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I was on one of the teams since 2010, and still at the surviving company now. The original deadline was “before a space agency went back” or 2013, whichever cam

I was on one of the teams since 2010, and still at the surviving company now. The original deadline was “before a space agency went back” or 2013, whichever came first. There was about 30 teams, of which only about 4 were serious, and as far as I know, only 2 surviving as companies that are actually still working. Near the end they finally figured out how to pare down to a few teams instead of manage 25+ teams of a few people each, making press releases and experiments but there was a lot of years of nothing much happening aside from the Milestone prizes in 2014. Each year after that it was a real struggle from the people At xprize to convince google to extend by one more year (which needs an annual budget, not only the prize money), teams so and so are going to launch soon. Eventually it wasn’t credible, and after 11 years there was none of the original people involved at either xprize or google so there was no one left to convince higher-ups. News about GLXP was more and more negative each year as well. I was fortunate in that we were (at the time) only making a rover so we were partnered with or in discussion with all of the top teams at some point and got to travel around to meet them. It was a great time!

echelon 5y ago
Fascinating history! How big is your company/team now, and what are you building? Is it commercial? What did the field feel like back then as opposed to now? Has the new commercial space race breathed new life into the field? Has it made it more competitive? Given new opportunities for funding? It's a shame Google shuttered, but it makes sense given the overhead. Still wish they could have performed minimal maintenance and left it untouched, but I suppose there was a period when it looked like none of this would pan out at all. I'd totally read a blog post if you have this written up somewhere. It's so interesting.
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  I work at ispace, we are mentioned in the article. We have 150+ people, 3 offices (Japan, USA and Luxembourg) and a handful of projects. It's commercial but the larger contracts in the industry are still from space agencies. And it was always like that. NASA doesn't make a lot in house but always contracts companies. There's just a willingness to let new companies try now. That's the "commercial" part and aside from telecom, it may be a while until we see fully commercial missions. Because of this the field is better now, because NASA and to some extent other space agencies are actually offering contracts to several low-cost missions, with the expectation that some fail and some succeed, with lower cost overall to a typical project with a ton of paperwork. The extent to which they actually reduce paperwork in practice varies. The overhead of GLXP was probably pretty huge even when they reduced the number of teams, plus reputation risk of google being associated with people running around telling investors they were "selected by google to fly to the moon." I haven't written this up anywhere, maybe someday.

echelon 5y ago

Fascinating history! How big is your company/team now, and what are you building? Is it commercial? What did the field feel like back then as opposed to now? Has the new commercial space race breathed new life into the field? Has it made it more competitive? Given new opportunities for funding? It's a shame Google shuttered, but it makes sense given the overhead. Still wish they could have performed minimal maintenance and left it untouched, but I suppose there was a period when it looked like none of this would pan out at all. I'd totally read a blog post if you have this written up somewhere. It's so interesting.

johnwalkr 5y ago
I work at ispace, we are mentioned in the article. We have 150+ people, 3 offices (Japan, USA and Luxembourg) and a handful of projects. It's commercial but the larger contracts in the industry are still from space agencies. And it was always like that. NASA doesn't make a lot in house but always contracts companies. There's just a willingness to let new companies try now. That's the "commercial" part and aside from telecom, it may be a while until we see fully commercial missions. Because of this the field is better now, because NASA and to some extent other space agencies are actually offering contracts to several low-cost missions, with the expectation that some fail and some succeed, with lower cost overall to a typical project with a ton of paperwork. The extent to which they actually reduce paperwork in practice varies. The overhead of GLXP was probably pretty huge even when they reduced the number of teams, plus reputation risk of google being associated with people running around telling investors they were "selected by google to fly to the moon." I haven't written this up anywhere, maybe someday.