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Google postpones moon shot deadline

Cape Town - Google has postponed its Lunar Xprize but requires teams to submit active proposals by the end of 2015, the internet search giant announced.

The prize of $30m will be awarded to a privately funded team that successfully completes a robot mission to the Moon. The robot must explore at least 500m and send high definition video back to Earth.

"We continue to see significant progress from our Google Lunar Xprize teams, most recently demonstrated in the pursuit of the Milestone Prizes, in which teams exhibited substantial technological achievements that will ultimately support their missions," Google said.

Milestone prizes of up to $6m will be awarded at a private ceremony on 26 January 2015 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

US organisation Astrobotic has already won two prizes of $500 000 and $250 000 in the Mobility category for their Imaging Subsystem.

SA space programme

But teams from Japan, China, India, Malaysia, Spain and Germany are racing to win other Milestone prizes.

There is no South African team competing in the Lunar Xprize but the country has an active space programme through Sansa or the South African National Space Agency which awarded tenders this year for Cybicom Atlas Defence.

Cape Town non-profit, the Foundation for Space Development has embarked on an ambitious crowd funding programme for a Moon mission.

The project has to raise at least $150 000 for the first phase of the mission which will be used as a way to retain African skills on the continent. They have already raised over $12 000.

Watch a video of the project here.

SA also has a micro satellite programme developed by Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) postgraduate students participating in the Satellite Systems Engineering Programme at the French South African Institute of Technology (F’SATI).

The TshepisoSAT "CubeSat" has been active in space for a year and the students are working on a second version being primed for launch.

Local firm Marcom Aeronautics and Space has developed a viable rocket design for low Earth satellite launches but is hamstrung by a lack of funding.

"We do need to raise a certain amount of capital in order to do it, but since then [2002], I've spent the last ten years doing the detailed design on this vehicle," Marcom managing director Mark Comninos told Fin24 recently about the state of readiness for the rocket launch.

The company is developing a cryogenic liquid rocket engine.

Cost

"We're currently in development of a 10kN [kilonewton] rocket engine which we call the MAS 10K and that is a 10kN thrust rocket engine which is pressure fed and runs on liquid oxygen and ethanol," Comninos added.

The Apollo Moon Mission was estimated to cost around $7bn, but that number rocketed up to around $20bn after it was recalculated by James Webb.

The final deadline for the competition has been moved to 31 December 2016.

Google concedes that space flight is expensive but believes that private corporations will be able to deliver access to the Moon at a much lower cost than government agencies.

"We firmly believe that a whole new economy around low-cost access to the Moon will be the result of the Google Lunar Xprize," said Google.

Watch this video clip of the first Moon landing.


- Follow Duncan on Twitter

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