Google Lunar XPrize competition to end without a winner

The Google Lunar XPrize, an ambitious $30 million competition to send a robot to the surface of the moon, will end without any of the teams able to meet the March 31 deadline, organizers said in a statement Tuesday. After consulting with the five teams left in the competition, "we have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline," founder Peter Diamandis and chief executive Marcus Shingles wrote in the statement. "This literal'moonshot' is hard, and while we did expect a winner by now, due to the difficulties of fundraising, technical and regulatory challenges, the grand prize of the $30 [million] Google Lunar XPrize will go unclaimed." To win, contestants would have been required to land a spacecraft on the moon's surface, travel at least 500 meters, and then transmit high-definition video and images back to Earth. The end of the competition is a letdown and a sign of the difficulties of commercial space travel, despite the advancements of companies such as SpaceX.