Triangle team racing to moon

X Prize's $30 million pot fuels private-sector effort

In the category of audacious goals, a team of Triangle business leaders and N.C. State University faculty members has entered a worldwide contest to launch the first private rocket to the moon.

Houston, you have competition.

Sponsored by Google and the X Prize Foundation of California, the contest offers $30 million in prize money to teams that can meet the following challenge:

* Land an unmanned rover on the lunar surface.

* Travel at least 500 meters.

* Transmit video back to Earth.

But ultimately, this contest is about making the moon a permanent celestial outpost.

"The space race is on again," said Dick Dell Sr., director of Raleigh-based Advanced Vehicle Research Center and a key member of the moon launch team. "There is going to be a huge rush toward commercialization this time."

Almost four decades after man first landed on the moon, some will no doubt question the need for such a contest.

But the rules of the game are different this time. The X Prize Foundation, which offers huge sums of money to spur innovation in a variety of fields, envisions a day when large solar panels built on the moon are used to power entire cities on Earth.

It sees the moon as an extension of our reach, a launchpad for further exploration, a place where humans keep a permanent presence.

But first, you need to get there without government help.

Earth comes first

Dell was involved in supporting another futuristic endeavor -- building cars that compete in driverless races -- when he learned of the lunar competition.

The leader of the Grand Challenge driving team, Grayson Randall of Insight Technologies in Morrisville, was interested.

So was Andre Mazzoleni, a professor at NCSU who teaches orbital mechanics and space system design. William Edmonson, who teaches electrical and computer engineering at N.C. State, also wanted in. So did others.

By late 2007, Team Stellar filed its application to launch a rocket to the moon. Its entry was accepted May 23, making it one of 14 teams cleared to compete.

Like Team Stellar, some of the groups have universities as partners.

The group known as Astrobotic Technology, for example, is a combined effort led by Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Arizona and Raytheon, a defense company.

But many of the teams are coalitions of private firms that want to pioneer private space travel. To underscore that point, 90 percent of a team's money must come from private sources, a rule intended to drive cost efficiencies.

The rules allow teams to hire a private launch company to take them into Earth orbit -- and there are many now, thanks to the needs of weather satellites and Global Positioning System satellites and a host of Earth-imaging products.

But it will take another set of rockets to launch from Earth orbit to lunar orbit, and still another set of rockets to drop out of the lunar orbit and land a rover.

Travel, video and just creating a craft that can survive extreme lunar climates -- temperatures can swing 450 degrees in a day -- keep the challenges coming.

But of all the tasks in front of Team Stellar, it is not the science that most worries Randall.

"We understand the technology," Randall said. "The first question is, where are we going to get the money we need?"

Investment and return

The answer brings the contest back to its entrepreneurial roots.

Any team that launches a rocket will spend far more than the $20 million set aside for the first-place winner. Dell predicts a final tab of $50 million to $100 million for the Team Stellar design. Raising that kind of money will depend on old-school marketing.