NASA is 50 this year, but rather than being able to revel in the occasion, finds itself possibly having to fend off a challenge from, of all organisations, search engine giant Google.
In a lecture at the beginning of this year, for instance, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, exhorted NASA to engage more with the outside world by creating “open systems” that others can build on. Google is certainly an interested party. Its planetary-visualisation projects, Google Earth, Google Moon and Google Mars, draw a lot on data collected by NASA. But it would also like to start collecting its own data - to which end it is offering a $30m prize to anyone who can land on the moon and drive a rover over the surface.
