Brian

International - Google has announced that working with the X Prize Foundation, they will be paying $30 million in reward money in a race for the first privately/commercially funded lunar rover sent to the moon. The grand prize is $20, there is a $5 million prize for bonus work (going beyond the set requirements), and a $5 million prize for the runner up if there is one. The money is up for grabs until the end of 2012 when it drops down to $15 million, and the prize will be terminated in 2014 unless extended by Google. Some of the stipulations are that the rover must be able to go at least 500 meters and take up to a gigabyte of pictures to transmit back to earth. One of the main goals of the prize is to foster more space exploration that isn’t government run, and see how much cheaper private companies may be able to pull it off.

Opinion – Things like this are really exciting to me. It seems like $20 million isn’t that much of a prize considering the requirements, but I don’t think that will matter much to those really interested in doing this. It wasn’t too long ago that the first private space flight took place because of one of these prizes. I wonder what will be next after this. Oh, and the website’s pretty cool. It costs ten bucks to have a picture and message put on the moon by the competing spacecrafts, and you can use a Google maps program to see what the solar system would look like if your house was the sun and the earth was the size of a basketball. It’s pretty cool.

National – A boy in Pennsylvania is facing charges for accidentally shooting himself. While this may sound strange, it is because he is 17 and was in illegal possession of a firearm. The boy, whose name has not been released because he is a minor, shot himself accidentally, messing with the .25-caliber pistol while standing in line at a McDonald’s. He wounded himself in the upper thigh around 9 p.m. The boy is doing fine at the hospital and nobody else was hurt. Police are trying to determine if the gun was stolen.

Opinion – That seems really fishy that a boy would be messing around with a gun while waiting in line at a restaurant. Was he going to rob the place, or did he just have a gun on him for the heck of it? Serves him right. But then again, that sounds like the sort of stupid thing that would happen to me if I decided to carry a gun around for some dumb reason.