Google's Moon-Landing Competition Is Getting Its Own Reality Show

It's been 30 years since a human walked on the Moon, and the missions we've sent since have been either hit or miss. When you look at it that way, the Google Lunar competition to launch a rocket-powered rover to the lunar surface and beam back back high-res footage to Earth is pretty exciting. At least, exciting enough to get its own reality television show.

The Discovery Channel and Science Channel jointly announced that they're partnering with the Google X Prize foundation to film a miniseries about the 21st century Moon race.

In case you need a refresher on the contest, 18 private companies and academic groups are working to build a rocket that can land on the lunar surface without crashing, and deliver a rover that can travel 500 meters across the surface collecting data and HD photos and video—by the end of next year.

As the deadline nears, things are starting to get interesting. This week, the five most promising teams were awarded a $6 million "milestone" funding boost: Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that grew out of Carnegie Mellon University, Moon Express out of Silicon Valley, and teams from Japan, India, and Germany.

The TV networks will follow the finalists through test runs on Earth leading up to the big launch, and then televise the live Moon landing, trying to recreate the historic moment in 1969 when the world huddled around its set box and watched Neil Armstrong climb out of Apollo 11.

X Prize vice chairman Robert K. Weiss said in a press announcement yesterday that they hope to create "an 'Apollo moment' for the next generation."

"Our intention is to provide a live, front-row seat to history being made," Discovery network vice president Eileen O'Neill said in the statement. "Google Lunar XPRIZE offers all the ingredients of fantastic television; stakes, competition, big characters, and mind-blowing visuals … When the winning craft touches down on the moon's surface, it's going to trigger buzz and inspiration all over the world."

The question is, does anyone still care about going to the Moon? A robot going to the Moon, no less? It wouldn't be a surprise, now that society's in something of a space fascination 2.0, what with Google's lunar landing, Elon Musk's SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, missions to Mars, Neil deGrasse Tyson​'s Cosmos remake, and futurists starting to talk seriously about space tourism and colonizing other planets. And we all can't forget Mars One, which hopes to turn a one-way manned mission to Mars into a reality show.

"Which team will show us what the future looks like?" says the show trailer.

The show, which will be narrated by none other than Tim Allen, is playing up the fact that we’re entering a new era of space exploration, led by “not governments, not space agencies, people like you,” the trailer says. And not just for discovery, but industry—establishing a permanent presence in space for science, the environment, energy, and to provide a platform to explore other planets, it says. “To go back to the Moon, for good.”