VentureBeat

Google is funding the Lunar X Prize, a competition that will award $20 million to the first team that lands a private unmanned spacecraft on the moon, and then broadcasts a high-definition video back to earth. Additionally, it will award two other $5 million prizes for lesser missions.

Watch the video above (RSS readers click here), where Google explains how one day the moon’s silicon soil could be used to create large solar satellites, which in turn can be used to provide electricity to earth. Each satellite would have enough power a run an entire city. Other moon resources would provide rocket fuel, to propel us to new worlds.

While the award most likely won’t cover the costs of any such mission, companies getting to the moon can commercialize the technology they developed. The deadline for winning the $20 million Lunar X Prize is Dec. 31, 2012. If no one makes itb by that date, it will drop to $15 million, until Dec. 31, 2014. See official X Prize site here, and the blog post by Google here.

Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal, has been working on a project to shuttle things to space through his company Space Exploration Technologies, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is developing a way to take humans to space with his project called Blue Origin (see coverage, scroll down).

The X Prize Foundation, a group advancing safe travel in space, is soliciting venture capitalists to offer million-dollar prizes to generate ideas from entrepreneurs. It’s having a fund-raiser at Google.

The New York Times has the story, which provides a summary some of the other VC-related competitions out there. Such competitions have a long history in Silicon Valley. There are many more such competitions, not mentioned (VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has regular business plan competitions, for example; Charles River Ventures recently held its Entrepreneur Idol competition, and plans one at Berkeley)

Two years ago, the X Prize Foundation awarded a $10 million prize to Mojave Aerospace Ventures for the flight of SpaceShipOne — launched by aerospace designer Burt Rutan and financier Paul Allen.

Seperate, but related: Six California rocket scientists have founded a green technology company to build a zero-emissions power plant, and looking for $100 million in capital, according to VentureWire (sub required).

The former scientists from Aerojet have designed a plant that combusts fuel with oxygen to create electric power. They want to isolate the resulting carbon dioxide waste stream, and pump it underground into saline structures. Called Clean Energy Systems, the company has $13 million in a first round of funding to pursuse the idea.

Backers of the Rancho Cordova, Calif. company are Southern California Gas Co., and Canadian investors Paxton Corp. and Quadrise Canada Corp., both based in Calgary, Canada, VentureWire said.