XPRIZE Foundation Announces $1 Million ‘Moonshot Award’ for Technical Achievements Outside of an Active XPRIZE Competition

The Award is inspired by SpaceIL, a former Google Lunar XPRIZE team, whose mission to become the first private, non-government entity to land on the surface of the Moon is underway, with an anticipated landing on April 11, 2019. A successful lunar landing will result in SpaceIL receiving the inaugural Moonshot Award from XPRIZE.

“Though the Google Lunar XPRIZE went unclaimed, we are thrilled to have stimulated a diversity of teams from around the world to pursue their ambitious lunar missions, and we are proud to be able to recognize SpaceIL’s accomplishment with this Moonshot Award,” said Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer of XPRIZE.

SpaceIL was founded in 2011 by Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, in order to compete in the Google Lunar XPRIZE. In 2015, SpaceIL became the first team to announce a launch contract, and they launched for the Moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on February 21, 2019.

“SpaceIL’s mission represents the democratization of space exploration. We are optimistic about seeing this first domino fall, setting off a chain reaction of increasingly affordable and repeatable commercial missions to the Moon and beyond,” said Peter H. Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE.

XPRIZE will consider future Moonshot Awards in other domains, recognizing both literal and figurative moonshots.

About XPRIZE

XPRIZE designs and operates global competitions to incentivize the development of technological breakthroughs that accelerate humanity toward a better future. Active competitions include the $20M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE, the $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE, the $7M Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, and the $5M IBM Watson AI XPRIZE. For more information, visit www.xprize.org.

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