“Back to the Moon for Good” is a film narrated by Tim Allen about the Google Lunar XPRIZE, a $30 million prize offered as incentive to anyone who can land a privately funded robot on the Moon. The film was originally released as a dome show for planetariums to raise awareness about the prize, and is now available to watch online. According to Google, its Lunar XPRIZE is the largest incentivized competition in history.
The show opens with the first era of space exploration in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We see what that era of landers and orbiters taught us about our nearest neighbor including the discovery of the Moon’s origin, composition, structure and the accessibility of raw materials on its surface. The Google Lunar XPRIZE is introduced as the largest incentivized competition to date, designed to democratize space and create new opportunities for eventual human and robotic presence on the Moon. We see the engineering and innovation steps taken by the internationally distributed teams competing to land a spacecraft on the Moon and vie for additional prizes. We highlight the human spirit of competition and collaboration as teams take on this audacious challenge.
