&gt; 50M over 5 years is a &quot;moonshot&quot;? Let&#x27;s hope Wired is to blame for such hype; Google surely knows better.<p>&quot;Moonshot&quot; appears to be a Google term of art for a focused project with a long expected period between initiation and potential payout (reflected in, e.g., the identification of many Google X, and some non-X, projects as &quot;moonshots&quot;, and in Astro Teller&#x27;s &quot;Captain of Moonshots&quot; title.)<p>So, even though this is Google funding to an external team, I can see how it shares the traits of Google-internal &quot;moonshot&quot; and why Google might use the term.