The competition is sponsored by the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant Google, and the X Prize Foundation, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit institute that wants to ‘‘create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”
To collect the prize money, a team has to be first to land a robot on the moon that travels at least 500 meters and transmits images and other data back to Earth.
A soft moon landing has not been done by anyone — public or private — since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. However, robotic craft sponsored by governments and public entities, including the United States, Japan and the European Space Agency, have orbited the moon since then, with the Europeans deliberately crashing a probe there in 2006.
‘‘There are plenty of skeptics,” acknowledged Stadd, who is also president of Capitol Alliance Solutions, LLC, a Bethesda aerospace and technology management services company. He has served as chief of staff to two NASA administrators and was on the White House National Space Council.
‘‘It’s a very ambitious undertaking,” Stadd said. ‘‘But I’m very confident and optimistic that we can do it.”
Organizers of the competition say the challenge will change the way people view space exploration — much as Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 transformed commercial aviation.
In addition, the moon, which some say is rich in resources, could help solve problems such as climate change and energy shortages, they say.
‘‘Many of these teams represent some of the most creative and entrepreneurial minds in space exploration today,” said Peter H. Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation. ‘‘We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration.”
Other teams include Astrobotic, with members from Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh and Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass.; and Odyssey Moon Ltd., headquartered on the Isle of Man in the United Kingdom with an office in Washington, D.C.
Odyssey CEO Robert Richards, a founder of the International Space University in France, said in a statement that he hopes to ‘‘lower the price” of reaching the moon and help initiate a ‘‘Moon Rush.”
It goes without saying that it’s a gigantic challenge to reach the moon, said R. Patrick Bahn, CEO of TGV Rockets, a Maryland space exploration company that formed in 1997. TGV has been working on a rocket called the Michelle B in hopes of making suborbital space flight less costly and more accessible, but the company does not plan to enter the lunar competition.
‘‘The hardest part could be to get the money to stack up to get to the moon,” said Bahn, whose company has won some government contracts and has a design lab in Norman, Okla.
Landing on the moon itself will not be a piece of cake, he said. ‘‘It’s an energy-intensive problem,” Bahn said.
Blasting off
Stadd, whose father was an engineer and one of the developers of G-suit technology for pilots in high-acceleration aircraft, has long been drawn to outer space ventures. Upon hearing about the Lunar X competition, he placed a call to Sarsfield, whose résumé includes stints as NASA deputy chief engineer with expertise in spacecraft design and mission planning, as well as managing small spacecraft development for aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda.
Stadd asked Sarsfield — who in 1998 wrote a 221-page report called ‘‘The Cosmos on a Shoestring: Small Spacecraft for Earth and Space Science” for the Rand Corp. — if the ambitious goal was possible.
‘‘He said he’d have to get back to me,” Stadd recalled. ‘‘When he did a day or so later, he said, ‘Yes, it’s possible.’ I was sold. When Liam says he can do something, he can do it.”
Sarsfield said he sees the new venture’s mission as a ‘‘demonstration of how low-cost lunar operations can create viable off-world commercial opportunities.”
The third Quantum3 partner, Carliner, is also no stranger to NASA and has some Maryland ties. Besides once being the staff director of the subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations that oversaw NASA’s budget, Carliner was the chief adviser to U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D) of Baltimore on space and science issues.
Currently president of Quantum3 — Stadd and Sarsfield are senior vice presidents of the business that has offices in both Washington and Sterling, Va. — Carliner is also president of Carliner Strategies LLC, a Washington consulting and government relations business.
‘‘Together, we have more than 50 years of experience in the space industry,” said Stadd, who is also an executive vice president of TerreStar Corp., a Reston, Va., mobile satellite communications company. He expects Quantum3 to add a few more employees from its present handful but to remain ‘‘lean.”
Quantum3 plans to use an East Coast range to launch, possibly the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, which is operated by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
Once the company’s craft — called Moondancer because its developers plan to have the ship hop on the moon’s surface rather than roll along it — nears the moon, Quantum3 expects to use a computer-controlled descent method with liquid propellant to land at the Sea of Tranquility. Stadd and his colleagues hope for a landing in the summer of 2009 to mark the 40th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. ‘‘That’s an aggressive timetable,” he said.
Much like laptops and other electronic items, vehicles for space exploration have become smaller and the technology has become more accessible. Quantum3 seeks to place computer stations in schools across the country where students can get hands-on experience with space flight — even actually steering the robotic ship on the moon itself.
Other high-tech challenges
Since its formation in 1995, the X Prize Foundation has organized other high-flying challenges. In 2004, a team financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by flying a manned craft into space twice in two weeks.
The developer of that craft, Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., which was founded in 1982, spent more than $20 million building that ship, according to published reports.
Getting funding is a big part of the challenge, not to mention assembling the technical team, Stadd said. ‘‘We’re working on a 24⁄7 basis,” he said. ‘‘We need to start the assembly process in a matter of weeks, not months.”
The X Prize Foundation is also running a $10 million Archon X Prize for Genomics, in which competitors try to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days for less than $10,000 per genome. The deadline is Oct. 4, 2013.
In addition, the foundation is coordinating the $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize challenge, in which teams build fuel-efficient vehicles and compete in 2009 and 2010. Two teams from Maryland are among more than 60 that have signed letters to compete, according to the foundation: Belloso Motor Co. of Salisbury and Red Light Racing of Callaway.
The founders of Quantum3 expect to continue working on space-related projects after their competition, perhaps trying to land a craft on Mars.
‘‘We see this as the first effort among a number of other efforts in terms of space exploration,” Stadd said.
Race to the moon
The Google Lunar X Prize includes a $20 million grand prize, a $5 million second award and $5 million in bonus prizes. The grand prize will be awarded to the first team to land a privately funded craft on the moon and have a robot travel at least 500 meters and transmit images and other data back to Earth by 2012. The fund will drop to $15 million after Dec. 31, 2012, until Dec. 31, 2014.
A second team to land on the moon within the time period will win $5 million.
The bonus prize will be awarded for completing additional tasks such as roving more than 5,000 meters, discovering water ice and surviving a frigid lunar night.
The contest will end in 2014 unless extended by Google and the X Prize Foundation.
Teams must be at least 90 percent privately funded and be registered by Dec. 31, 2010.
For more information: www.googlelunarxprize.org
