Okay, I fibbed when I mentioned at the end of my last blog posting that I would next post about the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. I’ll be talking about that contest plenty, but can’t really ignore last week’s announcement, can’t I?

For anyone who hasn’t heard already, last week, the Foundation announced the brand new Google Lunar X PRIZE. Personally, I couldn’t be more thrilled.

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is the largest prize the X PRIZE Foundation has ever offered; and is in fact the largest international incentive prize in history (even if you convert old prizes like the Longitude Prize or the Orteig Prize to present value). $30 million in total prizes await private teams that can land robots on the surface of the Moon and explore the lunar surface by traveling at least 500 meters (about a third of a mile) and sending back lots of high definition video and still imagery. The contest is open to any team—young or old, large or small, aerospace engineers or anything else—from anywhere in the world, so long as they are at least 90% privately funded.

The teams who compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE will be racing to place the first vehicle onto the surface of the Moon since 1976 (true, I’m not counting vehicles that were purposely crashed into the lunar surface, like ESA’s SMART-1). Along the way, they’ll be lowering the cost of exploration by a factor of ten or more—and getting kids and adults both from around the world hooked on science, engineering, and exploration.

To some, landing a privately funded mission on the lunar surface might seem impossible. In fact, we think that it’s just at the outer limits of what we can achieve. No fundamental laws of physics need to be broken, no alien technology is needed. Winning the prize will require lots of ambition, creativity, and hard work—but thankfully, human beings have all of those (renewable!) resources in abundance. And it looks like this prize will succeed in tapping into all of them: since announcing the prize on Thursday of last week, we’ve gotten well over 100 emails from teams around the world wanting to sign up! Universities, companies, or individuals in 22 countries thus far have stepped up and informed us of their strong interest; soon, we’ll start getting these teams actually registered and announcing them to the public.

Another extremely encouraging thing has been the number of people who have emailed us saying that they want to help out. They don’t care who wins, they just care that someone wins; and they’ve offered their brains and their labor to any Google Lunar X PRIZE Team that wants it. In the not-too-distant future, we’ll have ways that you can make these offers directly to Teams here on the Google Lunar X PRIZE site.

One of my favorite moments since joining X PRIZE happened last weekend at Wired NextFest. After announcing the prize on Thursday, we stuck around and talked to the public for the rest of the event. Friday morning was for students, and our booth was full of kids coming over to watch our videos, play with Google’s awesome software—Google Sky was a big hit—or to interact with the custom designed rover. You could see right away that to some of them, this rover was more than just a toy—it was an inspiration. Without fail, these kids would start peppering us with questions. When they found out that it was built by a student and a professor (from the University of Oklahoma—thanks Matt and Dave!) , they’d get even more excited; then when they learned that its ‘brains’ were essentially an iMac and a Gameboy Advance, they were really hooked! This was clearly something they could relate to—and a number of them left saying that they were going to compete in BotBall or FIRST… or maybe even the Google Lunar X PRIZE itself.

Last Thursday’s announcement was just the first step in what’s sure to be a long and incredible journey. I feel amazingly privileged to have a front seat view for all of the stories that are sure to come out of this prize. Hopefully, I can use this blog to give you a peek of the view from my seat.

I’m leaving for India this weekend—heading to the International Astronautical Congress. Perhaps my next posting will be from there! Until then…