Florida Ups Ante for Moon Prize

If $30 million from Google wasn’t enough to get you motivated to put your genius to work designing a moon rover, the state of Florida has a little extra incentive: a cool $2 million extra if your little robot makes its great lunar leap from the sandy shores of the Sunshine State.

The state’s space development agency said it will pony up the bonus for any winning contestant of the X Prize's latest attempt to commercialize space. The non-profit made history in 2004 when it paid out $10 million for a pair of private suborbital spaceflights which prompted Virgin founder Richard Branson to order up a couple of ships for a new tourism venture. While spaceship builder Burt Rutan toils away, the X Prize Foundation is moving on to the moon.

So far, 10 teams have registered to compete for the prize. They are:

Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA): Based in Valcea, Romania and led by Dumitru Popescu, ARCA registered but never flew for the private spaceflight X Prize. Two of ARCA’s most innovative projects to date have been the Demonstrator 2B rocket and Stabilo, a two-stage manned suborbital air-launched vehicle. The craft the team plans to enter in the Google Lunar X PRIZE will be called the European Lunar Explorer.

Astrobotic: Team Astrobotic, led by William “Red” Whittaker, was formed to coordinate the efforts of Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon Co., and partners. Carnegie Mellon’s expertise includes autonomous navigation which enables robots to automatically avoid obstacles and select their own route across unmapped terrain. Astrobotic will compete for the prize using their Artemis Lander and Red Rover.

Chandah: Chandah, meaning “moon” in Sanskrit, was founded by Adil Jafry, an energy industry entrepreneur. He now heads Tara, the largest independent retail electricity provider in Texas. Jafry says his goal is to catalyze commercialization of space, and bring advances in space travel, tourism, sciences and technology to the general public at large. The team’s spacecraft will be named Shehrezade.

FREDNET: Headed by Fred Bourgeois this multi-national team of systems, software and hardware engineers intends to bring the same successful approach used in developing open system software (such as the internet, and Linux) to pioneer space exploration.

LunaTrex: Led by Pete Bitar, LunaTrex is a mixed group of individuals, companies and universities from all over the United States that hopes to parlay its experience in the Ansari X Prize competition and other technical endeavors into a moon rover called Tumbleweed.

Micro-Space: Colorado firm headed by Richard Speck has been churning out innovative high-tech products for 31 years, including liquid-fuel rockets, near-hover rockets and an assortment of life-support systems. A competitor in the Ansari X PRIZE as well as the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Micro-Space’s moon offering will be the Human Lunar Lander.

Odyssey Moon: This private commercial lunar enterprise, founded by Robert Richards and located in the Isle of Man, is developing a series of missions to the moon in support of science, exploration and commerce. Its craft is called MoonOne (M-1).

Quantum3: Led by aerospace executive Paul Carliner, Quantum3 plans to soft-land its Moondancer craft where Apollo 13 settled down in the Sea of Tranquility.

Southern California Selene Group: Led by Harold Rosen, this Santa Monica-based group’s craft, Spirit of Southern California, pairs control and communication systems used in some of the earliest communications satellites with modern electronic and sensor technology.

Team Italia: Based in Italy and led byAmalia Ercoli-Finzi, Team Italia is a collaborative effort by several universities that already is running a prototype. To be determined is whether to build a single big rover or a colony of little probes that could quickly disperse on the lunar surface with cameras and sensors.