Rovers owned by private citizens should be playing lunar golf by now. Instead, the moon sits quiet as the deadline for the Google Lunar X Prize quietly passed this weekend.

Over 10 years ago, Google and X Prize offered a $20 million prize for the first nongovernmental organization to complete a lunar mission as it defined one. After multiple extensions of the deadline from the original date in 2012, the competition was officially killed in January when it became clear no private company would make it to the moon by the final deadline: March 31, 2018.

The prize required a private team to successfully perform three tasks to claim the cash and glory:

Successfully place a spacecraft on the surface of the moon

Travel 500 meters on the moon’s surface

Transmit high-definition videos and images back to Earth

Since the contest was launched on September 13, 2007, only three vehicles have successfully hit the moon. They were all government funded, and only one, Chang’e 3, launched by China in 2013, even had the ability to rove on the moon’s surface.

People landed on the moon in 1969, so we have proof that it’s an attainable goal. Why can’t we easily repeat our success from 49 years ago with today’s advanced technology?

“People of the world have to take a leap of faith that you can build a business on the moon.”

In short: resources. When the US made its first moon landing, NASA had taken the fastest route possible to get there. The priority was beating Russia, not building a clear path for future trips. “Instead of logical steps to build a sustainable model for continual access and operations on the moon, it was more of a leap to the surface of the moon,” says Blair DeWitt, CEO of Lunar Station Corporation (LSC), a moon data startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This abnormal market structure removed the means to build the supply chain needed to support continual transportation of equipment, materials, and people to the moon.”

Now that same structure has to be rebuilt without the fervor of the Cold War pushing us forward. The motivation to go to the moon must come from a drive to explore, not to win.

Even though the costs of accessing space are decreasing, getting to the moon is not cheap. In today’s dollars, the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo program would cost about $1.16 billion. (Nothing lights money on fire quite like putting it into a rocket engine.) It’s difficult to convince a government to quickly put that much—or more—into a rocket of equivalent or greater power.

Astrobotic' Red Rover going for a test run on Earth. XPRIZE Foundation

Right now, we just don’t have rockets with the firepower to match the Saturn V, making cargo-heavy moon trips a challenge. SpaceX’s powerful Falcon Heavy rocket—which recently had a successful test flight—shows promise for future moon trips at a comparative bargain of $90 million, but it still packs only two-thirds the 7.5-million-pound thrust of the Saturn V. Although SpaceX founder Elon Musk previously claimed his company would send tourists around the moon by this year, those plans appear to have been shelved. NASA is also still working on its powerful Space Launch System (SLS), which should beat the Saturn V handily in thrust. With development costs in the billions, it is going to be one expensive vehicle when it’s done, and the earliest test launch appears to be years off.

So things have been building, but slowly. Meanwhile, the Lunar X Prize can take a piece of the credit for the growth of private interest in lunar travel. Many space startups were formed in conjunction with the competition, and some still plan to make the lunar journey. The competition set the stage for a number of potential private moon landings in the next five years, drew attention to private space travel, and prompted an influx of space startups raising money.