Want $20 million in cash?

Google and the X PRIZE Foundation have it to give away – to the first team to build a privately funded space craft, land it on the moon, have it roam for at least 500 meters and send photographs and video back to Earth.

All by Dec. 31, 2012.

To be sure, this is not your father’s sweepstakes. But 10 teams of engineers, former NASA employees and aerospace experts have already registered to compete, and revealed their prototypes and plans at Google’s Mountain View headquarters today.

“The traditional industry is doubtful that anybody can do it and that’s fine,” said Dr. Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the X PRIZE Foundation. “But we have great faith in entrepreneurial ability and really believe someone will win the Google Lunar X Prize.

The competition was launched in an effort to use energy and resources from outside the Earth’s biosphere to solve some of the Earth’s problems. Ultimate goals include being able to transmit carbon-free energy to the Earth’s surface – around the clock – using solar power collectors made from lunar material, and gaining a deeper understanding of the solar system.

Already, the effort has sparked a lot of interest. Since the competition was first announced just six months ago, 567 potential teams from 53 nations have requested registration packets.

Among them: Adil Jafry, an energy executive and father of two who admits he’s not “a technologist or a scientist. I’m a finance/math guy. But I can learn.”

Born in 1972 after all but one of NASA’s Apollo missions, Jafry concedes his knowledge of space comes from the 26 books he bought from Amazon.com two months ago to bone up on space exploration and technology. He isn’t done with “Destination Space: Making Science Fiction a Reality,” “Space: The Free-Market Frontier,” or the other titles he’s picked up, but said he’s at least skimmed them all.

“This has really sparked my imagination,” he said. “The amount of technology that’s going to come out of this initiative is phenomenal.”

Of course, there are some stumbling blocks. For starters, there’s the expense and time involved. Many teams said they hoped they could keep their costs below the actual prize amount and will seek sponsors to come up with the millions of dollars in capital needed. There’s also the technology involved – after all, this is rocket science.