Prizes

Manned lunar exploration used to be the exclusive purview of governmental agencies until the $2M Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander XCHALLENGE paved the way for a new class of lunar vehicles. Through a unique public–private partnership between Northrop Grumman, NASA and XPRIZE, the winning teams proved that private industry could build, fly, launch, hover and land spacecraft suitable for lunar exploration for a fraction of what the government spends.

The $1 million Anu and Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE is a global competition that challenges teams to leverage technology to empower communities with a transformative solution that ensures women’s safety.

The $2.25 million Nokia Sensing XCHALLENGE aimed to stimulate the development of a new generation of health sensors and sensing technologies that can drastically improve the quality, accuracy and ease of monitoring a person’s health. Improvements in these technologies will empower individuals to effortlessly monitor and collect their own real-time health data, providing both consumers and healthcare providers convenient access to critical information whenever and wherever they need it.

Ambitious teams from around the world designed and built production‐capable, super fuel‐efficient and clean vehicles. Vehicles must be proven to meet rigorous standards. A thorough qualification process, completed in October 2009, assessed safety, cost, features, and business plans to ensure only production‐capable cars compete. Vehicles were tested for efficiency, performance, and durability under real‐world conditions.

$10 million will be awarded to the first team to rapidly, accurately and economically sequence 100 whole human genomes to an unprecedented level of accuracy.

The result was going to be the world's first "medical grade” genome, a critically needed clinical standard that would transform genomic research into usable medical information to improve patient diagnosis and treatment.

The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE was a $2 million global competition that challenged teams of engineers, scientists and innovators from all over the world to create pH sensor technology that could affordably, accurately and efficiently measure ocean chemistry from its shallowest waters to its deepest depths.

The Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE was a $10 million global competition to incentivize the development of innovative technologies capable of accurately diagnosing a set of 13 medical conditions independent of a healthcare professional or facility, ability to continuously measure 5 vital signs, and have a positive consumer experience.

The $10 million Ansari XPRIZE was designed to lower the risk and cost of going to space by incentivizing the creation of a reliable, reusable, privately financed, manned spaceship that finally made private space travel commercially viable.

The Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE was a $1.4 Million competition designed to inspire a new generation of innovative solutions that will speed the pace of cleaning up seawater surface oil resulting from spillage from ocean platforms, tankers, and other sources. The one-year competition culminated in the fall of 2011, with competitive demonstrations taking place at OHMSETT, the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility. 

The Google Lunar XPRIZE was created with two goals in mind. To spur affordable access to the moon and give space entrepreneurs a legitimate platform to develop long-term business models around lunar transportation and to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, space explorers and adventurers to enter the STEM fields.