Friday, March 29, 2019

XPRIZE Foundation Rolls Out New, $1M Moonshot Award

Los Angeles-based XPRIZE, the nonprofit which manages and operates competitions intended to spur significant advances in technology, says it has rolled out a new, $1 million award, which it calls the Moonshot Award. According to the Foundation, the award will go to an XPRIZE team demonstrating the achievement of a "moonshot" technological feat--even outside the parameters or timeframes of an XPRIZE competition. According to XPRIZE, it will present the first Moonshot Award to SpaceIL, the group which is in the midst of landing its own lunar lander on the moon, once SpaceIL lands its spacecraft on the moon--currently anticipated to happen on April 11th. SpaceIL originally began development of its lunar lander as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE effort. SpaceIL was founded in 2011 by Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, specifically to compete in the Google Lunar XPRIZE.