Google Lunar XPRIZE

Israel has put in its bid to be the fourth nation to reach the Moon and the first privately-funded mission to do so. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and the nonprofit SpaceIL today outlined plans to send up an unmanned spacecraft that will make a lunar landing on February 13, 2019.

​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. They have today announced plans to re-launch the competition.

​After a decade Google’s Lunar XPrize is set to end with no winner. An announcement from Google recently suggested the March 31st deadline would not be extended and a subsequent update from the XPrize team confirmed that no team will launch in time and the $30 million prize will remain unclaimed

​The deadline for the Google Lunar XPrize has again been pushed back, this time to March 31, 2018. After over 10 years and multiple deadline extensions, it is hoped that this is the final delay for what has been an ambitious competition to get the first privately funded spacecraft onto the Moon.

​The private race to the moon just kicked up a notch with Moon Express revealing in detail its plan to begin commercially harvesting moon rocks by 2020. The company is set to become the first commercial presence on the moon sending back lunar samples & establishing a permanent lunar outpost.

​​The Google Lunar XPrize has been almost a decade in the making, but 2017 will be the year that we finally have lift off. The XPrize foundation has today confirmed the five finalist teams that have secured launch contracts and will make the final push for the Moon's surface.

​One of the major disappointments of the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 was the discovery of the complete absence of beer on the Moon, but a team of engineering students are aiming to change that.

The latest XPrize competition is taking to the ocean depths with the Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize offering a total of US$7 million in prizes to encourage development of new technologies for unmanned exploration of the world's oceans.

Having previously announced that it had signed a launch contract in pursuit of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, Moon Express has now received official verification of the contract from XPRIZE. It is the second team receive verification, after SpaceIL. The news kicks off a new space race.