• One moonshot team buys up another

    Moon Express

    An artist's conception shows Moon Express' lunar lander.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    One of the competitors in the race to send the first private-sector probe to the moon says it's acquired the assets of a rival team, marking what could be considered a "Netscape moment" for the commercial moonshot industry.

    Moon Express said the acquisition of Colorado-based Next Giant Leap will add to its momentum in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition, which promises a huge payoff to the first team that sends a rover to the moon for an exploratory trek that includes transmitting high-definition imagery back to Earth. Moon Express and Next Giant Leap are among 26 teams vying for the prize.

    "There are many synergies between our companies," Bob Richards, Moon Express' co-founder and CEO, said in today's announcement, which was issued during a Google Lunar X Prize team summit in Washington. "We are all stronger together, and we look forward to carrying on the innovation and vision of the Next Giant Leap founders and partners."

    Both ventures were selected by NASA in 2010 for data-sharing contracts that are worth up to $10 million each. Both companies have been working on rovers that would hop across the lunar surface. The Next Giant Leap effort produced a "hopper" design that attracted a $1 million commitment from the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to fund the development of a guidance, navigation and control system testbed.

    Richards told me that the relationship with Draper Lab on the control system "is perhaps the most obvious and strongest inheritance of the acquisition we will be actively working," but he also placed great value on the other partnerships that Next Giant Leap had forged over the past few years. Among those partners are Sierra Nevada Corp., MIT Space Systems Laboratory, Aurora Flight Services, Jolted Media Group, the Center for Space Entrepreneurship and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. 

    Richards said that the acquisition involved a payment to Next Giant Leap, but by mutual agreement, the amount would not be disclosed. Moon Express probably ranks among the more financially solid ventures chasing the Google Lunar X Prize, considering that one of the venture's co-founders is dot-com billionaire Naveen Jain. 

    Next Giant Leap

    An artist's conception shows Next Giant Leap's proposed lunar lander. Moon Express' Bob Richards said that his venture "will subsume Next Giant Leap designs to the extent possible and practical. ... The main hardware difference is that the Moon Express lander uses the NASA Common Spacecraft Bus heritage and the Next Giant Leap lander was based on the SNC Orbcomm bus."

    Michael Joyce, founder and president of Next Giant Leap, said the acquisition serves as validation of his team's value, and as a testament to the dedication of his partners. "Next Giant Leap and its partners have made remarkable technical progress," he said in today's announcement. "We are proud to be able to offer that value in support of the vision and resources of Moon Express that continue our dreams toward the moon."

    Richards said Joyce and another Next Giant Leap co-founder, Todd Mosher, have been invited to serve as advisers to Moon Express.

    The Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first team that lands a rover on the moon, sends it on an excursion of at least 500 meters and gets it to send high-definition images and video back to Earth. If a second team pulls off the same feat, that team would receive $5 million. Another $5 million is reserved for bonus prizes. The prizes expire if no team fulfills the requirements by the end of 2015, and if a government-backed lander beats the teams to the lunar surface, the grand prize would be reduced to $15 million.

    Richards and Jain have said Moon Express intends to launch its lunar lander as early as 2014. 

    More about the Google Lunar X Prize:

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Moon telescope tested on Earth

    ILOA / Moon Express

    An artist's conception shows the ILO-X telescope demonstrator, mounted on the Moon Express lander and receiving beamed commands from its operators on Earth.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    After a wild night on top of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, researchers report that they've successfully tested the remote-control system for a prototype telescope that could someday be looking at the cosmos from the surface of the moon.

    The demonstration for the International Lunar Observatory precursor instrument, or ILO-X, came a day earlier than originally plannned, due to a wave of chilly, stormy weather that was sweeping over Hawaii. Temperatures on Mauna Kea reportedly dipped to 16 below zero Fahrenheit overnight.

    "It was certainly challenging," Steve Durst, founder and director of the International Lunar Observatory Association, told me today. "We succeeded after some time in imaging celestial objects — not as many as we wanted, because of the extreme conditions."

    ILO science team members were able to control the shoebox-sized, camera-equipped telescope from stations in Switzerland, California and China, with signals routed via the Internet through a mission control center at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea. Other researchers from India, Japan, Canada and Africa had been planning to participate, but they couldn't scramble quickly enough to tap into the system, Durst said.

    Durst said the telescope was aimed at celestial targets including the planet Jupiter and the Pleiades star cluster, using remote-control software developed by Moon Express. The imagery was returned for processing, just as it would be during a moon mission. "That was very rewarding to see happen," said Bob Richards, the co-founder and CEO of Moon Express.

    The flight version of ILO-X is destined to travel to the lunar surface aboard the Moon Express lander, which Richards and his colleagues intend to launch in 2014 to win a share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Moon Express has designed and is building the ILO-X instrument with financial support from Durst's organization.

    Changing minds about the moon
    ILO-X's backers say it would be the first visible-light telescope permanently placed on the moon to make celestial observations. Richards said the instrument "will do what an extremely good amateur telescope could do," but he and Durst stressed that the success of the mission wouldn't be judged by the quality of the imagery alone.

    "It's no Hubble," Richards said. "We're not trying to change the astronomy textbooks. We're trying to change people's minds about their place on the moon."

    Moon Express

    Moon Express software engineer Jake Forsberg readies the International Lunar Observatory precursor (ILO-X) for a global demonstration from the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

    Durst sees ILO-X as merely the precursor for bigger, more capable telescopes that could eventually be sent to the moon. For example, radio telescopes placed on the far side of the moon would be shielded from earthly interference — and even on the moon's Earth-facing side, telescopes could have a much clearer view of the cosmos than telescopes on Earth.

    "There's no atmosphere to distort the images," Durst explained.

    Making money on the moon?
    Durst is also experimenting with the idea of using the moon as a broadcasting platform, starting with ILO-X and continuing with a follow-on lunar mission known as ILO-1. "It's a catalyst for a money-making broadcast operation that we want to conduct," he told me.

    Richards said flying ILO-X on the Moon Express would help "buy down the risk" for future lunar telescopes. But that's not Moon Express' only aim. The venture, co-founded by dot-com millionaire Naveen Jain, is targeting the X Prize purse as well as other lunar business opportunities. "No one has ever captured people’s fascination with the moon," Jain has been quoted as saying. "What if, say, we take a picture of your family on the moon and project it back to you? Or take DNA up there?"

    Moon Express is one of several Google Lunar X Prize entrants that have made multimillion-dollar deals with NASA for access to their lunar mission development data. But the highest-profile payoff is the X Prize itself. To win the prize, the venture will have to put its lander on the moon, then send out a mini-rover to gather data and images and send it back to Earth.

    With the ILO-X demonstration completed, Richards said attention will turn to preparing the ruggedized version of the telescope and other components of the lunar probe for the big flight ahead. The clock is ticking, not only for Moon Express but for more than two dozen other X Prize teams. If no one pulls off a successful lunar mission by the end of 2015, the prize expires, and the purse goes back to the sponsors at Google.

    Update for 10:40 a.m. ET Dec. 20: I originally wrote that ILO-X would be the first telescope on the moon, but it's been pointed out that the Apollo 16 mission carried an instrument known as the Far Ultraviolet Camera / Spectrograph, which used a 3-inch telescope to make astronomical observations in ultraviolet wavelengths in 1972. Goes to show that there's nothing new under the sun, especially if you go beyond the visible-light spectrum. This MIT webpage tells you more about George Carruthers, who led the team that invented the Far Ultraviolet Camera / Spectrograph. 

    More about the Google Lunar X Prize:

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.