Here’s a report on the recent gathering of Google Lunar X PRIZE teams in Chile: Lunar Roundup: 2013 Team Summit in Chile – Google Lunar X PRIZE.
20 of the teams were available to make presentations at the Summit, and a few key pieces of information came along:
- Name Change!: White Label Space recently became based exclusively in Japan, and as a result, they will be changing their team name! While they haven’t finalized the new name, an official announcement and change will be happening soon.
- 2015 Express!: Moon Express mentioned in their presentation that they are planning for a 2015 launch! This puts them in a tight race with a lot of other teams who have largely mentioned early 2015 as a timeline (e.g. Omega Envoy‘s planned Q2 2015), with Barcelona Moon having a launch service contract for June 2014 and Astrobotic signed up for a launch with SpaceX in October 2015. The race is on…
- Masten and NASA!: Astrobotic announced that they have been selected by NASA to fly guidance tests on a Masten Xaero rocket! The helicopter-driven tests (which simulate lunar gravity conditions) will help demonstrate technology for future landers to ‘pull an Armstrong’: make directional adjustments once they’ve realised that their planned landing location is unsafe. Masten Space are the folks who won the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X CHALLENGE, so that’s a pretty epic triumvirate!
- Malaysian launch sites!: Team Independence-X shared a lot of exciting updates, including a couple of potential launch sites in Malaysia: Gong Kedak and Kuantan!
Astrobotic don’t appear on the SpaceX launch manifest (http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php). Are they a secondary payload?
I doubt that they are a secondary since the payload is fairly big, they need to be released into a specific orbit and at a certain time. It’s possible their launch is contingent on finding other payloads to share the launch cost with.