Yep, the race is on, $30 million to whomever safely lands (as in, In One piece) a robot on the surface of the Moon and get it "walk" 500mts and take lovely pictures (extra points for the Bot who uploads them to twitxr) . Now, 10 teams are already in, ranging from Team Italia to Romania's ARCA and also the guys wanting to Open Source all this.
Now, these are (in this context) exciting times, since we're looking (as Humanity) at the aging Shuttles doing a couple of flights per year, where each flight is a total risk management nightmare and yet we can't help wounder why is it that 20 years was not enought to come up with other ways to do things, and I know, we've probably reached the Technological Barrier and we're waiting for a Breakthrough (anti-gravity Mega Field and what not), but getting "ordinary" people to work on this (not just Government Suits) brings a little bit of hope, and even if most miss the moon (or indeed miss flight as a whole and come crashing down in flames and debris) SOMETHING will happen, and we'll (humanity you know) be proud of ourselfs again :D
Oh yeah, and bad bad google stole the idea , credit for the guy for thinking up this, but I submit that at least 2033556 anonymous people also had a similar idea ... being original is overrated :( we're (as in humanity again) just too many
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