Another Busy GLXP Day

There's usually plenty of news with the Google X PRIZE. Today is no exception:

Alan Stern joins Odyssey Moon - RLV News - I also agree with a lot of the things Stern did with an unfavorable budget in his short tenure at the head of NASA Science, from the absolutely vital decision to encourage suborbital science, to making projects stick to their budgets. I don't agree with everything - for example, although I appreciate how badly Mars scientists want Mars samples returned, I'm skeptical about raising the profile of that goal now because of the difficulty of doing it reliably with current space access costs without busting the Mars science budget. Let it wait for CATS (we can always use more people that want CATS). However, I still think he gets an "A", and he should be a good addition to the Odyssey Moon team as Science Mission Director.

Weapons Tech Maverick Shoots for Moon - Wired Danger Room - Wired mentions a voting contest at the Google Lunar X PRIZE site, and a related appeal from LunaTrex.

You can vote and see the results at the main GLXP site. Go ahead and vote for your favorite team. I don't know which is my favorite - I have different favorites depending on whether I'm thinking about the chances they'll get the money to enable a win, bring together the technologies needed to get there, lower space access costs, win a bonus prize, inspire space and STEM education, and so on.

I think Will Pomerantz suspects why LunaTrex is so much in the lead in the vote ...

Discovering Water/Ice on the Lunar Surface - LunaTrex - They start a conversation on the topic, and Will points out a GLXP forum discussion based on the post. The discussion has started with lunar mapper Phil Stooke.