Strange New World: Picks of the Week

Feb. 28, 2008 — -- This week it's dead easy to see what takes the cake for strangeness here in the Strange New World: space travel.

Google is offering a big, fat prize to get private enterprise back on the moon, and teams are lining up to compete for the Lunar X Prize. Also this week, the Academy Awards may have been a dud, but books about the technology of movie making are anything but. And Apple put its laptop line on steroids. Going portable has never been more powerful.

Here are our picks for the top tech stories of the week:

The Chinese are funding an Apollo-style mission to the moon, and we have been curious to see how the rest of the world would respond. Would the United States park a shuttle up there? Would Russia claim that land rights from the North Pole extend to the moon?

Well, the wait is over.

Last week, the X Prize Foundation announced the first 10 teams entered in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Unveiled in September 2007, the contest requires entrants to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the moon, explore the terrain for at least 500 meters and transmit results of the trip back to Earth. The grand prize is $30 million. So who are the early favorites? A very unlikely bunch indeed.

Odyssey Moon: The first team to register for the prize is located on Britain's Isle of Man. Odyssey Moon's team leader, Robert Richards, hopes to score business opportunities on the planet. No news as of yet if that includes fast food.

Astrobotic: Dr. William "Red" Whittaker's team from Carnegie Mellon did well in the 2007 Urban Challenge, the robotic car race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Sure, these guys may be bright, but their team name sounds like something you use at the gym.

Team Micro Space: This Colorado team is led by Richard Speck, who also competed in the Ansari X Prize, a suborbital flight contest. From the sound of this team, it will be the smallest entry. Potentially sending tiny little robots and tiny little rockets to the moon.