Moon Express licensed for lunar expedition in 2017

Moon Express unique torus bus approaches lunar vicinity in notional representation [Moon Express].

Mike Wall

Senior Writer

Space.com

For the first time ever, a private company has permission to land on the moon.

The U.S. government has officially approved the planned 2017 robotic lunar landing of California-based Moon Express, which aims to fly commercial missions to Earth's nearest neighbor and help exploit its resources, company representatives announced today .

"This is not only a milestone, but really a threshold for the entire commercial space industry," Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards told Space.com.

Previously, companies had been able to operate only on or around Earth. The new approval, while exclusive to Moon Express, could therefore serve as an important regulatory guide for deep-space commercial activity in general, Richards said.

"Nobody's had a deep-sea voyage yet. We're still charting those waters," he said. "Somebody had to be first."

Moon Express submitted an application to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on April 8. The document then made its way through the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission, Richards said.

View the full article, HERE.

Back to the Moon (for good)

Narrated by Tim Allen, a new premier video from Google Lunar X Prize, "a complete behind-the-scenes feature on the $30 million competition, the largest incentivized prize in history.

"Adapted from an award-winning digital planetarium show, the 24-minute movie chronicles 18 teams from around the world looking to make history by landing a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the Moon. This global competition is designed to spark imagination and inspire a renewed commitment to space exploration, not by governments or countries – but by the citizens of the world."

Learn more, HERE.

GLXP Milestone Prizes to five teams

Google has announced a list of Milestone prizes in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Five teams have won prizes, thus far totaling $5.25 million for demonstrated proficiency in Landing, Mobility, and Imaging.

Awards in Imaging and Mobility were announced in December. On Monday, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic of Carnegie Mellon University tops this latest list adding up $1.75 million in prize money across all categories.

Astrobotic, Team Indus and Moon Express were each previously awarded $1 million in the Landing column, adding to $500,000 for Mobility also awarded Astrobotic last month, together with Japan's Team Hakuto and Germany's Part-Time Scientists and $250,000 for Imaging each to Astrobotic, and Part-Time Scientists and Moon Express.

Astrobotic Technology's Red Rover concept, ultimately selected by Popular Science as one of the 100 Best Innovations of 2011, part of their design system in the heating-up contest to win the Google Lunar X-Prize [Astrobotic Technology, Inc.].

On the beach with GLXP Team Hakuto

GLXP Team Hakuto lunar rover and backup under go deployment and rugged hazard and slope avoidance testing, on the beach in Hamamatsu  [Tim Stevens/c|net].

Tim Stevens

c|net

Before you blast off to the moon in search of $30 million offered as part of the Google Lunar X Prize -- or the juicy $20 million grand prize for being the first to get to the moon -- you must make sure all your systems are ready for the harsh realities that exist outside our atmosphere.

Testing in lunar-like conditions while still here on Earth is a complicated thing. Just finding a place remotely like the lunar surface is difficult. However, if you're in Japan, one place reigns supreme: the sand dunes outside Hamamatsu. This is where we found Team Hakuto, lone Japanese team competing for the GLXP, and one of five teams in the running for $6 million in interim, milestone prizes.

Many of Team Hakuto's members made the trip to Hamamatsu from Tohoku University, located far to the north in Sendai. While they escaped a blizzard, they arrived only to find winds well in excess of 30mph and temperatures hovering right around freezing. These were not ideal conditions for wandering up the beach -- nor for driving rovers across it.

Still, Team Hakuto went to work prepping not one, but two rovers: MoonRaker and Tetris. The first, the bigger of the two, is named not after the James Bond novel and movie of the same name, but rather some legendary English smugglers in the 18th century.

Hakuto's sub-rover Tetris, designed to explore the interior of one of the Moon's newly discovered mare pit craters [Tim Stevens / c|net].

According to the tale, on one clear evening two men were using rakes to scour the bottom of a lake in which some barrels of brandy had been hidden to avoid customs. Officers of the law wandered by and asked what they were up to, to which they replied they were attempting to rake some cheese in from the moon. The officers laughed and continued on their way, leaving the smugglers free to recover their stash of booze.

The mare pit crater in the Sea of Tranquility (8.337°N, 33.219°E) has been surveyed from LRO (by the LROC team that discovered it) at different angles and altitudes, enough to build an improving picture of its underground scope and potential as shelter from cosmic rays, micrometeors and the extreme temperature swings on the surface [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Team Hakuto, is in search of neither dairy products nor spirits, instead hoping to rake in $20 million for being the first commercial team to land on the moon and cover 500 meters while beaming back high-definition footage. However, the team also hopes to check out some lunar real estate, which is where the second rover, Tetris, comes in.

Read Tim Steven's full article HERE.
View his accompanying Hamamatsu gallery HERE.
Catch up on extensive GLXP team coverage by c|net HERE.

GLXP: 'Back to the Moon for good'

The UK National Space Centre has produced a full-scale planetarium show designed to increase student interest in math and the sciences by highlighting the Google Lunar XPRIZE teams, their methods and long-term goals on the Moon, while engaging in the sometimes fierce competition to become the first 'non-state' stakeholders on the Moon [GLXP].

Erin Biba

Popular Mechanics

While so much space science and exploration attention has been focused on Mars in the last few years, Google wants to remind us that the moon is about to get awfully popular. Teams competing in their Lunar X PRIZE will send more than 20 rovers and spacecraft to our rocky satellite in the near future. Hoping to get us excited about all that impending traffic (and get kids and teens excited about engineering), the X PRIZE folks have put together a planetarium show that they're giving away free to science domes around the world.

Back To The Moon For Good, produced by the UK National Space Centre and narrated by Tim Allen, is a 24-minute look at the past, present, and possible future of humans on the moon. It starts with a look at the Apollo missions, and a reminder that while it was easy to assume at the time that humans would go back right away, nobody has set foot on the lunar surface in forty years. So much time has passed, Allen says, that some people even think the moon landing never even happened.

The film goes on to highlight some of the moon research that has happened over the years and outlines the myriad problems that need to be overcome in order to land a craft on the lunar surface. It highlights some of the more economical, space saving, and technical designs created by Google's X PRIZE teams with interviews with team leaders from Barcelona, Israel, Chile, and Penn State (who, in a truly American fashion, declare themselves guaranteed winners).

In the end, the film imagines a future in which the moon is a jumping off point for future space exploration and a hub for space business. Monetization, after all, is one of Google's biggest reasons for attempting to galvanize a new private space race. According to Lunar X PRIZE senior director Alexandra Hall: "We want to push the sphere of commercial influence out. Google are funding the prize to engage and inspire a generation to get excited about what private individuals can do. But they also want to explore incentivizing more democratized access to space. They have a goal of stimulating a new space economy."

Read the full article, HERE.

Related Posts:
 Moon Express introduces new lander concept (December 6, 2013)
'Government Landing Penalty' removed from GLXP terms (November 7, 2013)
Signs of 'Life' on the Lunar Frontier (September 8, 2013)
Spinning for the Prize (June 6, 2013)

Spinning for the Prize

"The Spirit of California," a design with unique heritage. A spin-stabilized Google Lunar X-Prize contender-that-was [Southern California Selene Group].

Rex Ridenoure
The Space Review

Five years ago, one of the then-active Google Lunar X PRIZE teams quietly signed off, withdrew from the competition, and ceased operations. At the time, it was arguably considered the team to beat in the quest for the prize. This article summarizes that team’s story and highlights a novel advancement in lander architecture derived from this short-lived yet very effective effort.

A long wait

This story starts fifty years ago at Hughes Aircraft Company in Southern California (Culver City), where Dr. Harold A. Rosen, a 37-year-old experienced and clever electrical engineer and radar expert, was leading a small team of engineers putting together what became the first successful series of geosynchronous communications satellites, Syncom. A few years prior, Rosen floated the idea to Hughes management of designing and launching a small, simple spinning satellite to GEO as part of the US response to the USSR’s 1957 Sputnik launch. This project would also serve as a kick-start toward the vision of global GEO satellite connectivity first articulated by Arthur C. Clarke in his seminal 1945 Wireless World article.

Syncom 1 was launched in February of 1963 and achieved the desired orbit, but suffered an immediate electrical failure. Five months later, Syncom 2 was successfully launched and began operating nominally. Syncom 3 repeated the achievement a year later.

 During 1962–1963, while Rosen and his team were immersed in their Syncom work, Hughes was bidding to be the prime contractor for NASA’s planned series of robotic lunar landers, Surveyor. The Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory had already developed a notional design for the lander and was looking to the emergent US space industry to complete the detailed design and then build the spacecraft.

Rosen was asked to peer review his firm’s proposal, and came away unimpressed. “That design was so big and clunky, and so expensive,” he recounted some 45 years later. “I knew back then that there was a much more elegant and cost-effective way to land.”

Read the article at The Space Review, HERE.

Google Lunar X PRIZE 2012 Hardware Reel

Twenty-five teams from around the world are currently building robots, rockets, and lunar landers to win the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE. Every year, we collect hardware video clips from the teams and showcase their progress.

This year shows some impressive advancements in the rover designs, propulsion and avionics technology. Teams are stepping it up as the competition thickens and with all the recent headlining developments, the Moon does not seem so far away.

For more information about the teams and the competition, visit http://www.googlelunarxprize.org.

Barcelona Moon Team contracts with Great Wall

Long March 2C/CTS-2 booster [GlobalSecurity.org].

Great Wall Industry Corporation of China will send the Spanish Google Lunar X-PRIZE team's lunar rover to the moon in June 2014, according to the Galactic Suite company which heads the "Barcelona Moon Team" that is competing in the Google Lunar X Prize contest.

The rover will be launched by a Long March 2C/CTS-2 rocket from China's Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The Google Lunar X-PRIZE challenges participants to create a robot that can move over the lunar surface and send live images back to Earth before December 2015.

China launch service contract to support Barcelona GLXP contestant in 2016

(WIRED, August 9, 2012)

Team Phoenicia teams up with Tyvak and Cal Poly

From Team Phoenicia Lunar Payload Delivery Rack (aka "Legion" System) Sat Deployment Simulation [Team Phoenicia].

Team Phoenicia announced in Menlo Park, California, Wednesday, they are teaming up with Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, LLC and California Polytechnic State University of San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) to work together on lunar and small interplanetary satellite and CubeSat opportunities.

The teaming arrangement includes collaboration on winning the total $30 million purse of the Google Lunar X-Prize, future interplanetary and lunar nanosat projects and a sharing of knowledge bases for future developments.

Details with the announcement on their Team Blog, HERE.

GLXP team presents lander model to Knesset

Space IL - an Israeli team competing for the Google Lunar
X-Prize, presented a model of it's concept lunar lander to the
Knesset, Tuesday [Space L].

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
Jerusalem Post
 
A tiny space vehicle that scientists and teenage science students in Israel have developed together is in its final stages of development and is due to launch in a few years on the back of a large communications satellite for an unmanned landing on the moon.

On Tuesday, representatives of the team presented a model for the first time at a meeting of the Knesset Science and Technology Committee’s subcommittee on space, which Likud MK Ze’ev Elkin heads.

The model’s design is the work of 150 adults and teens participating in the Space IL project, which aims to encourage young people to study space subjects, and to train the next generation of space scientists. Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub, three young engineers, launched the project with a non-profit organization they set up in 2010.

Dozens of volunteers are working to turn Israel into the fifth country in the world, after the former Soviet Union and the US, to have landed spacecraft on the moon. A few others have crashed spacecraft on the moon’s surface.

The spacecraft is expected to weigh only 90 kilos and be 80 cm. by 80 cm.in size. When it lands, legs on springs will open, making the spacecraft’s height a human-sized 1.6 meters.

Engineers and experts in a variety of other fields will put together the vehicle under sterile conditions. It is expected to be the smallest object ever to land on the moon, and therefore show that one can build miniature “smart” spacecraft (the smaller and more compact the space vehicle, the more complex it is to cram all the necessary equipment inside).

The launchpad will be a 4-ton communications satellite that will be sent into space anyway. Playing piggyback this way saves a lot of money compared to launching it from Earth.

Israel Aircraft Industries checked the working model carefully only a month ago.

Space IL is the only Israeli representative in the international Google Lunar X-Prize competition for landing an unmanned vehicle on the moon.

All the prizes will total $30 million, but if the Israelis win, the team members are obligated to donate the prize money to the advancement of technological and science education in Israel.

Among the many institutions involved were Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, and the Rafael, Elbit Systems Ltd., and Gilat companies.

Although Israel has never sent any astronauts itself into space, it has built many successful and compact communications satellites that other space agencies have launched.

Israel has the advantage of smallness; it is the only country in the world where all the relevant technologies for the project are located only an hour from each other by car.

The teenage participants not only helped adult scientists plan the space vehicle, but also chose the landing site on the moon and developed an Internet portal for displaying the project’s status.

So far, some 14,000 Israeli teens have participated in space-related activities inspired by the Space IL project. Some of them are expected to go on to a “future space scientist” project at TAU to complete a bachelor’s degree in physics; join a project for promoting girls in science studies in Ashdod; and, for pupils at ORT, give lectures to the public.

For Google, getting to space is not out of this world

Tiffany V.C. Montague, manages space initiatives for Google and its interests in the Google Lunar X Prize  [Aram Boghosian / The Boston Globe].

Tiffany V.C. Montague manages Google Inc.’s space initiatives and its Lunar X Prize, the company’s competition that will award $30 million in prizes to teams that successfully land and operate a robot on the moon. Before joining Google, Montague, 36, was an Air Force officer and worked as a flight test engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque. She spoke recently with Globe reporter Michael Farrell while in town to talk with Boston University students about space.

Why is Google so interested in space?


Google likes to take big bets. We are a company of technologists and space enthusiasts. It’s not surprising to me that we would be involved in space as much as we’re involved in any other game-changing technology, like self-driving cars.

What’s so exciting about space?

Are you kidding me? When I was a kid growing up in England my view of the future was that we would all have jet packs and hover cars and we would be vacationing on the moon. It’s 2012. I don’t have a jet pack, I don’t have a hover car, I can’t vacation on the moon, and I feel gypped about that.

I’ve never been there, but the moon doesn’t look like a very nice place to visit.

It is a fantastic place for a human outpost. The moon is a very attractive place because it’s outside the earth’s gravity well and there are resources that we can use. It’s part of this whole idea of frontierism that we should be pushing outward from what we know, and then find a way to push out even farther.

Read the full article, HERE.

GLXP team Moon Express acquires Next Giant Leap

Artist concept of Moon Express GLXP lander ME-1.

Alan Boyle
Cosmic Log
MSNBC

One of the competitors in the race to send the first private-sector probe to the moon says it's acquired the assets of a rival team, marking what could be considered a "Netscape moment" for the commercial moonshot industry.

Moon Express said the acquisition of Colorado-based Next Giant Leap will add to its momentum in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition, which promises a huge payoff to the first team that sends a rover to the moon for an exploratory trek that includes transmitting high-definition imagery back to Earth. Moon Express and Next Giant Leap are among 26 teams vying for the prize.

"There are many synergies between our companies," Bob Richards, Moon Express' co-founder and CEO, said in today's announcement, which was issued during a Google Lunar X Prize team summit in Washington. "We are all stronger together, and we look forward to carrying on the innovation and vision of the Next Giant Leap founders and partners."

Both ventures were selected by NASA in 2010 for data-sharing contracts that are worth up to $10 million each. Both companies have been working on rovers that would hop across the lunar surface. The Next Giant Leap effort produced a "hopper" design that attracted a $1 million commitment from the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to fund the development of a guidance, navigation and control system testbed.

Read the full article, HERE.

Selenokhod GLXP rover ready by summer

Team activity - The implementation of such a large-scale project is impossible without cooperation of various specialists. In team discussions we find powerful incentive to progress it’s extremely exciting and useful for professional development [Selenokhod].

The Team Selenokhod GLXP lunar rover prototype will be finished by summer, developers said on Thursday. Selenokhod is the only Russian entrant among the 26 teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize.

Selenokhod will move on flats instead of wheels, a design developed for the 4.5-kg Prop-M rovers that traveled on-board the identical Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions. After Mars 2 crashed on the martian surface, Mars 3 achieved the first soft landing there, December 2, 1971. But, for reasons still unknown, all contact was lost with Mars 3 after only 14.5 seconds.

RIA Novosti has posted a video showing
the Selenokhod lunar rover in action.

Though neither Prop-M rover was successfully deployed on Mars, the Russians are apparently working hard to live up to an inherited legacy of having landed and operated the only robotic rovers on the Moon, in 1970 and 1973.

The team is planning to deliver its 5-kg Selenokhod to the moon on-board Luna-Glob, though that mission was recently delayed until sometime after 2015, past the present X-Prize deadline, and the team reports that contest organizers have not yet indicated whether using a government-funded platform is acceptable.

Astrobotic changes plans, aims for lunar north

High potential resources, greater mobility, better parking? Epps and Wingo of Skycorp/LOIRP made a strong case for preferring the north over the south polar regions for lunar rover missions in a poster presented at the 43rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. Top, fig. 1a from that presentation, shows "LOLA 10 Meter Gridded Data Record Terrain from 87.5° North to the North Pole (3x vertical exaggeration)." Below, LOLA steady accumulation of laser data is bringing the far lunar north out of permanent and near permanent shadow, while other LRO experiments continue to back up low-resolution conclusions offered after the Lunar Prospector (1998-1999) neutron survey, namely that hydrogen species derived from all vectors may be present at twice the accumulation in the north over the lunar south polar regions [NASA/LOLA/Skycorp].

David Templeton
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Astrobotic Technology, one of 26 teams competing for a $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, has altered its October 2015 mission to the moon in dramatic fashion. It's headed to the lunar north pole to prospect for natural resources, including water and methane, and abandoning plans to land near the equator.

The new goal is to advance science by confirming the presence of resources necessary for colonization of the moon. The space robotics company, which holds six NASA contracts to develop robotic equipment for moon missions, changed its strategy to take full scientific advantage of landing its first robot on the moon.

NASA, ESA, Japan, India and China all completed recent satellite orbits of the moon that indicated the presence of water and other resources there, but without confirmation*.

In February, Astrobotic president David Gump announced Astrobotic is the first to announce that it has reserved a launch vehicle -- a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX -- to carry its robot and lander to the moon.

Astrobotic's Polaris robot, which is a lunar rover, also will be able to dig and drill for resources, then analyze and report its findings to Earth. Its landing would represent a major scientific step forward in moon exploration.

"If we get on the ground in the north pole and confirm the presence of resources, that would be the basis for a thriving lunar economy where we could create spacecraft fuel on the moon," Gump said.

Led by noted Carnegie Mellon University roboticist William "Red" Whittaker, the company now is redesigning its Polaris robot to transform it into a lunar prospector. Because the weight the rocket can carry is set, any additional weight added to the robot must be subtracted from the lander, Gump said.

Originally, Astrobotic planned to land a robot near the moon's equator, which would travel across the lunar surface and send video back to Earth. The former plan also included a trip near the Apollo 11 landing site, where the first humans stepped on the lunar surface, and provide fresh video of the famous spot.

"The previous robot was designed to be a scout carrying cameras and making long-distance traverses," Gump said. Astrobotic plans to haul payload from space agencies and scientific institutions to the moon at a cost of $820,000 a pound.

At the north pole, the robot will operate for 10 to 12 days of constant sunlight, then hibernate during the equal period of polar nighttime.

*Editor's Note: India's Moon Impactor Probe (MIP), released from Chandrayaan-1, directly detected the presence of water in trace form before its hard landing near Shackleton crater and the lunar north pole. The Cassini probe detected hydrogen as molecular hydroxyl and water while making baseline calibration observations of the Moon on the way to Saturn in 1999. Water was directly observed in the plume resulting from the LCROSS impact at Cabeus crater. The presence of water, within and near permanently shadowed regions of the Moon has been inferred by remote sensing data consistent with the presence of water ice by Clementine (1994), Lunar Prospector (1998-1999), and more recently from the Mini-RF, LEND and LAMP instruments on-board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Team Plan B - Lunar CubeSat update

 

GLXP Team 'Plan B' is a Vancouver based group of Canadian enthusiasts who hope to land their contest entry vehicle on the Moon using minimalist CubeSat architecture.

- Southgate Amateur Radio News

Astrobiotic unveils Polaris high-latitude explorer

Polaris prospects for water at the lunar poles. One of three lunar rover designs by Astrobotics Technology, Polaris has three vertical solar panels to generate 250 watts of power and two radiator panels to rid itself of excess heat. Stereo cameras and laser are used to guide Polaris and generate 3-D video and models of the lunar surface. The robot communicates directly with Earth using a pointed S-band antenna to receive commands and send video and data. Polaris carries up to 175 lbs (80kg) of payload, such as a drill to take core samples and science instruments to identify water content. Polaris is capable of driving and avoiding obstacles autonomously including traverses into dark regions in the lunar pole’s long shadows. Polaris suspension includes raise and lower capability to vary chassis ground clearance to lower for drilling and raise for driving on rough terrain. The suspension maintains four-wheel ground contact over sloped and rocky lunar terrain without the use of springs. Surface operations are carefully preplanned to maintain unobstructed views of the sun for power and the earth for communication. View the full-size artist concept HERE [Astrobotic Technology/CMU].

Pittsburgh / CMU - Astrobotic Technology unveiled its new Polaris lunar rover design, which will prospect for potentially rich deposits of water ice, methane and other resources at the moon's north pole in three years.

A powerful Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX will launch Polaris from Cape Canaveral in late October 2015. Four days later Polaris will land during north pole summer, when patches of ground that are in cold shadow most of the year get brief illumination. This is where ice will be found closest to the surface, and when a solar-powered robot will get the sunlight needed to sustain exploration. Polaris will search for ice for the next 12 days until sundown in early November.

Polaris carries up to 175 lbs (80kg) of payload, such as a drill and instruments to analyze samples from the drill. To find the best spot to drill, two sensors will look for signs of hidden ice beneath the surface layer of dry soil. A neutron spectrometer will measure the number of neutrons given off by the first yard of soil beneath the rover; a dip in the reading indicates neutrons coming in from space are being absorbed by hydrogen (in water or methane) in ice beneath the robot. A near infrared spectrometer will look for variations in surface temperature that may hint at ice below.

Polaris is adapted from a lunar excavation machine that Astrobotic has been prototyping under a NASA contract granted in 2010. After Polaris and other prospecting robots find the highest ice concentrations, excavation robots will remove the covering layer of dry soil to recover the ices and deliver them to a plant that turns them into rocket propellant.

CMU's Red Whittaker and the Google Lunar X-Prize

Astrobotic Technology's "Red Rover" design concept picked by Popular Science as one of the 100 Best Innovations of 2011, their team entry in the contest to win the Google Lunar X-Prize [Astrobotic Technology, Inc.].

Debra Erdley
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

William "Red" Whittaker is still shooting for the moon.But Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor and CEO of Astrobotic Technology Inc., says his team has pushed back its plans to land a robot on the moon by a year — to May 2015 — to tailor a robot suited to the expedition's new destination: the lunar south pole.

The CMU/Astrobotic team is competing to claim a portion of a multimillion-dollar prize for landing a robot on the moon. The team's new plan calls for a robot prospector to drill for ice samples at the moon's south pole to try to confirm the existence of water there, a possibility lunar orbiters and a lunar penetrator have strongly suggested in recent years.

William "Red" Whittaker, roboticist and research professor
of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, describes the
Astrobotic lunar lander that his team built in a Pittsburgh lab
before it was crated up to ship to California for additional
testing, last June 15. The team is tweaking its design and has
changed the launch date to May 2015 [Andrew Russell/
Tribune-Review].

"It is high-risk and high-return," Whittaker said.

His team is among 26, including one from Penn State University, that are competing to claim a portion of the Google Lunar X Prize, which will go to the first team to land a robot on the moon, make it travel 500 meters and transmit video to earth.

Prize organizers extended the deadline for the contest several times, most recently to December 2015.

The CMU/Astrobotic team built and tested its lunar lander. Last year Astrobotic signed a contract for a $60 million space shot with the privately owned Space X company. Along the way, the company picked up $610,000 in NASA contracts.

Astrobotic president David Gump said confirming water at the poles would be a major discovery that could point the way to the production of rocket fuel on the moon — water is a critical component — and the use of the moon as a fueling and launching point for further space exploration.

"The big question is: How can you do exploration at an affordable price? The key to that is being off-planet. If we can get propellant for a Mars trip on the moon, it will really make getting to Mars much cheaper," Gump said.

Going to the south pole of the moon means the trip can occur only during a one-month window when the cold, dark region has a small amount of light. Whittaker said the robot will have to be slightly larger and stronger than originally envisioned.

But he's excited about the possibilities inherent in a lunar polar mission.

"There is no more significant deliberate discovery that a robot can achieve in a near-term mission than to confirm the existence of ice at the poles of the moon. ... Given the life opportunity of a landing on the moon, why not make it count?" Whittaker said.

Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

RCSP's "The Spirit of Alabama"

The second Rocket City Space Pioneers Google Lunar X-Prize lunar lander concept, November 2010, "redesigned with fixed legs and monopropellant configuration" [Rocket City Space Pioneers].

Crystal Bonvillian
The Huntsville Times

Pelham, Alabama - A Pelham fourth-grade class has named the lunar lander that Huntsville's Rocket City Space Pioneers hope will become the first privately funded spacecraft on the moon.

The "Spirit of Alabama" is the Rocket City Space Pioneers' entry in the contest for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, an international competition that challenges engineers and entrepreneurs to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The Rocket City Space Pioneers is one of 26 teams around the world vying for the grand prize.

The announcement was made this afternoon to the winning class at Valley Intermediate School in Pelham. The class won a free trip to Space Camp and their teacher, Karen McDonald, won a $500 gift card for classroom supplies.

"We are very excited to congratulate the students of Mrs. McDonald's fourth-grade class," Dr. Tommy Bice, state superintendent, said in a news release. "They came up with a great name and had a lot of fun doing it!"

The naming contest, open to all Alabama fourth-grade classes, was announced Jan. 31 at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. The Rocket City Space Pioneers teamed on the project with the Alabama Department of Education and the Alabama Tourism Department.

"We were excited to hear that the 'Spirit of Alabama' was selected as the name of the lunar lander. We think it will represent our great state well in the competition," said Lee Sentell, Alabama Tourism director.

Tim Pickens, Rocket City Space Pioneers team leader, speaks
Jan. 31 during the announcement of a contest allowing Alabama
fourth-graders to name the team's lunar lander. The team also unveiled
the prototype of the lander they plan to send to the moon to claim
the Google Lunar X Prize [The Huntsville Times/Eric Schultz].

Tim Pickens, team leader of the Rocket City Space Pioneers, agreed.

"The word 'spirit' represents the collective enthusiasm, loyalty and dedication of our Alabama team and our state relative to our going to the moon to win this Google Lunar X Prize," Pickens said in the news release.

"Our team name, 'The Rocket City Space Pioneers,' captures the spirit of Huntsville, but naming our lander 'Spirit of Alabama' will excite the entire state about our endeavor," Pickens said.

The Rocket City Space Pioneers is led by Huntsville-based Dynetics and consists of team members Teledyne Brown Engineering, Andrews Space, Spaceflight Services, Draper Laboratory, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the Von Braun Center for Science & Innovation, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Moog, Analytical Mechanics Associates and the Huntsville Center for Technology.

Lunar rover competition

The White Label Space Google Lunar X-Prize team is offering all of us a shot at remotely driving their future lunar rover on the Moon. In a February 28 post on the White Label Space blog readers are urged to "check out" this video message from Simon O'Reilly for details, and Simon says "don't forget," to "Like us on Facebook."

Google Lunar X-Prize 'fashion show'

As yet unnamed rover design by the Part-Time Scientists.

Nick Azer, author of the Luna C/I (Colonization and Industrialization) blog and now an official part of the LPI's MyMoon Street Team, has been busy, "running down the Best of the Best, 'fashion-wise,' of the competing Google Lunar X-Prize lunar rovers.

"The $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE has 26 teams competing for the prize - each with their own rover, and each jockeying for the adoring love of the space community.

"Each rover, lander, hopper, ball, and other budding moon explorer has different functionality, but their own brand of robochique. The best rover may win but the foxiest will walk away with the style points.

"To that end, I'll be rolling out each of the 26 teams' rovers onto the catwalk for the ultimate in wheeled robotic fashion shows! Bundle up and brace yourself for a whirlwind tour of the finest Mr. and Mrs. Moons Luna will have to offer circa 2015."

Begin a tour of the Google Lunar X-Prize rovers, HERE.