Robotic Race to the Moon Heats Up

16 teams aim for the Moon. (Image: Flickr/Kevin Doncaster) Three engineers walk into a bar. The punchline won’t do any favors for your next stand-up set, but what followed may one day find its place in start-up folk history alongside the Silicon Valley garage. It was 2010, and Israeli engineer Yariv Bash had just posted a bold invitation on his Facebook wall. “I’m going to the Moon - who wants to join me?” Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub took the bait, meeting Bash for a beer. Soon, the three were sketching spacecraft designs on napkins, proposing unusual landers that would hop from site to site across the lunar surface. Emboldened, they signed up to enter the Google Lunar XPRIZE, a competition that offers $30 million in prizes to teams able to land a rover on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and beam high-definition visuals back to Earth. Six years later, ...