Nihilitarianism

Google offers a 30 million dollar prize to any private-funded project that can get a rover to go 500 meters on the moon. The problem with most of these projects will be that they'll make the same mistake that aerospace engineers have made for decades: they think spaceflight is so ambitious that they doubt themselves too much to do anything more than imitate their predecessors, who in turn did the same thing, so that rovers have not changed in their basic design since the 60s, even as every other technology has transformed since then.

Just like our computers, our rovers need to be miniaturised: its package volume needs to be as small as possible, as small in relation to a rover as a smartphone in relation to ENIAC, perhaps a thousandth the weight of a rover so that it would also only require a thousandth the fuel and almost a thousandth the cost. It could just be a camera looking out the side of a single motorised wheel. We could use a high-altitude balloon to get the rocket into the stratosphere (even high school projects have reached 60 km), where the high-speed winds will give it a boost of up to 100km/hour, bringing it that much closer to escape velocity. The only problem then would not be resources as much as figuring out the ballistics.