Space Travel Contest With $20 Million Prize
I’ll just land my space craft on the dark side of the moon.
Having conquered cyberspace, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have set their sights on the moon. They have arranged for their Mountain View company to fund the Lunar X Prize, a competition that will award $20 million to the first team that lands a private unmanned spacecraft on the moon - and broadcasts high-definition video back to earth. In a video statement prepared for Thursday’s announcement, Brin said he had been interested in space exploration as a kid and began following it more recently as his peers - technology geeks who had grown rich off the Internet - turned their attention to space.
With space travel in the not-so-far future, this places space education as a high priority. The team at the Lunar X Prize has prepared free learning guides, videos and other resources to help stimulate student interest not only in space but in math, science and technology as well. The X Prize Foundation, founded by Peter Diamandis, a medical doctor with a degree in genetics from MIT, completed its first competition in 2004, awarding $10 million to Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, after they successfully built an aircraft that flew 100 kilometers into space twice in two weeks.
