Airbus, Blue Origin and ESA organize competition for sustainable sojourn on the moon

Airbus, Blue Origin and the European Space Agency, among others, have announced a competition for companies or individuals to develop technologies that contribute to sustainable living on and exploration of the moon.

For example, The Moon Race concerns the development of lunar technologies for building infrastructure, generating energy, growing plants or extracting water and oxygen. The global competition aims to promote sustainable lunar exploration and contribute to the necessary technologies.

Participants are judged on the scalability of their technology, how well it performs, how innovative it is and how well the public is involved. Winners will not only receive a cash prize, but will also receive access to experimental facilities and they receive support and advice from the organizations of The Moon Race. The organizers have not yet announced prize amounts for the eventual winners.

The competition will start in early 2019 and the selected participants will be announced during the International Astronautical Congress. From that moment on, the competition starts. By 2020, the participants must have completed a proof of concept and a prototype, after which development will start in 2021. Preparations will then have to be made in 2023 for the final launch to the moon, which should take place from 2024. It is likely that use will be made of the large, still developing New Glenn rocket of Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The Moon Race is somewhat similar to the Google Lunar X prize, which began in 2007 and offered teams a prize of $30 million if they managed to launch a lunar lander. However, no team met the deadline, after which the game was called off in early 2018. An important difference between the two competitions is that The Moon Race does not focus so much on technologies to get to the moon; it mainly concerns technologies for a sustainable moon stay.