Not every robot headed into space comes from the professionals, you know. Competitors for the Lunar X Prize have three years to build their own rover and land it on the moon. Here are some of the hopeful bots.
The nineteen teams competing for the prize – $20 million, provided by Google – span students to scientists, and multiple continents. But one thing unites them all: they just want to see if it can be done. Fred Bourgeois, from the open source Team Frednet:
What we’re doing is a proof of concept: that this can be done, and for less than the government would pay for the same kind of mission.
Rovers rev up for Google’s moonshot jackpot [New Scientist]
