There have been a series of stories about and interviews with the leaders of teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize. The groups are competing to land a rover on the lunar surface. The interviews include:
INTERNATIONAL SPACE FELLOWSHIP
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO (AUDIO FILES)
A group at Glasgow University in Scotland has announced plans to join the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition. The group, lead by Dr. Gianmarco Radice, put out a call for partners last Friday, according to the Sunday Herald.
“We are looking for partners to join us - we can definitely get to the moon,” he said. “It is very expensive though, so it’s more a prestige thing than an economic investment. It would be quite a PR stunt, to say the least.”
Ten teams are already competing for the prize, which requires landing rover on the lunar surface by 2012.
Here is a roundup of news stories about Indiana-based Team LunaTrex, one of the entrants in the Google Lunar X Prize competition:
IndyStar.com: Skies are prize for spacey Anderson biz
Heard Bulletin: Anderson company pursuing $30 million lunar exploration prize
WSBT Channel 2: Anderson company to help in bid for $30 million lunar prize
Wired Science has an interesting story analyzing the entrants in the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition to land a private spacecraft on the moon. The competitors include include “a Jesus freak, a Linux geek and a guy who recently bought 30 books on space exploration…an eclectic mix of engineers, rocketeers and dreamers so confident of winning they made reaching the moon sound easy.”
Florida is offering a $2 million incentive to encourage entrants in the Google Lunar X Prize to launch their robotic rover from the state.
The money would be in addition to the $20 million prize being offered by Google and the X Prize Foundation for the first private group to land a spacecraft on the moon by the end of 2010. Ten organizations have registered for the competition.
Ten teams are now competing in the Google Lunar X PRIZE challenge, the race to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon.
The X Prize Foundation revealed that nine additional teams had joined the competition during a press conference this week at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. “It’s not just a new mission,” said X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis announced. “It’s a new way of doing business.”
The 10 teams are:
Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA): Based in Valcea, Romania and led by Dumitru Popescu, ARCA was also a contender in the Ansari X PRIZE.
Astrobotic: Team Astrobotic, led by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, was formed to coordinate the efforts of Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon Company and additional institutions.
Chandah: Chandah, meaning “Moon” in Sanskrit, was founded by Adil Jafry, an energy industry entrepreneur. He is now chairman and CEO of Tara, the largest independent retail electricity provider in Texas.
FREDNET: Headed by Fred J. Bourgeois III, this multi-national team is comprised of systems, software, and hardware developers who serve as the leaders and overall coordinators of an international group of Open Source developers, engineers, and scientists.
LunaTrex: Led by Pete Bitar, LunaTrex is comprised of several individuals, companies, and universities from all over the United States, some of whom were also competitors for the Ansari X PRIZE.
Micro-Space: Helmed by Richard Speck and based in Colorado, Micro-Space, Inc. has a 31-year history of producing world class, high tech products.
Odyssey Moon: The first team to register for the competition, Odyssey Moon is a private commercial lunar enterprise headquartered in the Isle of Man and founded by Dr. Robert Richards.
Quantum3: A U.S.-based team, Quantum3 is led by Paul Carliner, a senior executive in the aerospace industry.
Southern California Selene Group: According to team leader Harold Rosen, the approach taken by the Santa Monica Selene Group can be succinctly summarized as “an elegantly simple design that is relatively inexpensive to implement.”
Team Italia: Based in Italy and led by Prof. Amalia Ercoli-Finzi, Team Italia is a collaboration between several universities. The team is currently running a prototype of its system at Politecnico di Milano.
X Prize has full details about the competitors on its website. Space.com has a comprehensive story.
Tony Spear, project manager for Carnegie Mellon’s Google Lunar X Prize entry, recently engaged CMU students and faculty in a lighthearted and informative discussion about the competition.
“At Carnegie Mellon, understanding the problem and the approach to the solution is more important than the answer [itself],” said Spear, discussing his return to Carnegie Mellon after 46 years to join William “Red” Whittaker and his Google X Prize team.
X Prize Foundation Press Release
Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, and Clinician/Scientist to Grow Prizes in the Area of Life Sciences
SANTA MONICA, Calif., January 17, 2008 –The X PRIZE Foundation, an educational nonprofit prize institute created to foster radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, today announced the appointment of Bard J. Geesaman, M.D. Ph.D. as Executive Director, Life Sciences. Beyond his academic and medical qualifications, he is the founder of two healthcare companies and worked as a venture capitalist. He has extensive experience in business, clinical medicine, basic research, and finance.
X Prize Press Release
WASHINGTON, February 6, 2008—Congressman Daniel E. Lungren (R-CA) today led the passage of a House resolution congratulating the X PRIZE Foundation’s leadership in inspiring a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles. (Full Text of H. Res. 907; Related Congressional Record)
The Automotive X PRIZE is a private, independent, technology-neutral competition being developed by the X PRIZE Foundation. The prize will award a multimillion dollar purse to teams that can design, build, and demonstrate production-capable vehicles that achieve 100 MPG or its energy equivalent (MPGe).
Continue reading ‘X Prize Honored by Congress for Work in Auto Efficiency’
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Gulf Times
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AMEInfo
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RIA Novesti
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Space News
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Dow Jones Newswire
“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is protesting a proposal to lease offshore Virginia for oil and natural gas development over concerns that drilling would interfere with rockets’ flight patterns.
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