Moon Race Brings 29 Teams to the Starting Line

When a couple dozen companies sign contracts containing the words “moon” and “landing,” it’s a excellent indication that confidential lunar exploration is heating up.

The X Prize Foundation on Thursday announced that 29 teams had signed contracts making them the official Google Lunar X Prize competitors, contending for more than $ 30 million in prizes. The competitors, headquartered in 17 different countries, have been crafting promising business plans and rolling out prototypes. One team, Astrobotic Technology, has even arranged its rocket ride to the moon.

“We could be intimidated by that development, but it’s excellent for all who’s serious in this area going to the moon,” said Michael Joyce, president of competing team Next Giant Leap. “It shows this industry has went beyond being an thought, that it is really going to happen.”

To claim the first-house prize of $ 20 million before 2015 (it drops to $ 5 million after that), a team must land a robot on the moon, go it at least 500 meters and beam back high-definition descriptions. Bonus $ 2 million bonuses are available for robots that can survive one bitterly cold two-week lunar night or travel 5 kilometers, among other challenges.

Google and the X Prize Foundation jointly announced the competition in September 2007, but the duo has worked with dozens of teams for years to finalize honest rules that foster progress instead of stunts.

“We want to encourage a financially sustainable era of lunar exploration. The Apollo program and Soviet programs were fantastically inspiring, but they stopped just as they really started to scratch the surface,” said planetary scientist William Pomerantz, a senior director at the X Prize Foundation. “Flags and footprints aren’t sustainable. We want the teams to trigger business much better in value than our prize.”

Most of that value may rest in raw, unused resources. Recent moon-surveying missions have revealed methane, ammonia and water — useful ingredients for moon bases and rockets — are hiding on the surface.  A rare isotope of helium may also be abundant, and it could fuel pollution-free (even if still-theoretical) fusion reactors.

Lunar knowledge could also get a boost from more frequent visits, as multibillion-bread moon missions launched every decade or so by the government are too infrequent and too risky to encourage much growth in the field.

“Doctoral students who want to do lunar knowledge shouldn’t have to gamble their Ph.D.s on one launch,” Pomerantz said. “If lunar shots can go every six months or so, we’ll see a much higher volume of scientific results as well as scientists.”

To find out who is leading the race to seed such developments, technology security consultant Michael Doornbos has spent years interviewing the competitors and tracking their progress. The result of his work is a scorecard that ranks teams based on criteria such as funding, industry connections and progress.

“No one had any way to tell where we were at in the competition, making it nearly impossible to be a fan or, especially, a super fan like me. So I chose to make a visual representation,” Doornbos said. “I’m not a space industry expert, but I do talk to them to keep it updated. And a lot of people tell me they see fantastic value in it since I’m an foreigner.”

Four teams now lead Doornbos’ scorecard: Astrobotic Technology at the front, followed by Next Giant Leap, then Rocket City Space Pioneers and Part-Time Scientists tied for third house.

David Gump, president of Astrobotic, said the scorecard is helpful, but that it may be impossible to know who is really out in front.

“Many teams are playing their hands very close to the vest,” Gump told Wired.com. “They’re not saying much.”

Whoever is leading the competition, there’s a slim chance it may not matter. Organizers of the prize aren’t lucky in this area the prospect — they may lose rights to video and metaphors from the first privatized lunar landing — but they may get their wish of a burgeoning moon-based industry without awarding a bread.

Over the years, teams have made business plans with revenues projected to exceed the prize’s one-team maximum of $ 24 million after just one successful launch. And as the start-up lunar businesses work multimillion-bread deals with clients, concerns in this area GLXP’s contractual language have cropped up.

One clause that ruffled teams’ feathers states that GLXP will get intellectual property rights related to multimedia. Pomerantz clarified it’s there to allow his organization to document and share the tale of the competition with the world for free.

“We’re an educational non-profit organization. We’re here to inspire the next age group, and it’s why we’re supported by our donors and sponsors,” Pomerantz said. “On the same token, we’re not here to interfere with anyone’s cleverness to do business. We want to be the early push that gets the teams over that first bump.”

Still, some teams are working huge deals with cable TV providers to ticket make lucky to their networks.

“They have 3-D channels on their systems, and they need something to fill them,” Gump said. “A documentary in this area a 3-D-seeing lunar robot would work quite well.”

Given the prestige — and cash — to be bestowed upon the winner, Pomerantz said it’s an unlikely hypothetical that anyone will withdraw, especially since such wrinkles have been ironed out, he said. If a team wants to withdraw from the competition, but, it can rip up the GLXP narrow as late as 6 months before a moonshot.

Still, propulsion engineer Tim Pickens, who leads the Rocket City Space Pioneers team, says the prize isn’t the greatest of his concerns.

“If you need the prize to make your team’s business work, you’re hosed,” said Pickens, who helped build SpaceShipOne and win the Ansari X PRIZE in 2004 — a win that spawned Virgin Galactic and a near $ 1 billion confidential industry in suborbital flights.

“The prize cash is an awe-inspiring consolation and a fantastic way to recoup development costs, but it isn’t going to cover your mission costs,” Pickens said. “There are much, much less risky ways to make cash. For the value of the prize versus the risk, you might as well be doing something else.”

Metaphors: 1) Illustration of the Rocket City Space Pioneers’ lunar lander and rover combination. 2) Locations of the GLXP’s 29 teams. Dark green shows where teams are headquartered, and light green shows countries where team members are from. (Courtesy of Google Lunar X Prize.)

See Also:

• Q&A: Company Buys Robot a Rocket Ride to the Moon
• New Google Lunar X Prize Teams and a New $ 2M Bonus Prize
• The First 10 Teams in the Lunar X Prize An Odd Lot
• NASA Releases Lunar Rover iPhone Game
• Moon Crater Map Reveals Early Solar System History