Lunar X-Prize gets first official entrant

Seth Rich · Dec 7, 2007

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Moon 2.0 has its first startup.

The Google Lunar X-Prize folks held an event at a space investment conference in San Jose to announce their first fully-registered competitor.

Odyssey Moon, a startup based on the Isle of Man, and run by Carl Sagan mentee, Bob Richards and the CFO of satellite-provider Inmarsat, Ramin Khadem, plans to land a rover on the moon within the next seven years.

"For Odyssey Moon, the race is just the beginning. It is our intention to seed and then lead private lunar commercial enterprise." said Richards. "It's our goal to lower the cost of lunar access by an order of magnitude."

The lunar prize, launched in September at Wired NextFest, offers $30 million to the first private company to reach the moon with a rover by December 31st, 2014. X-Prize founder, Peter Diamandis, said he expected a variety of competitors and that someone would win the prize.

"We'll see the first attempts to win this competition within the next four years," said Diamandis, "I would expect we'd see a half dozen teams fully-registered by the middle of 08."

Other competitors, like Red Whittaker, have announced they will enter the competition, but Odyssey Moon is the first to have completed its registration, which includes a small monetary deposit.

Reporters (and we were here like flies: BBC, LA Times, SJ Mercury News, SF Chronicle, TV channels, etc) didn't let the team off easy with a quick pat on the back. They hassled Odyssey Moon executives for financial and technical details, which the company's representatives said they weren't ready to discuss. Eventually Khadem did provide a small nugget of information.

"Are we fully funded? No, we're not," he said. Khadem also stressed that Odyssey Moon is not being custom built to win the moon prize.

"We believe we have a robust business case even if we don't win the prize," he said. "The prize is a bonus."

Given the lack of detail, the press conference was a bit triumphant, even featuring signs that showed today's date and the tagline, "History Restarts." For someone who has heard a fair amount of startups' hype, it seemed more like History Repeats.
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And so it begins.

I'm excited about this. I really think private ventures will be the future of space travel, instead of the inefficient, bloated bureaucratic relic of the Cold War we currently rely on to explore space (a.k.a. NASA). While government space programs operate mainly to show up competing space programs in other nations, the private sector space initiatives will, IMO, be the ones who make the truly innovative and cool space technologies, and make space travel available to more than just Navy/Air Force pilots and a handful of scientists.

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Lunar X-Prize gets first official entrant

Seth Rich R.I.P.

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Lunar X-Prize gets first official entrant

Seth Rich R.I.P.

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