The OG Phillie Phanatic Wants Major League Baseball To Lighten Up

Bourgeois’ first fundraising worry is over restrictions on how the teams can parcel out the media rights to their missions. Bourgeois’ second worry is over the general fundraising environment for space enterprises. Too many other teams are still in the running to mention them all, but the leaders include Astrobotic, a spinoff of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh; Rocket City Space Pioneers in Hunstville; Team Space IL, the only Israeli team competing for the prize; and 해외선물 Team Phoenicia, a Menlo Park, CA-based team that was just tapped by one of its competitors, Team JURBAN, to supply the engines for its own lander. The media rights issue essentially boils down to the potential for sizable new team sponsorship avenues, assuming that the foundation and the teams are not competing with each other for the same broadcast media opportunities… “That means we are competing for the same funding sources-people interested in space.” Bourgeois is careful to say that overall, the Google Lunar X Prize competition “is a really good thing” and that “there are still people involved at the X Prize Foundation who have good intentions.” But in effect, he says, the foundation is sucking the oxygen out of the room by striking its own sponsorship deals with outside donors and sponsors.

“Few of these big-name sponsors or individuals are going to commit to a team at a very early stage, because they want to back the winner, not somebody who will drop out or fall behind,” she says. “Once the front-running teams really solidify their launch dates, other teams will say, ‘We’re obviously not going to be first, let’s figure out what to do with the value we’ve created,'” says Hall. As for the alleged competition over donors between the foundation and the teams, Hall says she’s familiar with Bourgeois’s contention, but that she doesn’t see evidence for it. If teams are having trouble lining up sponsors, Hall says, it’s probably because they haven’t made enough progress. I think people are very afraid of that kind of progress. Long before the 2020 minor league seasons were officially cancelled, it was already in doubt whether there would be any organized baseball activities of any kind for professional baseballers who weren’t going to participate at the Major League level. “It’s not a treasure chest that is going to get you the deposit on a rocket. “It’s a back-and-forth dialogue,” she says.

“It’s a growing problem of where do you draw the line of allowing a team to capitalize on its image and mission, versus how much do you allow the X Prize Foundation to fund its future operations by selling media from this one-time event,” he says. Even if the team grabbed the grand prize and all the bonus prizes, it could only get $25 million of it back-which is exactly why any new moon mission has to be part of a larger enterprise. Team FREDNET doesn’t have that much yet, but is “coming very close,” Bourgeois says. The world of space entrepreneurs is small; the world of corporations, foundations, and private donors willing to sink tens of millions of dollars into moon exploration is not much bigger. If Team FREDNET represents the 99 percent in civilian space exploration, then Moon Express is much closer to the 1 percent. I asked Bob Richards at Moon Express whether he shares any of Bourgeois’s concerns. Moon Express is the product of a complex web of connections between longtime space entrepreneurs. The plan is to create a lander version of the bus and put it into Earth orbit aboard either an Orbital Sciences Taurus II rocket or a Space X Technologies Falcon 9 rocket.

The most expensive part about getting to the moon, by far, is reserving a launch vehicle from a company like Space X or Orbital Sciences. Hall, who is the former director of the Chabot Science Center in Oakland and the former CEO of zeppelin company Airship Ventures, is still relatively new to the X Prize Foundation-she took the reins of the Google Lunar X Prize last summer. The expected slash line is still nothing impressive but ended up at .174/.254/.340. Injuries caused while bodies are still developing can have long-term consequences, including the development of arthritis at points of injuries. “We are not being driven by the X Prize, but we are desirous,” says Richards. To qualify for the prize, the team would simply have to roll the ball 500 meters away from the landing site while sending back video. And that’s what’s causing at least one team leader, Fred Bourgeois, to voice criticisms about the way the X Prize Foundation has structured its agreements with the teams. It couldn’t, because the “master team agreements” that each team has signed with the X Prize Foundation say those rights belong to all of the teams as a bundle, and can only be apportioned by the foundation.