Let's Hope Rob and Amber Don't Win

From our friends at Forbes:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - First it conquered cyberspace. Now, Google is setting its sights on outer space. The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy. ... One bold ambition of the project: using lunar materials to make solar power collectors that can generate carbon-free energy, which is then transmitted to the Earth.

Now that's offshoring! By the way, the bottom of the Forbes piece contains a fascinating fact: "The last spacecraft to land on the Moon was NASA's Apollo 12 mission, nearly 40 years ago." Fascinating, but incorrect. Apollo 12 landed on the moon in November 1969. After that we had Apollos 14 and 15 (both in 1971) and Apollos 16 and 17 (1972). And no, I didn't get that information from wikipedia. (Well, not only wikipedia.) Check out this thumbnail history of the Apollo Program, courtesy of NASA. Sorry, that link went to a brief history of Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater. I often confuse the two. Here's the NASA link.