Gentlemen, start your engines, Google’s giving you 30 million reasons to join the space race.

The online giant is teaming with the X PRIZE Foundation in announcing the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, a robotic race to the Moon.

Private companies from across the globe will compete to land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon. To win, several mission objectives are required. They include capability of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending back video and images to Earth.

The Google Lunar X PRIZE aims to challenge and inspire engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The X PRIZE Foundation, best known for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private suborbital spaceflight, is an educational nonprofit prize organization whose goal is to bring about radical breakthroughs to solve some of the greatest challenges facing the world today.

“The Google Lunar X PRIZE calls on entrepreneurs, engineers and visionaries from around the world to return us to the lunar surface and explore this environment for the benefit of all humanity,” said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. “We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration.”

“Having Google fund the purse and title the competition punctuates our desire for breakthrough approaches and global participation,” continued Diamandis. “By working with the Google team, we look forward to bringing this historic private space race into every home and classroom. We hope to ignite the imagination of children around the world.”