the Milestone Awards, in which the teams presented significant technological achievements that will ultimately serve them in their mission," said Robert Weiss, Vice Chairman and President of XPrize. "We know that the task we are asking the teams to perform is very difficult and unprecedented, not only technologically, but also in terms of economic considerations. For this reason we decided to postpone the end date of the competition. We believe that a whole new economy around low-cost access to the Moon will be the result of the Google Lunar XPrize.”
At the end of January, the milestone awards (Milesone) worth up to 6 million dollars will be awarded. In the meantime, an announcement was made about the American Astrobotics group winning $750 in the portable category and for their secondary imaging system.
In order to recognize the technological achievements recently achieved by the teams in the fields of landing, mobility and imaging. The other teams competing for the Milestone Awards are Hakuto (Japan), Team Indus (India), Moon Express (USA) and Part-Time Scientists (Germany). The other teams chose not to participate in this intermediate competition.
Dr. Eran Pribman, CEO of the SpaceIL association, the group representing Israel and the only association among the participating groups (all the others are registered as members) says in response: "The extension of the competition was required in light of the complexity and challenge of the task as well as in light of the fact that as of today, no group is able to complete the The mission until the end of 2015. SpaceIL continues to work hard to secure a launch contract and we hope to have good news on the subject in the near future. As soon as we have a launch, we will make sure that the whole country knows and will be excited along with us. For us, as an Israeli non-profit organization, the achievement is beyond competition: the very act of landing on the moon is the achievement! We intend to donate the potential prize money to promote science and scientific-technological education in Israel."
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