Google yanks cash firehose from Lunar X Moonshot comp. The actual Moon shot one Google has pulled its financial backing from the Lunar X wheeze to get a privately funded spacecraft to the Moon after finally conceding that none of the five entrants were likely to make it there. “We have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline,” said Peter …
Right, because I guess 30M are simply pocket money for such effort - you would recover a tiny fraction of your costs. The need to deploy a rover was complex enough (I guess China spent a lot to achieve it), but even obtaining the energy to get into the lunar gravity well was not simple - and especially cheap, unless you could piggyback another launch. Even if you could piggy back an expensive geosync launch, you would need your own fuel to raise the orbit enough, and very few expensive launch - or none - would allow another system with its own fuel and engine on board, because of the risks of causing havoc. Using less risky technologies would be probably more complex and expensive, if they could allow the desired speed.
How much are Google prepared to Invest for AIDrives to Mars .... and Planetary Bodies beyond.
For Real Live Journeys to be BroadBandCasted on Earth ....... to show the Natives what A.N.Others can Realise for Population/Heavenly Planet Colonisation.
$30m invested ten years ago is how much now?
Maybe they're going about this the wrong way... Make it a "manned" trip to the moon and the astronaut will be selected and set (willingly or unwillingly) based on winning using paid ballots. Say $10 a vote. I'm sure here in the US that there's XXXX millions that would be donated to have someone shipped to the moon.
I'll leave it an exercise for the reader to figure out the person most likely to win the "election" and be sent. .
They have spent appx the same amount of time as the original missions to get to the moon in the 1960s. While the U.S. gov't did this 40 years ago, they did it with ancient, heavy technology. I would have thought that a private company using 21st century technology could have accomplished this in a similar timespan as the U.S. gov't 40-50 years ago.
I guess this just illuminates what a damn fine job they did in the 60s.
Actually the technology was pretty new at the time, especially the liquid oxygen one.
The Orion is actually revisited old technology.
"using 21st century technology"
21st technology is mostly some faster CPUs and more software. Still, they can't break the law of Physics.
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