It’s official: no one is going to win the Google Lunar X Prize competition
No one is going to win the X Prize Foundation’s competition to send a spacecraft to the Moon, the foundation announced today. Only five finalists remained in the Google-sponsored Lunar X Prize competition, and in order to win any grand prize money, the teams had to launch and complete their missions to the Moon before March 31st, 2018. But with only two months until the deadline, no team is ready to launch, so Google will keep the prize money instead.
“After close consultation with our five finalist Google Lunar X Prize teams over the past several months, we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline,” the X Prize Foundation released in a statement. “This literal ‘moonshot’...