That is the purpose of the Google Lunar X Prize, which was launched by the Google search engine, and with a prize of 30 million dollars!
This amount will be received by the first private group that will send a robot to the moon, which moves over a distance of 500 meters and send to the Earth videos, images and data …
19 groups have applied to date (25 June 2009).
An open source project
Among the candidates, the Frednet team decided to propose to the public to contribute to the project and have therefore put it in open source, so everyone can have access to programs used.
See for example the evolution of their lunar car.
This group provides a forum, a wiki, a blog for information on the project.
X-Prize
Note that the X-prize foundation in the past offered a price of $ 10 million to Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and Burt Rutan for sending a space ship at 100 km in space. That was the Ansari X Prize and the ship called SpaceShipOne to which SpaceShipTwo succeeded.
The competition website: Google Lunax X Prize.
See also