The Lunar Challenge

It's like a James Bond film come to life. A company based on a tiny island in the British archipelago parachuted into San Jose on Thursday to become the first private team to enter a race to reach the moon by 2014 and thereby pocket most of a $30 million prize offered by Google.

"We are challenging small private teams to do what only two governments have done before - land on the surface of the moon," said Peter Diamandis, head of the XPrize Foundation, which is administering the purse that Google offered in September.

Entrants must fly a craft to the moon, operate a robotic rover and transmit data to Earth to win the $20 million first prize or the $5 million second prize plus $5 million in bonuses.

Out of 375 inquiries from more than 40 countries, so far only a company called Odyssey Moon has completed the registration process to become an official contender, Diamandis said at a conference about space investment on Thursday in San Jose.

Among the commercial possibilities of such a mission: robotically mining the surface of the moon to extract silicon that could be refined into chips to create solar arrays on the moon that would eventually - by means as yet unspecified - beam power back to Earth.

Gregg Maryniak, executive director of the XPrize Foundation, began the presentation by showing a futuristic video depicting the moon as "a natural storehouse of resources that we can use to enhance life on Earth and explore our universe."

Maryniak likened the Google Lunar XPrize to the Apollo challenge issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

"Now there's a new moon race," Maryniak said, calling this "Moon 2.0" effort "a race to bring Earth's offshore island, the moon, into Earth's sphere of economic activity."

Odyssey Moon's leaders include Robert Richards, a co-founder of International Space University, and Ramin Khadem, former chief financial officer of Inmarsat, a nearly 30-year-old satellite firm publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Officials said the company is based on the Isle of Man to take advantage of space-friendly tax policies and regulations.

According to Odyssey Moon's Web site, the company's goal is to "lower the price of getting to the moon by an order of magnitude and in doing so help catalyze a 'moon rush' to Earth's sister world, which (Richards) describes as an eighth continent rich in energy and resources."

Thursday's announcement was timed to coincide with NASA's pending launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, which was delayed because of an equipment problem.

Also at the event was Red Whittaker, the robotics expert from Carnegie Mellon University who recently won the third in a series of robotic car races sponsored by the Pentagon. Whittaker has formed a company, Astrobotic Technology, that has announced its intention to compete for the XPrize but has not yet paid the $10,000 registration fee as part of the requirements to be accepted as an official entry.

Whittaker, a larger-than-life character with a track record in robotics, has set an incredibly optimistic goal.

"I intend to land (a robotic craft) near the Apollo 11 site on the 40th anniversary of its landing," said Whittaker, which would mean putting a privately built craft on the lunar surface in July 2009.

Sensitive to the fact that exploration has, in the past, led to exploitation, speakers professed that the Odyssey Moon bid and the Google Lunar XPrize would be "responsible," without saying how.

"We are ill-prepared in many ways for a responsible return to the moon," Richards acknowledged.

The race, he said, will open a dialogue about how to divvy up the next frontier in a responsible way.

The XPrize is modeled after a challenge laid down in 1919, when a wealthy Frenchman offered $25,000 to the first pilot to fly nonstop from New York to Paris - a feat that made American Charles Lindbergh famous when he landed in France in 1927.

Diamandis, who is involved with two firms that offer high-priced space tourism packages, reminded skeptics that when he concocted the first XPrize in 1996, disbelievers said no private firm would be able to put a manned craft into space. A team including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and space pioneer Burt Rutan proved them wrong in October 2004 when SpaceShipOne made two space flights within a week to win a $10 million prize - versus about $26 million the team spent.

SpaceShipOne now hangs in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum alongside Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis.

Richards, the Odyssey official, said it was clear the mission would cost more than the prize but that the eventual payoff would be getting a head start in space exploration.

Current government-sponsored robotic missions run from $500 million to $1 billion, officials said, but these private firms estimate they can do it for something approaching a tenth of the cost. If the ratio of prize to project cost in the 2004 win is any indication, they said, shooting the moon might carry a price tag of $100 million.

Diamandis said he expects the first moon-launch efforts to get off the ground within roughly four years.

"Get ready for some fun and amazing decades of private exploration ahead," he said.

Tom Abate