Google Lunar X PRIZE Has Its No.1 Competitor

Everybody has dreamt of touching the moon at least once in his/her life and for the overwhelming majority the dream has been wiped by the first rays of sunlight that gently entered the room and laid to rest on their faces. Not everybody's a rocket scientist, let's face it, so dwelling on that dream would only lead either to a career as a poetry writer or to a basically unexplainable-without-therapy frustration.

In September, Google announced at the Wired NextFest that it would offer 30 million dollars to the first private company to reach the moon with a rover by December 31st, 2014. Many competitors were expected to take part in the Google Run For The Moon, but so far only one has fully registered and an event was held in the honor of the moment, in San Jose.

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

X-PRIZE founder, Peter Diamandis, said that: "We'll see the first attempts to win this competition within the next four years. […] I would expect we'd see a half dozen teams fully-registered by the middle of 08." At the same time, he congratulated Odyssey Moon for being the first: "We are proud to participate in the announcement of our first fully registered team. We hope the announcement will motivate and inspire even more teams to enter this race; a race that is now truly international." The next competitor said to enter the race is Red Whittaker.

Additional information was not made available for the press, who were swarming on site; thus, reporters from BBC, LA Times, SJ Mercury News, SF Chronicle, TV channels and so on only got out of the executives the declaration that Odyssey Moon was not fully funded.

Go for the Moon! And if you get there first, make sure to send me something nice.