Redmill

 What is it that drove the Google founders to sponsor the Google Lunar challenge?

” The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.”

Is it that sailing the oceans in multimillion dollar yachts no longer appeals to the rich or is there a genuin pioneer spirit? There are parallels.

When America was discovered pioneers urged to cross the ocean and discover this new land. Promisses turned out to become true for quite a few as they struck gold in many ways. With this it is not said that golddiggers got rich. Everybody knows the story that the people that dug for gold hardly made a bug. It were the people that supplied the equipment for digging, washing and sieving that made millions.

When it come to digging for gold in the 21st century it seems that Google has invented the ultimate gold pan. Pioneering the web and creating the ultimate sieve for information they are allways on the forefront of new development.

But why the moon? In an overwhelming page the X prize foundation come with very strong arguments.

`The Moon is the closest source of materials for doing anything in space. Right now we have to bring every single bit of material that we need for space operations at great expense from the bottom of the Earth’s deep gravity well. it’s 22 times easier to launch from the Moon than from the Earth. The lack of an atmosphere on the moon also makes it possible to launch materials from the moon using electric motors rather than expensive rockets.

The moon is more than 40% oxygen by weight. Oxygen is the main component of rocket propellant. Much of the rest of lunar soil is silicon (useful for making solar cells) and metals like aluminum and iron. Thanks to the rock and soil return by Apollo astronauts and recent robotic probes we now have detailed knowledge of our nearest neighbor in space.

Clean solar energy can be sent from space to the earth with solar collectors in high Earth orbit made from lunar materials. A single solar power satellite could power a major Earth city without CO2 or other pollution. Since these systems provide power at night, energy from power satellites could charge electric cars, generate hydrogen from water, or make synthetic fuels for cars or aircraft during nighttime off-peak power times.

The moon is so close to the Earth (1.3 seconds for radio or light) that people can directly control lunar robots and other machines from Earth.

Once lunar materials are available for construction in space we can overcome many of the limits to space exploration that we currently take for granted. For example:

• We can shield astronauts from cosmic and solar radiation
• We can used beamed power to enable fast transportation in the solar system
• We can build large telescopes and other astronomical tools to learn much more about the universe and how it came to be.
• We can protect the Earth from the threat of impacts from asteroids and comets

In addition to using lunar materials to build solar power satellites we can collect energy on the moon’s surface and transmit it to the Earth. Eventually we may also collect Helium 3 trapped in moon soil which is an ideal low-radiation fusion fuel.”

I know that many things in modern live are the result of space exploration so far but working on the moon got stuck in 1972 when the last human set foot on the moon.

I´m convinced that Google entered a new frontier sponsoring a $30 million prize is like installing the first server for a search engine for the universe.