MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Nearly two years
into the competition for the Google Lunar X Prize $30 million purse, teams are
lining up financing, establishing partnerships and tinkering with rover
prototypes.
The international
competition announced in September 2007 to land a rover on the moon, travel
500 meters and send back high-definition imagery has attracted 19 teams with
participants from 42 countries, Nicole Jordan, X Prize Foundation team liaison,
said during a Space Frontier Foundation conference here in late July. Teams
range from an open-source collaboration of engineers and software developers to
highly structured partnerships featuring prominent aerospace firms,
universities and investment banks.
In spite of their contrasting approaches, team leaders
speaking July 20 during a panel discussion on the prize were uniformly
optimistic that lunar transportation services would be profitable. Participants
cited a study released July 16 by the Futron Corp. predicting a $1 billion to
$1.5 billion market for commercial lunar services during the next decade. The
study by Futron, a consulting firm in Bethesda, Md., identified six markets for
lunar services: hardware sales to governments around the world, services for
government customers, products for the commercial sector, entertainment, sponsorship,
technology sales and licensing.
Before they can reap the rewards of those markets, however, teams
will have to make a significant investment to reach the Moon. Bob Richards,
chief executive for Odyssey Moon Ltd., a company formed on the Isle of Man one
year before the lunar prize was announced, said an extremely efficient mission
to send 30 kilograms to 50 kilograms to the Moon would cost approximately $100
million.
Richards said the Futron study confirms his view that
customers will line up to send payloads to the Moon once a reliable service is
in place. "Our goal is to prove that the private sector together with
government can provide transportation services to the Moon and establish an
economic base and a viable business case to continue operations," Richards
said.
Odyssey Moon announced July 29 that it had signed up its
fifth customer, the International Space School Education Trust. Moonlink Ltd.
of Yorkshire, England, has contracted with the Education Trust to reserve 1
kilogram on Odyssey Moon's first flight, dubbed MoonOne, for a scientific
instrument to be selected by a competition for Yorkshire schools and
individuals. Paragon Space Development Corp. of Tucson, Ariz., also announced
plans to send an experiment on MoonOne to grow mustard seeds, and Celestis, a
part of Space Services Inc. of Houston, hired Odyssey Moon to carry a memorial capsule
with cremated remains to the Moon or into lunar orbit. In addition, the
International Lunar Observatory Association, based in Hawaii, plans to send
aloft a scientific instrument to collect astrophysical and in-situ information,
and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research plans to
launch a modified version of a spectrometer designed originally for the
European Space Agency's Aurora Mars exploration program.
In addition to building a customer base, Odyssey Moon is
seeking investors to finance its flights. During the next six months, Richards
said Odyssey Moon will embark on a second round of financing with a group of
new partners: Near Earth LLC, an investment bank based in New York; WPP Group,
a London-based marketing and communications firm; Milbank Tweed Hadley and
McCloy LLP, a law firm based in New York; and Aon International Space Brokers,
an insurance company from Chicago.
The economic downturn is making it challenging to raise
money, "but it is not so daunting that it has discouraged us,"
Richards said. "If you have a good business plan, the economic climate
doesn't matter."
Michael Joyce, founder of another Google Lunar X Prize
competitor, Next Giant Leap, said the economic slowdown may even benefit his
team because investors have little prospect of making money in the short term.
"It has shown investors that they need to be looking at a little bit
longer time horizon, so that has helped us," Joyce said.
The Next Giant Leap team, which was known simply as the
Mystery Team during the first year of the competition, includes Sierra Nevada
Space Systems of Littleton, Colo., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Space Systems Laboratory and the Draper Laboratory, both of Cambridge, Mass.,
and Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va. The team's Moon lander design
is based on existing spacecraft built by Sierra Nevada, while Draper Labs is
offering guidance, navigation and control expertise.
The MIT students, led by former astronaut Jeff Hoffman,
unveiled a prototype robot in June designed to hop across the Moon's surface.
The students are scheduled to complete testing of the prototype within one
year, Joyce said on July 20.
While Next Giant Leap is seeking investors, the team is also
financed in part by an unusual method. Joyce, the owner of B9 Creations
LLC of Deadwood, S.D., manufactures and sells $24,500 replicas of the
robot featured in the 1965 television series "Lost in Space."
Another Google Lunar X Prize team, Astrobotic
Technology led by Chairman William "Red" Whittaker of Carnegie
Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, already has built three
prototype rovers designed not only to win the initial $20 million prize, but to
win millions of dollars in bonus prizes with its first mission scheduled for
May 2011. During that mission, called Tranquility Trek, the Astrobotic robot is
designed to travel to the Apollo 11 site and send back imagery showing the
impact of weather, radiation and meteorite bombardment on hardware left there.
According to the lunar prize rules, the first team to land on
the Moon, travel 500 meters and send back a 1 gigabyte "Mooncast"
including high-definition still and video images by Dec. 31, 2012, will win $20
million. If that goal is not accomplished, a prize of $15 million will be
available until Dec. 31, 2014. No prize will be awarded after that unless the
rules are changed by sponsors Google Inc. and the X Prize Foundation of Playa
Vista, Calif. The second team to reach the Moon by Dec. 31, 2014, will win $5
million. Teams that complete additional tasks, such as traveling 5,000 meters
on the lunar surface, sending back imagery of Apollo hardware, discovering
water and surviving the cold lunar night, will be eligible for $5 million in
additional prizes.
The Astrobotics team includes the University of Arizona's
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, Ariz., to design and build the
rover's cameras, and Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., to help design the spacecraft.
Two additional X prize competitors, Fred Bourgeois, leader
of Fred's Research Development and Exploration Network (Frednet), and Kevin
Myrick, leader of Team Synergy Moon, also presented plans for Moon missions
during the panel discussion.
Team Synergy Moon, which joined the competition in February,
is a collaboration of space enthusiasts, filmmakers, artists and adventurers
from around the world. The team's goal is to interest young people in space
exploration, Myrick said. To raise money for the Lunar X Prize competition,
Team Synergy Moon plans to hold art festivals, concerts and public technology
demonstrations around the world.
In contrast, Frednet is focused on creating an open source
lunar mission. "We want to prove that a group of open source developers
can come together, work together and solve problems," Bourgeois said.
"I'm trying to draw in as many people as I can find with math, science and
engineering backgrounds in an open source, open participation project."
Members of Team Frednet are developing multiple rovers
including a 72.5 gram ball based on a Lego Mindstorm model kit and a 4 kilogram
rover. In addition to competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, Team Frednet
members are interested in sending small satellites into low Earth orbit and
establishing a digital communications network to serve future Moon missions,
Bourgeois said.
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