X PRIZE Foundation | Peter Diamadis | Talks at Google

All right, welcome to Peter D. Mandis Talk. First, I want to welcome our other offices, Santa Monica, Irvine, Kirkland and Phoenix, which are also on here via video. I know it's early for all of you engineers to. So we appreciate you being here in time to clear out the cafe. Now I've known Peter for a while now and the thing that most, I think differentiates Peter for most people and why he's been so successful is that he's very patient or stubborn, he says. And I was pretty amazed. I found actually online a little timeline of Peter's activities. And he's been at this for quite a while in fact, like in 1980, I believe, he founded his first student organization, which was SEDS, Students for Exploration and Development of Space at MIT in 1980. And it's now the world's largest student pro space organization. And he also, by the way, got his aerospace engineering degrees from mit, both undergraduate and graduate and, and by the way, an MD from Harvard. So if any of you feel sick during the presentation, he can help you out or if you want to go into space. And in fact, pretty much everything having to do with space that's been interesting over the last, well, since 1994 has been. Peter's been sort of founding. So he founded Zero G in 1993, which is the organization that takes you up on the 727 and makes you weightless. And I've done it twice now and I highly recommend it. I've never seen everyone be converted into two year olds instantly, no matter what their age is. So I think it's sort of like a new state of being. It's well worth doing and it's probably a lot safer than going into space also, or very, very safe. In 1994, the XPrize concept was conceived which resulted in the Ansarik's prize and the, you know, Burt Rutan's flight and so on. And in 1995 the ISU, which is the International Space University Central campus, was built and since then, and he's also founder of that incidentally, so. And then finally in 1997, Space Adventures was founded, which is how all the people, the private people have gone into space. The Anusha, Ansari, Dennis Tito and so on, and Charles Simone, all as part of that. So. And anyway, a whole bunch of things up till now, but I mean, for me actually when we were starting Google actually Sergey said that I was willing to wait for things to come sort of next day, that we had to order parts and he was too impatient for that. And that's why we managed to start Google. And I think all of this has happened because of Peter's great patience, perseverance and really dedication to this cause. And I know no finer person. So welcome Peter Dimandis.

Thank you, Larry. Wow, that's quite the introduction, Larry. Thank you. Thanks guys for being here. This is a magical time for us. I was on the plane the other day and realizing the this is truly a chance for dreams coming true. What I'd like to do, for those of you who don't know it very quickly, give a little bit of the history of the X Prize and not bore you. But it was based on this book, the spirit of St. Louis. If you haven't read it, won the Pulitzer Prize. Amazing book a great friend of mine, Greg Marinette gave me. And I had no idea Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win a $25,000 prize. But what was incredible was this 25,000 caused people to spend $400,000 to win it. And he paid none of the losers, just the winner. The guy who was the most unlikely person to win. The Flying Fool. The day before Lindbergh took off from New York, the New York Times put out this editorial said stop, don't do this. You're going to set back aviation a decade by killing yourself. Well, of course just the opposite happened. And within 18 months of his flight, passenger travel in the US went up 30 fold from 6,000 to 180,000. That idea, reading that and the frustration around my wanting to go into space and literally giving up on NASA being the way I was going to get there. I laugh and say my chances of becoming an astronaut are less than my chances of becoming an NBA All Star. But in reading it I said what kind of prize could bring about a new generation of private spaceships? This concept, The X Prize $10 million was enough to attract entrepreneurs but not turn the heads of the low Lockheed's and the Boeings and three person privately funded ship. When we first announced this, everybody said it's crazy. Why isn't NASA doing this? Would anybody really be able to win this? Aren't people going to kill themselves? I was turned down probably 2, 300 times for putting up the money. But luckily at the end of the day, we did fund it through the Ansari family. And incredibly it worked again. We had 26 teams who spent $100 million to do this was Darwinian evolution. Literally every possible approach, vertical and horizontal takeoff, solids, hybrids, liquid engines, above an airplane, below an airplane, on a balloon. Helicopter designs was tried and that Was the beauty of prizes, the magic winning shot, the money shot. 2004, October 4th was fantastic. We hit our marks. We changed the paradigm. I used to go into schools and ask kids how many of you would like to travel into space. Everyone raises their hand. And then I would ask how many of you actually think you'll have a chance to go? And no one would raise their hands because it was clear that your chances were very small. And now that's begun to change. I tell people if you want to travel to space, you can. Not your kids, not your grandkids, you can get a chance to go. So we drove regulatory reform. We got a huge amount of media and now the winning vehicle is hanging in, well, almost in building 43 at least. The mock up is replicas in building 43. But the winning vehicle is in air and space, right next to the spirit of St. Louis. 120 million of media value. This is pre YouTube, but five and a half billion media impressions. So that was incredible for us. This was the Google doodle. On the day that the X Prize was won. It came up here and gave a similar tech talk. Back In October of 2004, I had the pleasure to meet Larry who said, you know, why doesn't the X Prize become an organization that fosters prizes in other areas, A world class prize institute. Larry very graciously joined our board of trustees and we did just that. We took on an audacious goal of building an organization whose mission was to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. We committed to doing about a third of our prizes in space and 2/3 in other areas. And that's the path we're on. And I'll speak to that in a little bit. But besides Larry coming on, other folks you may know, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, recently Ray Kurzweil has joined the board and and really try to say where are the biggest challenges that humanity has? And so we're looking at besides space. We're getting ready to launch an Automotive X Prize later this year. We're in negotiations with a title sponsor on that. The notion would be a new generation, not a single car, not just Tesla, but a new generation of cars, a dozen different cars, all that exceed 100 miles per gallon equivalent, that are low carbon emission, that are affordable and look great cars that people want to drive. So we're hoping that the Automotive X Prize will bring about those breakthroughs. We launched the Archon X Prize for Genomics. 10 million to the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. Hopefully getting low cost rapid gene sequencing will allow us to really be able to correlate disease state with gene sequences. If you have a large enough database, especially in a place like this, you can do that correlation and say, you know, you're likely to come down with adult onset diabetes, change your diet this way and really change medicine from something that's reactive to predictive could completely change the medical industry. We're looking at nanotechnology, looking at medicine, environment, education, poverty and looking at a flow of prizes. Where are the biggest challenges we have? So on March 3rd of this year we had a Gayla here. Thanks again to Larry and Sergey and the team for hosting us. And that morning we had this meeting talking about where should we be doing our next prizes and where should we be looking at prizes in space? Well, the very first conversation on the idea of the Google Lunar X Prize took place on March 3rd and incredibly we launched on March 13th. And our, our slogan here is join the revolution. And it really is for us a revolution. Moon 1.0, which was Apollo, was about sending 12 men, American men, to the moon. It was about humanity going to the moon, but in particular it was a very small segment. It was literally leaving flags and footprints on the lunar surface. Moon 2.0, as we call it, is about bringing humanity there a chance for all of us. Larry's kind intro points out my passion and my mission has been how do we include, how do we include everybody? How do we make space something that is personal, that we can all be part of, not just reading about it someplace and seeing it. How can we all have a part of that future? So I want you to imagine a private international moon race, literally racing the government back to the lunar surface, where universities, private companies, small groups of individuals are doing what thought only possible by governments. And that's what the Google Lunar X Prize is. We haven't been back there in over 30 years, which in itself is incredible. The fact that we would go there in the first place and then not go back. Let me show you a quick video that will set the tone of the Apollo era. If you could roll the first video, please. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. So we literally went and the engine that drove us to go to the moon in the 1960s was a political one. It was fear. I don't know if you know this, but the average age of the engineers who built Apollo in 1961 know the number 26 years old. The average age of the engineers who literally created Apollo was 26. There was no one there to tell them how to do it. They had to invent the navigation, the guidance systems, propulsion systems, rendezvous and docking, structural systems, everything. There was no one there in their 50s say, well, no, son, this is the way we used to do it. You can't do it. And that's unfortunately what's happened. We're literally going back to the moon. It's costing us two or three times as much and taking three times longer. Incredibly, that same average 26 year old age was what built the dot com industry. It was literally saying, start with a fresh sheet of paper and go. And this is what our hope is, to inspire a new generation of thinkers to look at how to open up space. So I am thankful that Google has stepped up to this challenge. It's a $30 million purse. It is the largest international purse ever. 20 million for a first place, 5 million for a second, and 5 million in bonuses. And let me actually roll this next video that will show a little bit about what the prize is about and I'll come back to this.

Spaceship Earth, a delicate jewel in a vast universe. Saving it has become a global priority.

T minus 2 minutes and hold. Pre programmed hold for final systems check. Final systems check complete.

The countdown has started for a space mission unlike anything ever attempted. Not a government, but a privately funded team prepares to make history.

YouTube is all. The XPRIZE foundation has joined forces with.

Google, the world's largest search engine, to create the biggest international prize ever. And it's open to private enterprise from any nation. $30 million in prize money is offered to the first two privately funded teams.

To land and rove a robotic craft.

On the lunar surface. The mission will push ingenuity further than ever before.

Velocity 25,000 miles per hour. Distance to target 238,850.

56 miles.

Pitch angle on profile.

Have we made contact?

Affirmative.

Contact light is on. We are on the surface.

Nice working. The first ever privately funded vehicle has successfully landed on the moon.

All systems arco.

Until recently, space was off limits to the public. But in 2004, the winners of the Ansari X Prize proved that private enterprise could travel to space in a reliable, reusable spacecraft. Less expensively than any government program. The competition ignited a revolution that will launch thousands of civilian passengers into space. Today, the Google Lunar X Prize is challenging free enterprise to reach much further to the moon. To pave the way to harnessing its wealth of resources only days away. It's Earth's partner and a unique two world system.

That's one small step for man, one.

Giant leap for man.

These early missions learned much about the moon, but they were far too expensive and lacked any long term plan. So in 1972, Moon 1.0 was abandoned. Earth's offshore island, the Moon can become our greatest asset. It could help provide our world with abundant resources and clean, affordable, limitless energy. The Google Lunar X Prize is designed to kick start moon 2.0, a revolution in space to benefit all humanity.

All right, let's get a better look.

Much of the lunar soil is silicon, the key ingredient in solar cell. In the future, the silicon could be mined and used to build huge solar power satellites. These satellites could be deployed to capture clean solar energy for the Earth. Each one capable of powering a large city. Part of the prize purse includes bonuses for teams that achieve extraordinary performance.

We are coming up on the crater.

Rim like finding ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar south pole.

Drive and stop before crater rim.

Lights on. Look at that. Spectral analysis confirms presence of water ice.

Ice could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen elements vital to lunar habitation and to producing rocket fuel, propelling us to new worlds. The lunar night is extremely cold.

So.

There'S an added cash prize for the team that is able to survive the equivalent of two Earth weeks of brutally frigid temperatures.

It's going to be a long lunar night.

Rise and shine, people.

Rover is powered up and back in action.

Finally, to connect with our space heritage, there's a bonus prize for the first team to find artifacts of previous exploration.

We have located the Apollo lander. Congratulations, everyone. Mission accomplished.

Today, the Google Loop, the Lunar X Prize ignites our imagination, allows us all to participate and challenges private enterprise to take us back to the moon. And this time, we're planning to stay. Moon 2.0 join the revolution.

Actually, if I could just back up one slide. So that gives you a little flavor. It's obviously a little dramatic and it's just an educational piece for us to go out to the community with. But let me take a second and speak to the rules here and obviously let's have some dialogue on it in the Q and A if you wish. But we ended up originally proposed this prize to NASA, went and spoke with the NASA administrator and the folks there and said, you know, we have logically at Xprize a couple of places we can go for in the space arena as an X Prize orbital prize. We're looking at really a $50 million private orbital prize. Would be the minimum amount of money Lunar, which had a lot of interesting implications in terms of robotics and exploration, or a propulsion breakthrough prize. And NASA was very interested in both the Lunar and all of them, but Lunar in particular. And they funded us to do a study. We went out there and studied how much it would take to really do this. And we figured 20 million was a minimum amount for a first place that would. The least cost you could do this for is probably in the 15 to 20 million dollars arena, actually go and build and land on the moon. So 20 million was a first place. We learned we really wanted a second place prize to keep the number of teams going forward. So, you know, when Burt Rutan won the original Ansari X prize, there was a field of about four or five potential folks that would have kept going had there been at least a million dollars as a second place prize. So we learned that lesson, and putting a second place prize was critical to us. And then the bonuses were a way that we could cause teams to extend themselves, but not in a fashion that would overextend themselves from at least winning the basic mission. So we have a number of bonuses. One is for when you to win the actual baseline prize, you have to land. People say it's a soft land. No, you could crash in the moon if you can survive that. When you land on the moon, you have to actually send back a data set we call a mooncast. And that mooncast will include a number of YouTube videos, high definition videos, panoramic still images, images of your descent. So that's basic mooncast. And it's really intended to create content that excites the public and says, hey, this is your mission. Then you have to rove at least 500 meters again to change your view, have the ability to actually go and explore someplace interesting, you see, and after you've roved 500 meters, you have to send back another moon cast back to the Earth. One of the things that's cool is we partnered with seti, the SETI Institute that has something called the Allen Telescope Array. Paul Allen funded the largest private array. We originally were going to work with NASA Deep Space Network. But the DSN is very difficult to work with, not only because of the government, because they're in communications with a number of satellite systems. And it turns out Allen Telescope Array, which is up here in Northern California, is receive only, but is of equal magnitude to the Deep Space Network. And in fact, by the time it grows, it will far surpass it. So we'll have a private network to work with. So they'll be pointing instead of looking for SETI signals, pointing it at the moon every time there's a mission up there. And we've arranged it such that all the teams will have free access to that to reduce the barrier. So you'll have to rove if you row 10 times further instead of 500 meters, row for 5 kilometers. There's a bonus of up to $5 million there if you detect water ice. There's another bonus if you detect any Moon 1.0 hardware, a Soviet Lunokhod, any piece of Apollo hardware. I mean, that's really the chance to go and connect with the heritage and say we're taking over where Apollo 17 left off in 1972. There's surviving a lunar night. The lunar temperatures drop down well below 150 degrees centigrade. And because all of this is solar power, there's no, you know, nuclear. It's a challenge to really have your electronics survive and wake up the next day. But if you do wake up and send another moon cast, then you win a prize purse for that. We have detecting the water ice. And then one of the unusual but important bonuses is a diversity prize. So the team that maximizes diversity of its employees in terms of age, ethnic, gender, there's going to be a prize out for that. Again, just to demonstrate that this is not the same old space program. Before we announced the competition on September 13th at Next Fest, Larry was there. Buzz Shanna Dale, the deputy administrator number two at NASA, Elon was there. Elon, who also serves on our board, came on as a major donor and has offered all teams that use his launch vehicle, basically a launch at his cost. He'll basically donate his profit back to the teams to maximize their chance of winning. Interestingly enough, the calculations we did a Falcon 1e. He's launched the Falcon 1 about 90% of the way to orbit. Hopefully in January he'll successfully get it. He has an extended version of that called the Falcon 1E that the calculations show can land between 50 to 100 pounds on the surface of the moon in terms of the total mass fraction that will get there. So, you know, you can do a lot with 50 to 100 pounds these days. And so the cost of that vehicle would be about $7 million, which means you can conceive of getting a mission on the surface for under 20 million, which is at least an order of magnitude. The first lunar lander mission that NASA had planned to do was originally here at Ames. It got taken down to Huntsville and cost it at a billion dollars. So it's definitely a different set of capabilities. We had over 300 press and had over 1000 articles, over 5000 blogs so far, amazingly, all extremely positive. So let's roll a short clip from the opening video. You can find all these on YouTube, by the way.

Boys and girls, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here this morning. This is a milestone event for the XPRIZE foundation and a special opportunity for me personally.

Today we're challenging private teams from around the world to design and build robotic explorers and race them to the surface of the moon. The Google Lunar X Prize is a competition that will once again demonstrate that small, dedicated teams of individuals can do what was thought only once possible, possible by governments. We are extremely thrilled and proud to have Google as our partner in this epic adventure. And it's my personal pleasure to give heartfelt thanks to Larry Page and Sergey Brin for embracing this prize and making it possible.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a trustee of the XPRIZE foundation and co founder of Google, Mr. Larry Page. And we believe that these kind of contests and setting an ambitious goal like going to the Moon is really a good way to improve the state of humanity in the world. And that's why we care about this. It's also going to be a great competition, a lot of fun. I hope that a small team, very ambitious team of people will let us all virtually go back to the Moon very soon. So I couldn't be more excited about that.

It's a pleasure to be with all of these gentlemen today to celebrate the launch of the Google Lunar X Prize. Now, let me read from the plaque. We Apollo astronauts congratulate the winner of.

The Google Lunar X Prize.

May this plaque, placed on the surface of the moon by this intrepid craft and its team, serve as a welcoming beacon to future generations of lunar explorers. This spacecraft returns in the spirit of our journeys of the 20th century, in peace, and with hope for all mankind. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Ladies. Ladies and gentlemen, the clock has started. Let the race begin. So it was a fun launch and a great start. And incredibly, when we originally did the study for NASA, NASA was going to only have, by the way, us teams allowed to compete for NASA Lunar X Prize. And luckily turned out they didn't have the money to to fund the prize. So we ended up coming to Google. It's pretty funny on a $16 billion annual budget, but they didn't and we announced it and this has been our registration request we've had as of last night over 125 groups around the world request registration materials and we've had actually five teams submit them already, which is, you know, way, way, way ahead of what we expected. So it's from 20, I think we're up to 23 countries in terms of interested interest. So that for me is huge because it's a chance to really spark the dreams of entrepreneurs around the planet and say it no longer takes the entire might of the Soviet Union or the US to go to the Moon. A small dedicated team can actually do that and that will fundamentally change the view of folks for space. I'm going to show two short videos in a moment. The first one is from James Cameron. Many of you may know he's a explorer and someone who's very passionate about this. So let's run that James Cameron video.

It's been 35 years since we've had a human presence on the Moon. Now with the announcement of the Google Lunar X Prize, we're going back. And not because of a massive government program, but using the ingenuity and cost effectiveness of private enterprise. The competition created by this landmark prize could cut the cost of lunar exploration by an order of magnitude. The Google Lunar X Prize will pick up where Apollo 17 left off 35 years ago. This is Moon 2.0 with private industry reopening the high frontier and kickstarting the future of lunar exploration. As an explorer and an avid supporter of exploration in all its forms, I can't think of a more exciting way to engage the public's imagination and to go forward, not in some future decade, but now with an achievable short term plan to begin opening up our two world system.

A friend of mine, someone you guys have seen his work. Arthur c. Clarke wrote 2001. He also is the inventor of the communication satellite. So he was really thrilled about this prize and sent us a short video from Sri Lanka. He's been sort of stuck there for the last 15 years, wheelchair bound. But let's Quick message from to Larry and Sergey from Arthur Clarke Anders and the H Prize foundation for staging another remarkable challenge that is sure to transform the world once more. And I applaud Larry Page and Sergey Boleyn for stepping up with the backing that makes it possible. If I could borrow a line from.

My friend Neil, it is one small step.

We Google one John Leap for Googlekind. I'll be watching with great interest as your adventure unfolds. This is Arthur Clark signing off from Sri Lanka. Let the new Moon race begin. That was fun. This is about education Inspiration, it's the primary payload that we're carrying back to the moon to really exciting new generation of scientists and engineers and saying, you can do this, you can tinker, you can build and you can send your stuff to the surface of the moon. We've partnered with the St. Louis Science center that is building out a global science center network that will allow kids to participate in this. We've also teamed with International Space University based in Strasbourg, France that will be reaching out again globally. They'll be helping us recruit teams and judging teams. There is going to be a top end curriculum that will be pushing out to the schools and to the teachers. So education and the education element of what we do is critical to us. One of the things that we launched is something called the lunar legacy. In 1972, Charles Duke, who was an Apollo 16 astronaut, did something that was an off the cuff thought. He left a photograph of of him and his family with an inspirational note written on the back on the lunar surface and against the dark and the gray hues of the moon. It was a beautiful image and you can see it there in the photo. So one of the things that we've done to help fund our education efforts beyond the kind support that Google has given us is launch this Lunar Legacy Program. So we're basically for $10, people can upload a digital image and a message that will be put on a chip and carried to on all vehicles making the attempt to go to the moon. We're calling it the Lunar Legacy Program. Half the money that comes in goes to our education effort. Half the money that comes and goes to the teams competing to help their education efforts. So you can go online. We've got about, I don't know, probably 700, 800 people who have, who are in the process right now who have done that. We hope to get to millions of folks who will put their images on this thing. You heard Buzz Aldrin read this plaque. This is an effort we put together in the last three weeks. We actually went out to all of the Apollo astronauts and got them to agree on a statement which was really hard to do about, you know, we Apollo astronauts congratulate the winner. And here are 11 of them so far and we hope to get all of them on board. And this is a chance to sort of carry on the legacy. This plaque is actually part of a larger plaque that will be going up. This is an effort to recognize contributors again. Our goal is to raise through this plaque where people contribute 25,000 or more, get a chance to put Their name on this, this on a science center wall, you have a chance to have your name on the plaque on the rovers that go to the moon. And again, this goes to funding our education outreach and to funding the team. So if it's something of interest to anybody here, please let us know. So what else are we going to do? We're going to be putting together the largest time capsule we can. So again, through Google and the Google products, we're going to be encouraging teams to send us their videos, their photos, their content and we're going to put as much as whatever the latest storage media is three, four years from now, we're going to put as much content on the vehicles that are going. So we have as part of every vehicle that goes, we've got a half a kilogram reserved for storage media to go to the surface of the moon. We're also going to have a competition. You all know the immortal words of Neil Armstrong, one small story step. We're going to have a competition that says what's going to be the first email sent back from the moon? What's going to be the first YouTube video sent back from the moon? So people are going to have, it's going to be a user selected experience working with the Google team and the YouTube team to say how do we do this best? So over the course of the next three to six years, I expect, by the way, we're going to have a winner of this within four years. I think that quickly going to have teams making an attempt. The $20 million purse for first place is on the table through December 31st, 2012. At that point the 20 million gets reduced down to 15 million, which is on the table through December 31, 2014. So it's a chance to try and accelerate people's interest. But the notion here is that we'll let the users generate as many as they can, vote them down to the top 50 videos and 50 emails and we'll have a panel sort of pick the one they think is best. And so it'll be a surprise as to what gets transmitted back from the lunar surface. Live video. The teams are going to be required to transmit at least eight hours a day. And so we're going to have again people on the net be able to watch it. We're going to have competitions and allow kids to have a chance to drive the rover on the moon. Again, how much can we incorporate? User participation. It's all about having Moon 2.0 be about your experience on the lunar surface. Obviously we'll have personalized iGoogle pages around Google Lunar XPrize, SMS, you know, send an SMS to the moon and whatever the current snapshot is gets transmitted to your phone. So the idea is, and we're open to ideas, whatever way we can get the products and the user experience to be really amazing. So please work with our team and we're open to doing that. And of course we're very, you know, I'm very thankful that Brian and his team at Google Earth got Google Moon up to its next generation. And we're looking forward to having live video plugged into Google Moon going forward. One last slide that I'd love to open up for. Questions? Why are we doing this? We're doing this to educate and to inspire. The notion is that we're going to qualify a brand new generation of hardware. NASA's got a problem. The problem is that they can't find fly something that's not flown before. It's a really strange thing. They have something called a test readiness level, a TRL level that goes like from 1 to 10. 10 means it's been flowing consistently and it's safe to fly. One is, it's a concept and there's this bridge they call the TRL gap. It's like something that's never been tested but is a really good idea, has a really hard time flying because you have to test it and test it and test it and no one ever takes the risk because if it fails, it's, it's too visible a failure. So what we have a chance to do here is to qualify a brand new generation of hardware that's an order or two of magnitude less expensive. That will enable literally small countries, universities, groups of people to go and explore the same hardware that we're qualifying here can actually go to the moons of Phobos, can go out to asteroids and the resources that we have out there. The average nickel iron asteroid half kilometer in size is worth something like 20 to 30 trillion dollars in platinum group metal markets. We actually the largest nickel mines on Earth and the largest platinum mines on Earth are actually asteroid impact sites that we mine. So the resources that we need to continue human expansion are we have to start thinking outside of just the biosphere of Earth if we want to preserve it and allow for increased standards of living for beyond just the US So it's that and a chance to increase the economic sphere of Earth beyond just geostationary orbit out to the moon and to inspire. So let me pause there. This is my email and phone number. If you have Ideas, please email them to me. I'm happy to plug in. I'd love to take questions. Let me say thank you to the Google family for your support. This is something we're looking, we're excited and we're thrilled to be doing with you. So thank you everybody. Questions? Surely, please.

So curious how you plan to address the danger of. Okay, you succeed. Congress now believes that every space exploration mission can be done for $20 million. So how do we do science after that?

So one of the most powerful results of this will be the ability to do science at a much lower cost. The ability to actually take sensors, experiments to the moon and do it on a much quicker time scale. I mean, you know, if you're going to become, if you go and get your doctorate degree in space sciences, you're, you know, sometimes you're dissuaded from doing that because to do your thesis, to do on an actual research experiment can take a decade. This is, in my mind, this is no different than the fact that we use room size computers. And then here, Kim here came Pong that qualified a new type of low cost system that, you know, what utility is it if we can do this and demonstrate an economic model and demonstrate new hardware that reduces the cost? The hope is that it will actually reduce the cycle, the time cycle and reduce the complexity of doing space science.

Well, physics works against you. There are minimum sizes for going to the moon. Yeah. But for going to outer planets, there are minimum sizes you have to deal with. And so these things are expensive.

Agreed. And again, I'm just, I'm hoping that what we'll see here is that companies can sponsor science missions, individuals can sponsor science missions. You know, as long as we're just dependent on the government to do it, who are on the whims of congressional budgets up and down and things get kicked off like super colliders that never occur. So I think this is sort of a new approach that we need to try. I mean, I don't think the government's going to go anyplace. I don't think NASA is going to be defunded. But I think this is an expansive approach versus reducing the amount we're going to be doing. Please, you went through a process to assign $20 million or $30 million for this. And I was wondering about a couple other numbers that you must have thought about at least to some degree. Number one, how much would it cost.

To send a person to the moon.

And bring him or her back? And secondly, if you were going to make the robotic mission be to Mars, how much would you have to offer? Can you say that second one part again? If this mission was to Mars instead of to the moon, how much would the enterprise have to be right now? Yeah, so we did go through a lot of studies. We spent, we spoke and when we studied this to every likely candidate we thought of at universities, small companies. And how much would it take for you to really make an attempt at this, to close the business case, if you would. Because these teams are going to have business cases beyond just winning the Google Lunar x Prize. And 20 million was what we believe was the right number. Looking at Mars, Mars Pathfinder, that Tony spare, the first airbag mission without the launch was $100 million to do that mission. And it's probably 150 million with a Delta launch included. You know, I think there's a natural limit to the size of prizes and you know, would a $50 million Mars mission work to spark a team? Maybe or $100 million. But the business case for that would be harder to justify. The vehicles that are going to the moon can do asteroid exploration. There's a billion, you know, to $10 billion that NASA's going to be spending in lunar explorers. If these vehicles succeed, NASA will likely buy these vehicles going forward. So for this prize, if it was to send a person and not a robot, how much would that be? That's a good question. I don't know I can really answer that. I mean the having to come back is the hardest part, you know. So a rule of thumb is it's 10 times harder for a return mission. I mean, that's why, you know, for me the best way to go Mars is a dedicated one way mission. You know, people are going there to colonize. Coming back makes it much likelier to fail and far more expensive. Please. Yeah, I was one of the things.

In the video showed that, you know, you can create solar energy on the.

Moon, there's lots of silicon, but how.

Do you actually get the energy back to Earth?

So that's one of the interesting controversial subjects and we discussed whether we should put that in the video. Video. There's been a huge amount of studies and actually the space community has got like two camps and the notion is that it's microwave transmission. You can actually there have been extensive studies that have been done by Raytheon and Peter Glaser was the pioneer, actually went and built large rectennas and you out in the desert, even over the water or large farms, you can actually build large rectas. And the efficiency of the day, night cycle, the atmospheric attenuation gives you sort of an order of magnitude increase. And so we'll see. There's a lot of momentum right now in looking back at solar power satellites, but you capture it and then you basically transmit it in the microwave region back. But have they studied how microwaves impact the environment? Yep, they have. They've done the evaluation on birds, on plants, on atmospheric interactions, and all the results came back without significant interference.

Okay, thanks, please. One of the first slides you showed were the various X prizes that you're considering, and one of them was for energy. About two years ago, Dr. Broussard came and spoke at Google and said that for approximately $250 million, he believed you could build a working fusion generator. And to duplicate the work that he had already done for the Navy would take about $2 million to show that the concept was valid. And then the full scale would then follow from the that. What prizes have you considered for the Energy X Prize?

So we are just finalizing a seed grant from two foundations, and I've just hired a team to look at Energy X Prizes. I think the bent of the X Prize foundation has been more about personalizing things. So personalized spaceflight, in this case, almost personalized exploration. And in the energy realm, we're looking more in the lines of decentralized power, sort of very small biofuel plants, small solar thermal plants. The idea of competitions to design systems that are low cost, highly efficient, that can be built by small teams and demonstrated, that can actually be stuck in your backyard and feed the grid or feed the community. So those are more the directions that we've been looking at so far.

Hi, I got two questions.

Firstly, are Google employees eligible for this prize? I have no idea, Larry. I have to ask the lawyers, I guess, or, I mean, it'd be hilarious to have a Google team go for it. So you have to. Okay. Secondly, I'm sure you're aware of a.

Certain group of revisionist history people who.

Dr. Aldrin has had the honor of.

Punching one of them in the face.

And I'm wondering whether, whether you have an opinion on what they're going to think about this. We've identified the soundstage for them, or all this has taken place and invited them to come and watch. It's going to be interesting. I think. I really hope that a team will actually be able to go and do a soft landing near an Apollo site. Clearly, one of the things that we're going to be thinking through is how to make sure that none of the footprints and hardware is disturbed. But if we can once and for all in a different way because we can, you know, you can visualize stuff on the surface of the moon right now, corner cube reflectors and such. So you can, you can show that there is stuff on the surface. But we've invited, we've invited those folks to form a team and go back to the moon and take a look for themselves. Thanks. Please.

I believe some of audience here today are very interested in some kind of involvement to this program. So my original question was are you interested in Google employee to volunteering X Prize activity or individual team that are trying to go to the moon? But the previous question was answered that.

The Google employee probably not eligible to. Well, let's split that question in two parts. We would love to have employees who are interested in dedicating their time to help us make this mission the best it can possibly be. Make the user experience on the net the best it can possibly be. Clearly Google is helping experts do this a lot so far and we're. This is not an official request, but if you guys want to volunteer and support us, please. This is your mission as much as ours. So if there's a way that you want to help us develop the web experience or other aspects, you know, my email is up on the, on the board here. I'll connect you with our team. As to whether a Google team could actually go and build a rover and fly it to the moon and win the competition, that's a separate, a separate question.

Okay, so I'm very quite interested in participating in that area. So.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. I also, you know, invite folks who want to financially contribute to what we're doing on the education mission. Put your name on the surface of the moon. That's another way folks can participate.

Hi, how's it going? I was wondering if you could tell.

Us a little bit about some of.

The teams that are already involved. Who they are. Is Burt Rutan getting involved? And then some that you are speculating might, you know.

Sure. Tell us a little bit about them. So we have had a wide range in the original Ansari xprize. We probably turned away about half the applicants who came back. And when we turn a team away, we don't say you're wrong, we say please. These are the concerns we have. Can you go back and iterate it and resubmit your application? I did have the, you know, the UFO team who had anti gravity devices. All you have to do is you have to just levitate to the second floor. I'm on the second floor of my building. Just levitate the second floor. You don't have to go any further than that. And you can, we'll register you to compete. But. We're, you know, you don't want to turn away those pesky bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, you know, so you don't want to prejudge people's technology. We've had at least two or three of the major aerospace primes contact us, which is a big surprise because we did not expect to have the major primes compete in the Ansari X Prize. And the problem is, if they demonstrate they can go to the moon for $30 million, why is NASA paying them hundreds of millions? So that's the problem that they face. But we've had a number of known startup companies and I don't feel comfortable mentioning the names right now until they all disclose that they registered. But there are a number of teams. I do know that I spoke to the Mojave Aerospace Ventures Group and Dave Moore, who runs that. And I don't know if his comments are confidential since this is being broadcast, but let's just say that he was very intrigued by the competition. So I think that if we could get the same sort of folks who compete in the America's cup, who will spend 60 or 70 million dollars for a race ship racing boat to compete for this, that'd be really cool. And all of us get a chance to win through that. So it's a wide range. And what really hit me is the national diversity. That's exciting. Sir.

Hi. So this is an unmanned prize. The last one was a manned prize. There was a real risk that somebody could get killed.

Yep. Does that enter into your decision making.

When you decide how to offer these?

Absolutely. So in order for this model, the prize model to work, the media has to care about what's going on because the $30 million is a huge amount of money that credentials the competition. It inspires people, it gets teams going. Looking at this, and then the media that's generated around the competition is what the teams then use to go and raise money themselves. And typically gets us a 10 to 50 times leverage on the prize money. So not having a human in the loop means that we really need to now turn our focus to the teams and the humans in the team. So the robots that land on the moon may be an anthropomorphic manifestation station of the teams here on the ground, but we're planning to focus our attention through television and YouTube and blogs, and so forth on the teams themselves. So one of the requirements, for example, is that every team has an embedded reporter. And that embedded reporter, and that's something that we've been working with folks here at Google about, is going to have to blog on a regular basis, upload YouTube videos so that you can follow the teams literally week to week on what they're doing and tell their story of what works, what fails. John Carmack, many of you may know, is an inventor of Quake and Doom, who's been building vehicles in the X Prize cup, does an amazing job blogging and uploading videos and people will watch what he does and he's a very open source space, which is great.

Thanks.

Thank you. Yes. Hi, Peter. First off, I think it's a really good idea and I think you set the prize a bit about the right level in the sense that for the Ansari X Prize, the cost to do that was roughly maybe double or triple what the prize was. And the money that they make, the business case they make is that they've got outside something in the background, either media or in their case selling to.

Branson and so on.

And I think the same is going to be true here. My guess is it's probably going to cost 50 to 100 million to probably do this. But are you going to help somehow or other, have you thought about how you can help these companies close their business case? Maybe give them media contacts or give them ways of giving it some sort of money other than just the prize? So, good question. I think that the smartest teams will be able to do this probably for under 50, I think. I think my estimate is the cheapest we'll see. It is 20 million. And I think you could probably see a number of teams spending 30 or 40 million to do this, but in that area. But it goes back to the point that in competitions typically teams will spend the amount of the money a factor of 2, factor 2 above in this case. One of the things that we learned in the original Ansari X Prize was that it's important for us to own all the media rights and then to broker those media rights to, to get the most attention worldwide. It turned out that when the original Ansari X Prize, when the teams were piecemeal trying to broker their media rights, it diluted the value tremendously. So one thing that the master team agreement we signed with the teams that the Xprize foundation and through the X Prize, Google owns the media rights and will be making sure that we have the maximum amount of coverage showing the team's capabilities because as it turns out, when I originally met Bob Weiss, who you saw in the video here, has produced 20 motion pictures, I went to him going, I'm going to fund the Ansari. XPRIZE was not the Ansari X Prize then the X Prize by selling the media rights. And he laughed out loud. And it's true, the media rights for these things are worth a very small amount of money. It's the publicity that then attracts the corporate sponsors. That is the engine that works there. So the more we can publicize it, the more it allows the teams to go and get local benefactors or sponsors to underwrite their folks. But we do want to help the team. So we will be serving as a. If their sponsors want to call us and talk about the competition. And we will be creating some interim milestones with hopefully capital. So the money, for example, we get from people donating to xprize, we split between ourselves and the team. Teams will create interim milestones that teams can win to try and move them and give them visibility. I was thinking something more like what NASCAR does. You know, they have tremendous corporate sponsorship and they organize events where the corporate sponsors can work with the various teams and they essentially split the dough. Yep. But they've got a tremendous money making machine. Machine through exactly what you're saying there. But it has to be organized by somebody and that's really what makes it all work. We are looking at that in case of can we create interim milestones where teams can, in the case of nascar, if they win, make interim, you know, depending where they are on individual races, they can win money through the sponsors there. We're looking at can we have interim prizes that support the teams moving forward? Yes.

So all this is much less than the budget for a typical Hollywood movie. Is it possible to fund this by making a good movie out of it?

That's a good question. Again, if you look at the amount of money spent on movie rights, the maximum you'll get paid for a movie script and typically in the single digit millions. So could we get that kind of level of money? Sure, but you're not going to get 50 or 100 million. That money is actually used to pay the stars and produce the movie. But you're right, this is far less than a typical James Cameron movie by an order of magnitude. Maybe one. Two last questions and we'll wrap up.

Hi, Tiffany. Hi, Peter. In response to the gentleman who asked the question earlier about whether Googlers could compete, there's nothing in the current rule set that bars Googlers from competing. I think the High level answer is that it's still undecided. So we'll have to get back to everybody on that.

Talk about 20% time. Yeah.

Second comment. While we were at the XPRIZE event last week, I got some oddball questions from some folks who were maybe a little concerned, concerned about why we weren't going directly to Mars. So it was apparent to me. But maybe you could tell the audience a few words about why going to the moon is an important first step to developing a long term human off world presence.

Sure. Once we are able to build a sustainable capability on the moon, it literally represents a launch platform. It's a way station from which we can do refueling. The ability to get off the Earth's surface because of the deep gravity, well compared to 1/6 gravity of the moon makes the moon an ideal place to go and stage to build structures to refuel your vehicles. And once we are able to build that capability, it gives us really a launching pad to go not only to Mars, but to any, any place in the solar system. It's a very low delta V diversion from the moon. And because it's only, you know, one and a half light seconds to the moon and one and a half seconds back, it's a great place for a base of operations. So if we went to the Mars right now, it would literally be a flags and footsteps mission again. It's going to Mars. Proving that you can do it and come back unless. And NASA can't do a one way mission. I wish they could. It's the right way to do it. And I think, you know, my own personal belief is that the first mission to Mars will be eventually a private one on a one way colonization mission. It's going to be a hard, you know, I don't think NASA could ever get through Congress. Well, we're going to leave them there, you know, but that's a whole different conversation. Thanks Tiffany.

I remember visiting the X Prize booth.

At Oshkosh ten years ago thinking these people are crazy. We were.

Still are.

So I've learned my lesson. Very excited about this.

Thank you. I totally believe it's going to succeed. My question is to do the mission that you've described here is really two pieces. You've got a launch vehicle requirement and.

Then an exploration vehicle requirement.

Do you see or do you anticipate, do you hope or any of those that the winners will build a new.

Launch vehicle and build a new exploration.

Vehicle or do you see that there's.

Some opportunity for reuse, like a really.

Great new booster and they bought the.

Plans for the Pathfinder or vice versa. Great question. I think that every team will use an existing launch capability and focus on the explosion explore a rover part. There are a lot of really low cost launch opportunities out there. Besides Elon Elon's vehicle, there's about a dozen communication and geostationary satellites that are launched every year and those going up on Deltas and Atlases and Arianes and There's typically about 10 to 30% of the launch capacity is fallow they don't use the entire booster and so you could literally get a very low cost, few single digit millions into a geo transfer orbit. So your apogee is out at 22,300 miles and your perigee is down at a few hundred miles and it's a great place for you to piggyback and then boost to the moon. So there are some great opportunities like that that teams will make use of and really focus their energy on what needs to be done which is low cost landing roving video back. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate your time folks and look forward to to being back here when we all watched it, being one together. Thank you so much.