Saturday, July 12, 2008

2008 X PRIZE Cup and Lunar Lander Challenge Information

I'm not sure when this appeared on the X PRIZE Foundation XPC and LLC sites, which I don't check regularly. I noticed it in a GLXP Forums conversation about a Little Rover Challenge idea.

From the X PRIZE Cup site:

After exploring a number of options, the X PRIZE Foundation has decided that we will not be holding an X PRIZE Cup in 2008. Instead, we will be holding a Lunar Lander Challenge at Holloman Air Force Base on October 24 and 25, 2008. This event will be webcast, but will not be open to the public. We are planning to hold the next Cup sometime in 2009, so stay tuned for more information!

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge site has similar news.

I'm not sure what the status of the 2008 Pete Conrad Spirit of Innovation Award is.

It's too bad they couldn't pull it off this year. Even if they had to call it a "mini-X PRIZE Cup" or something like that because they couldn't hold certain events like the LLC there or couldn't raise enough money for a big event, it would be good to have some kind of public-oriented space/rocketry festival to anchor one of the weekends of the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. That reminds me, I still have to catch up and listen to the archived Space Show interview of Dr. Patricia Hynes to see what the plans are this year.