Quite a bit has happened so far this month dealing with the Space Race 2.0 or whatever you want to call the recent surge of interest.

First off is the most exciting, Google and the X Foundation just teamed up. They are offering $30 million in rewards for the first privately funded rover to get to the moon, and preform a few tasks.

The prize breakdown is as follows…

• $20 Million for the first team to successfully complete the task.
• $5 Million for the second team to successfully complete the task.
• $5 Million broken up for ‘exceeding expectations’ things like traveling 5 miles instead of 1/2, finding the original Apollo landing site, finding Ice at the southern pole

While the team to actually complete this certainly won’t make back the money from the prize alone, I’m sure many more avenues would open up.

On Friday the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a rocket towards the moon that will be orbiting 100 Kilometers above the moon.

Jamaipanese and Rising sun of nihon have reported that JAXA was going to become move into the private sector to try to snag a piece of the action; however, I could not find any information about this. I found a bit about National Space Development Agency of Japan (One of the three organizations that merged to form JAXA) using private contractors to build the rockets but that is outdated to far to be relevant. If anything, the contractors could go for the Google LunarX prize.

They should be fine, as long as this isn’t their rover… right?

Lastly, this month is the 30th anniversary of the Voyager mission, and you will also be able to see the four planets that were studied by the probes this month. Just look to the skies… with a starchart of course.