X Prize Foundation Announces Lunar Lander Competitors

Raver32 writes to tell us the X Prize Foundation has announced eight of the nine groups planning to compete in this year's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. "The ninth team requested to remain confidential, lending an air of controversy to the announcement. Space bloggers have surmised the ninth team is Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, but sources told SPACE.com that information was wrong. Their confidentiality period ends 60 days before the start of the competition at which time the X Prize Foundation will announce the team's name."

Comments

seriously

[morgan_greywolf]

It's not Blue Origin. They're known to be using hydrogen peroxide as the fuel for their 'mystery project', which isn't going to get anyone to the moon, considering rockets based on H2O2 are barely enough to get you into a suborbital flight.

I'll bet it's Burt Rattan and Scaled Composites, but this time instead of being backed by Paul Allen, they'll be backed by Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic outfit. They may even be using the Virgin Galactic as the team name. It's just Branson's style to pull something like this.

My other guess, if that doesn't pan out, is Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX. SpaceX may have only barely got a prototype rocket into space, but they have a lot of very smart people on that team. Somehow I doubt it's them, because I don't think hiding the team's name is Musk's style.

Re:What is our limitation?

[Arterion]

What's on the moon that's so great? All the other things you mentioned are useful to society. How does society benefit from trips to the moon?