The challenge called for privately funded teams to be the first to land a lunar rover on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit back to Earth high-definition video and images.

[4][8][9] On 23 January 2018, the X Prize Foundation announced that "no team would be able to make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the [31 March 2018] deadline...and the US$30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed.

[14] The competition offered a total of US$30 million in prizes to the first privately funded teams to land a robot on the Moon that travels more than 500 meters (1,640 ft) and transmits back high-definition images and video.

[1] However, in November 2013, the organizers and the teams agreed to drop this rule as the Chinese Chang'e 3 probe prepared to land on the Moon in December 2013.

[20] Peter Diamandis, the project founder, wrote on the official web page in 2007: It has been many decades since we explored the Moon from the lunar surface, and it could be another 6–8 years before any government returns.

Peter Diamandis then presented the idea to Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, at an XPRIZE fundraiser.

Jeff Foust commented in Space Review that as the end of 2012 approached, "no team appeared that close to mounting a reasonable bid to win it.

[30] As a result, some archaeologists went on record calling for the Foundation to cancel the heritage bonus and to ban groups from targeting landing zones within 100 kilometers (62 mi) of previous sites.

[31] In turn, the Foundation noted that, as part of the competition's educational goals, these bonuses fostered debate about how to respectfully visit previous lunar landing sites, but that it does not see itself as the appropriate adjudicator of such an internationally relevant and interdisciplinary issue.

[32] The Foundation pointed to the historical precedent set by the Apollo 12 mission, which landed nearby the previous Surveyor 3 robotic probe.

Pete Conrad and Alan Bean approached and inspected Surveyor 3 and even removed some parts from it to be returned to Earth for study; new scientific results from that heritage visit, on the exposure of manmade objects to conditions in outer space, were still being published in leading papers nearly four decades later.

[34] And in July 2011, NASA issued Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Lunar Artifacts.

[35] These guidelines were developed with the assistance of Beth O'Leary, an anthropology professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, and a recognized leader in the emerging field of space archaeology.

[39] On 23 January 2018, the X Prize Foundation announced that "no team would be able to make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by the [31 March 2018] deadline... and the US$30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE will go unclaimed.

[97] In November 2013 the X-Prize organization announced that several milestone prizes will be awarded to teams for demonstrating key technologies prior to the actual mission.