This year, the X Prize Foundation is pointing its magic wand squarely at the Moon. The Peter Diamandis-led group announced the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize today, a competition for privately funded robotic lunar exploration. The foundation hopes that this largest-ever X Prize purse will see the development of multiple new, low-cost methods of robotic space exploration, as well as begin capitalizing on the moon's potential as "a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth—energy independence and climate change."

Competitors will need to land a robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of, among other things, roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.

The purse has multiple tiers, including a $20 million grand prize, a $5 million second prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the grand prize, a team must rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. Second prize involves simply landing, roving, and transmitting data, without the specific parameters of the grand prize. The bonus prizes will award roving longer distances (more than 5,000 meters), imaging manmade artifacts (e.g. Apollo hardware), discovering water ice, and/or surviving through a frigid lunar night (approximately 14.5 Earth days). Deadlines: December 31, 2012 for the grand prize and December 31, 2014 for the Second Prize.

Of course, since the competition is sponsored by Google, the participating lunar spacecraft will be equipped with high-definition video and still cameras that will transmit live to the Google Lunar X Prize Web site.

We can hear university labs around the world revving up right now . . .  —Eric Adams

The Wirefly X Prize Cup kicked off Thursday with the exclusive X Prize Executive Summit, a high-powered brainstorming and networking event that brought together a distinguished group of the world's most influential entrepreneurs, astronauts, heads of NASA and the FAA, tech-industry experts and visionaries to talk about the future of the emerging personal-spaceflight industry.

The X Prize Cup, an annual rocket race and showcase set to touch down every October in Las Cruces, New Mexico, held its inaugural gathering on October 9. Founder Peter Diamandis, whose X Prize Foundation last year awarded $10 million for the first private manned spaceship, plans for the XP Cup to be a chance for space fans to meet the engineers and pilots of a new generation of commercial spaceships and to watch them compete in rocket races both in and out of the Earth's atmosphere.

Erik Lindbergh, the 36-year-old grandson of the legendary "Lone Eagle," took
off at about 12:16 p.m. Eastern time from Farmingdale, Long Island, on
Wednesday May 1, slightly east of the Roosevelt Field shopping mall that now
stands where his 25-year-old grandfather departed on May 20, 1927. Erik
Lindbergh arrived at the same Le Bourget airfield near Paris where a
throng of 100,000 people greeted his grandfather. While Charles’ flight took
about 33 hours, Erik’s took about 17 hours. He touched down at 11:30 local time on Thursday, May 2.