Last week, billions of people around the world turned over the page on a new calendar year. When the evening's festivities were over, we went home and found ourselves ready to take on new challenges. Some people enter the year resolving to improve themselves one way or another--maybe, for example, by posting to their blog more often! Others decide to tackle a new project or learn a new skill. If you are looking for something to challenge yourself and improve the world, maybe you should consider joining a Google Lunar X PRIZE Team!

Towards the end of 2007, we launched a new Community Forum on this Google Lunar X PRIZE webpage. It's been very encouraging to see the early adopters of that forum use it to try to find teammates, to share ideas, or to offer their assistance to the groups already pursuing the prize. Every time I see a new message titled "Any teams or prospective members from UAE?" or "Looking for a team to join as member of robotic designer" or something similar, I smile. It's the beauty of this whole internet thing, right?

One team that has been remarkably active and very successful in using the Forum to attract new ideas and members is Team Frednet. They seem to chime in anytime anyone offers up some time or an idea, and I think that's paying off. Over the holiday break, they were profiled on national television here in the USA--you can read the piece at that link. I recommend the video even more that the written piece. Kudos to them!

The forum community is still relatively small, but I look forward to watching it build over the years. I encourage you to sign up today!

One other document that we released towards the end of the year, which some people may have missed, is the first batch of a set of Official Questions and Answers for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. If you've been looking for an answer to a technical question about the rules, I'd highly recommend checking there first. We try to be very precise when answering these kind of questions, as we know that the requirements we impose will make a huge difference for the teams that are actually trying to win the prize. Much as writing the prize rules themselves is a continual balancing act between what is significant and what is actually possible, answering these questions requires balance between wanting to deliver responses as rapidly as possible and needing to answer fairly, thoroughly, and correctly. Past experience has showed that collecting questions and releasing batches of answers about once a month is a good way to achieve that balance--so we'll move forward with that schedule. If you have questions you'd like to see answered in the next batch, you are more than welcome to submit them either in the Forum or by emailing glxp-team -AT- xprize -DOT- org.

Some other notes:

• With the new year, the Google Lunar X PRIZE is getting some new teams. We've received and gone over several applications already, and we've got some really exciting teams that will debut soon. I can't give away too much right now, but stay tuned.
• With more teams comes more content for this webpage. We're working on some site design modifications to try to make the freshest, most interesting content really leap out of the page at our visitors. So, be sure to check the main googlelunarxprize.org site for updates, and if you have suggestions, let us know!
• If you know any students who are applying to ISU and looking for funding, please encourage them to apply for this scholarship (among others!) I've served on the selection committee for that scholarship for the past few years, and it has been really fun to look over the applications of all the promising students. We always wish we could give away more money, but it's nice to be able to help even a small number of students pay for their education.
• Kudos to the Automotive X PRIZE guys for their great coverage in Wired. Cool stuff!
• Bob Richards, the Founder and CEO of Odyssey Moon, will be on the Space Show today! Listen in tonight, or check the archives later. Also, you’ll be happy to note that !
• Those of you who saw my talk at the 7th International Symposium on Launcher Technologies in Barcelona last April may recall that I made some comparisons between commercial airfare and commercial spaceflight. Out of curiosity, I showed some numbers about how far I had already flown that year, how much cost, and talked about how nice it would be to have similar numbers for spaceflight. Curious once more, I recently ran the numbers for the full year, and discovered that I logged about 82,000 miles (~130,000 km) of commercial air travel last year--thanks mainly to multiple trips to California and New Mexico, one trip to Europe, and one to India. Even though I feel like I fly an insane amount, it's humbling to realize that even such a large amount of flying represents only about 35% of the distance between the Earth and Moon. Also, just for fun: I paid about $0.11 per mile for those commercial flights--or, if you want to ignore the miles spent flying to connection cities, something closer to $0.20 per mile. If we were able to get those kind of rates for a trip to the Moon, a round-trip "flight" would cost a little under $100,000. I'd buy one!
• Finally, if you are the betting type, you may be interested to learn that you can now bet on whether or not the Google Lunar X PRIZE will be won by 2012. I obviously can't bet on it, but I'll have fun tracking the odds!