Carnegie Mellon robotics professor William "Red" Whittaker became the first official participant in Google's new Lunar X Prize this week, when he and his team announced their intent to compete for the $20 million first prize (an additional $10 million will be divvied up among the rest of the field).

Business Week covers the latest news, and takes a deeper look at the motivations and incentives involved in the process, as part of this well-done summation of the X Prize phenomenon.

The piece looks at the sort of folks who are drawn to innovative contests like the Lunar X Prize, and the Wirefly X Prize Cup - and the corporate entities who sponsor them.

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The buzz going around this morning turned out to be worth the wait - the "unnamed" Fortune 500 company beginning a new relationship with the X Prize Foundation is Google. And the new monetary prize is a whopping $30 million.

The Google Lunar X Prize takes the original Ansari X Prize a step further. While the original contest asked entrepreneurs to successfully launch a private craft into orbit, the Lunar X Prize is exactly what it sounds like - a race to the moon. This new X Prize will require a privately funded lunar mission, complete with a rover capable of completing various objectives, including traversing a distance across the surface and transmitting video and data homeward.

The first group to successfully complete the task wins $20 million, with the remaining $10 million split between the second-place team and several other bonuses.

The Google Lunar X Prize represents a new and exciting element of the X Prize Foundation's mission to encourage space-related innovation and technology in the private sector - a mission that will be on display at this year's Wirefly X Prize Cup in New Mexico, later this fall.

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The Santa Monica-based X Prize Foundation will announce a new "innovation competition" today which will include the largest international prize ever offered - reportedly in the tens of millions of dollars.

The X Prize Foundation, organizers of the Wirefly X Prize Cup, and the $10 million Ansari X Prize, has partnered with an unidentified Fortune 500 company to offer the new cash incentive, which will inevitably make headlines around the world.

We'll have more news concerning the identity of the sponsor, and the exact value of the reward, later today.

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