14 Google Lunar X PRIZE Teams

The X PRIZE Foundation has a press release on the Lunar X PRIZE Team Summit that reveals 4 new teams: X PRIZE Foundation Holds Team Summit, Introduces Official Contenders in Private Moon Race

From the press release (which also describes the student team competition and other aspects of the meeting):

The four new teams are:

Advaeros: Team Advaeros is led by Hanidy Yusof, who founded the Malaysian company Advanced Aerospace Industries. Advanced Aerospace Industries is a small Research and Development company dealing with smart systems for navigation, robotic application, aeronautical and space related activities. They are a team of enthusiastic technical people who work together for the future dreams of flight, both for fun and for knowledge. They plan to design their own launch vehicle, focusing part of their team on craft design, and the rest on launch vehicle design.

JURBAN: Started in 2000, the Juxtopia® Group, Inc. is a not-for-profit research organization whose mission is to improve human learning performance with science and technology that adapts to individual learning needs, enhances cognitive performance, and augments human learning capabilities anytime, anywhere, at any pace, and for anyone. The Juxtopia® Urban Robotics Brilliant Application National (JURBAN) challenge is a Juxtopia® Group program. The JURBAN Challenge Program trains underserved and disadvantaged students to build autonomous service robotic systems that have significant impact in their community. Led by Dr. Jayfus T. Doswell, the JURBAN team will be made up of professional and student engineers.

STELLAR: Based in North Carolina and led by Dick Dell, Team STELLAR includes team members from Insight Technologies, the Advanced Vehicle Research Center, and North Carolina State University. The team plans to highlight educational outreach, and includes volunteers from two schools that participate in the FIRST Robotics competition, which is a national high school competition based in the United States.

Mystery Team: Google Lunar X PRIZE teams have the option of officially registering but remaining anonymous until July 20, 2009. One new team has chosen to keep their identity a secret for the moment, but they are still working hard on their mission plan.

RLV News posts a press release by one of the new teams, Team STELLAR. It gives more details on the team than you see in the paragraph above. The RLV News post also links to the STELLAR web site and the GLXP Teams site, which has a lot of information about the Stellar team.

In fact, all 4 new teams appear on the GLXP Teams site. Even the Mystery Team has an entry. In fact, the mystery team will be blogging like the others. There's a contest to see if you can guess facts about the mystery team. There are a lot of details on the Teams site about the other 2 teams as well. JURBAN has experience in the DARPA Challenges. I expect to be posting about all of them in the near future. Good luck to all of the teams! Hopefully we'll see more bonus prizes funded so more teams will be able to make it to the Moon.