Lunar water-prospecting rover rolls closer towards launch

I'm all in favour of this but . . .

I've never understood how the Google Prize encourages so much competition. I had the same problem with the Ansari X Prize for a re-usable spacecraft. Surely the prize doesn't even cover the development and building costs and that's assuming you win!

Or were all of these efforts already in progress and the Google Prize just offers a little leverage?

Can anyone enlighten me?

Doozers

Is there a team of dedicated doozers (the little hardhatted folks from Fraggle Rock) working up in that drilling rig?

That cost in perspective

$1.8m Kg may sound high but according to a report on increasing the payload of the Saturn V (Logsdon & Africano) the cost per unit mass to put a unit of mass in Lunar orbit was more than the equivalent in Gold at the time.

They were able to increase Saturn payload by 5% *without* major hardware changes.

Interestingly this is about $35k/Kg about 1/51 that of Gold.

nuclear-powered rover

I find it rather frustrating that the use of nuclear-powered rovers is so very limited and not far more prolific. I recognize that the material necessary to power these units is limited in supply, but the units themselves should be built and made available to the many companies actually building and placing motorized rovers throughout our solar backyard.

If you're going to actually perform a credible search for large quantities of ice on the moon you need sufficient power to survive the extremely cold temperatures, the utter lack of all solar-energy when exploring the darker eternally shadowed areas, and good consistent power for drilling. Although I support all these various ventures, I feel they are very much handicapped long before they are ever launched. We should give the moon ventures just as much technological support as we do those ventures that go much further out (i.e. the Mars Rover etc...). Just my thoughts.