In 2007, the X Prize Foundation announced and soon after opened up a competition known as Google Lunar XPRIZE, its official name, or unofficially as Moon 2.0. Google worked with the X Prize Foundation to fund the competition.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE, put simply, offered $20 million for the competition’s victor, then $5 million for second place, a sum of $4 million to be split among a pool of competitors in the name of bonuses, and $1 million in the capacity of a diversity award.
Originally, when the program was opened up by the two companies in 2007, they announced that the deadline was Dec. 31, 2014. If any competitors were to complete the mission before the beginning of 2013, they could win even more money as a grand prize. After neither of these milestones was successfully reached, the competition made clear that the deadline would be pushed back to Dec. 2017, but only if one or more of its competitors could manage to ink a contract with a space agency such as NASA that would guarantee the launch of their lunar craft by Dec. 31, 2015.
In late 2017, the deadline was further pushed back to March 31, 2018. Even though none of the competition’s members have reached any of the deadlines set by Google and the X Prize Foundation, they agreed to continue to oversee the competition even though no cash awards would be given out.
SpaceIL, an organization that was one of a handful of competitors in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition that is based in Tel Aviv University, Israel, managed to launch a lunar lander in late Feb. of this year.
Named Beresheet, a Hebrew word that roughly translates to English as “in the beginning,” SpaceIL looked to land the lunar module on the moon, travel some 500 meters, and – hopefully – transmit data, such as images, back to the SpaceIL team back on planet Earth.
Unfortunately for SpaceIL, Beresheet’s gyroscope, the tool used to orient the lander, broke just last week. This caused the lander to crash on the surface of the Moon as a result of the gyroscope’s failure causing several other malfunctions to take place that ultimately caused the main engine of the Beresheet lander to shut down.
Fortunately, the X Prize Foundation announced that Google would give SpaceIL $1 million for its accomplishments. Further, SpaceIL announced the to-be-manufactured lunar lander Beresheet-2 just four days ago.
