Nobody Won Google's Lunar X Prize. What Does This Mean?

But don’t write them off just yet.

- Koh Wanzi

Google’s Lunar X Prize is ending this month without a winner. The US$20 million competition kicked off in 2007, but more than a decade later, the prize will go unclaimed. The competition was established to help lower the costs of getting to space, and over 25 teams raced to become the first privately financed venture to make it to the moon.

So far, only government agencies like NASA have touched down on the lunar surface, a fact that will unfortunately remain unchanged for now. These missions often run into the hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars, so the Lunar X Prize was meant to prove that private individuals could do it as well.

Of course, this meant working with a much smaller budget, and the idea was to provide the incentive for teams to come up with cheaper and more creative methods of getting to the moon.

However, that was only the first part of a multi-step challenge, and teams had to devise a rover capable of traveling up to 500m on the moon and broadcast live back to Earth.

But at the end of the more than decade-long journey, it seems like no one will get to the moon by the 31 March 2018 deadline, a date that has been extended several times beyond the original 2014 end date.