One Giant Leap for Entrepreneurs

To jump-start the space race with private dollars, Google's Lunar X Prize hopes to spur ordinary citizens to land on the moon

by Douglas MacMillan

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This November, Carnegie Mellon robotics professor William "Red " Whittaker and his team's radar- and laser-equipped Chevy Tahoe are top contenders for the $2 million first prize in the DARPA Urban Challenge—a series of races with driverless vehicles sponsored by small companies and universities. The Defense Dept. has already held similar challenges twice in the past three years in hopes of drumming up ideas for sophisticated, unmanned vehicles for use in urban combat zones. Soon another government agency will be eyeing Red's robots: NASA.

Whittaker was the first to enter the Google (GOOG) Lunar X Prize, the search giant's competition to land an unmanned vehicle on the moon and complete a series of tasks. Like the Ansari X Prize —the $10 million bounty that aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Paul Allen nabbed in 2004 for flying the first humans out of Earth's atmosphere in a privately funded spacecraft—the Google competition is an incentive for the emerging private space industry to build exploration technologies faster and on a tighter budget than the government. But this time around, there's reason to expect more involvement from wily entrepreneurs like Whittaker and less from deep-pocketed tycoons like Allen.

"The Ansari X Prize created this whole new industry of suborbital space tourism, a market that even a company who didn't win the prize could pursue," says Jeff Foust, senior analyst with Bethesda (Md.) aerospace industry researcher Futron. For the Google Lunar X Prize, all contestants will still retain the rights to their intellectual property. But, as Foust points out, "It's not clear what the market is for one of these rovers."

To the Moon

Many space veterans are simply too busy to shift gears to a moon landing, points out Michael Belfiore, author of Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian, 2007) (BusinessWeek, 8/6/07). "Burt Rutan would be the one with the biggest chance of success, and he's locked up doing work with Virgin Galactic," he says, referring to the space offshoot of Richard Branson's Virgin Group which will begin shuttling passengers to space in 2009.

That leaves the door wide open for academics, hobbyists, and enterprising small businesses with enough drive and enough know-how to get to the moon. And while robotic moon landers may not be worth much to large private space companies like Virgin Galactic and rocket maker SpaceX, there could be even bigger customers—government agencies—waiting in the wings.

"If a company or team is successful, and they can do it for more than $20 million, but less than $100 million, they now have an inexpensive platform for exploration that they can take to NASA," says analyst Foust. NASA, which plans to return a manned vehicle to the moon by 2020, makes no secret of the fact that if private entrepreneurs can build better technologies for cheaper, it will adopt them. Since the agency launched its Centennial Challenges in 2004 for this purpose, it has awarded $200,000 to Peter Homer, who designed a better astronaut glove; and $250,000 to various entrepreneurs who engineered Jetsons-like personal air vehicles.