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Home , Luna 17, Luna 21, Lunokhod 1, Peter Diamandis, Synergy Moon, TeamIndus

SELF-STYLED FASTEST SHARKS ARCHAEOLOGY MESSIAHS IN THE SEA BY SATELLITE

THE SPACE ISSUE

THE NEXT SHOT

| IN ORBIT WITH SCOTT KELLY

| VOYAGER, 4 YEARS LATER

| BEST ECLIPSE IN A CENTURY

AUGUST 2017 Scientists, visionaries, evangelists, GUHDPHUV

Team , Japan Sorato, the rover built by the Japanese team competing for the Lunar XPrize, sits in a Tokyo clean room. A $20 million prize will go WRWKHƃUVWSULYDWHO\IXQGHGJURXSWRODQGDFUDIWWKDWWUDYHOVPHWHUVRQWKH PRRQDQGEHDPVLPDJHVDQGYLGHREDFNWR(DUWKŞDVPDOOVWHSWRZDUGSRWHQWLDOO\ JLDQWHFRQRPLFUHZDUGVEHFNRQLQJIURPWKHPRRQDQGEH\RQG LEFT: FROM FULL MOON%<0,&+$(//,*+7ǩDZDZDZ25,*,1$/%<1$6$3+272%<0$5.7+,(66(11*067$)) 31 Synergy Moon 7HFKQLFLDQ(ULN5HHG\SRQGHUVURFNHWGHVLJQDW,QWHURUELWDO6\VWHPV ,26 EDFNHURI WKLVLQWHUQDWLRQDOWHDP,26ŠVJRDOWREHWKHORZHVWFRVWODXQFKSURYLGHULQWKHSULYDWHVSDFHLQGXVWU\ Shoot for the moon. By Sam Howe Verhovek Photographs by Vincent Fournier

Again.

The youthful Indian engineers took their seats, a bit nervously, in a makeshift conference room inside a cavernous former car-battery warehouse in . Arrayed in front of them were several much older men and women, many of them gray-haired luminaries of India’s robust space program. The first Asian space agency to send an orbiter to Mars, it also nearly tripled a previous world record by launching 104 satellites into orbit in a single mission this past February. The object of everyone’s attention was a small rolling device barely the size of a microwave oven.

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34 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • AUGUST 2017

The members of the young crew explained traveling vehicle on the moon that can transmit their plans to blast the device into space aboard high-quality imagery back to Earth. a rocket late this year, position it into lunar or- The competition is modeled explicitly after bit nearly a quarter million miles away, guide it the great innovation-spurring prize races of the to a landing on the moon, and send it roaming early years of aviation, most notably the Orteig across the harsh lunar landscape. The engineers Prize, which won in 1927 when of TeamIndus said their company would do all of he flew the Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New this on a shoestring budget, probably $65 million, York to Paris. give or take, the vast majority of it raised from Like the quest for the Orteig Prize, the com- private investors. petition for the Lunar XPrize involves national A prominent Mumbai investor, Ashish Kacho- prestige. Teams from Israel, Japan, and the U.S., lia, who has put more than a million dollars into plus one multinational group, are vying for the the firm, sat at the back of the room, transfixed honor along with India; a cavalcade of other na- by the discussion. It somehow combined the tions participated on the 16 teams that survived intense, rapid-fire questions of a doctoral the- into the semifinal stage last year. sis defense with the freewheeling, everybody’s- Almost as diverse as their countries of origin shouting, laughter-punctuated atmosphere of is the range of approaches and commercial part- the Lok Sabha, India’s boisterous lower house nerships involved in solving the three basic prob- of parliament. Kacholia hardly needed to be here lems at hand—launching from Earth, landing on all day to check up on this particular investment the moon, and then going mobile to gather and of his—far from his largest—but he stayed just transmit data. To meet the last challenge, three to hear the erudite dialogue on selenocentric teams plan to deploy variants of a traditional rov- (moon-centered) orbit projections, force model- er, while the other two intend to use their landing ing, apogee and perigee, and the basis for how craft to make one giant leap for private enter- “the kids” drew up the error covariance matrix. prise: They will “hop” the required minimum of “It’s thrilling, really,” Kacholia explained. 500 meters on the moon rather than drive across “You’ve got these 25-, 28-year-olds up there de- the lunar surface. fending their calculations, all their work, in front As with many early aviation prizes, whichever of a thousand years of the nation’s collective team prevails almost surely will spend much more aerospace experience and wisdom.” His friend to win the prize than it gets back in prize money, S. K. Jain, also a well-known Indian investor, though all the teams hope the global publicity nodded in vigorous agreement. “These kids are and “brand enhancement” of victory will eventu- firing up the whole imagination of India,” he ally make their investment pay of handsomely. commented. “They’re saying to everyone, Noth- ing is impossible. ” AT ITS CORE, this new sprint to space poses a Nearly 50 years after the culmination of the question that would have been laughable in the first major race to the moon, in which the Unit- Cold War era of the 1960s, when the U.S. was will- ed States and the spent fantastic ing to spend more than 4 percent of its federal amounts of public money in a bid to land the first budget to beat its superpower foe to the moon: humans on the lunar surface, an intriguing new Can someone actually make money venturing race to our nearest neighbor in space is unfold- out into the great beyond? To a demonstrably ing—this one largely involving private capital wide range of entrepreneurs, scientists, vision- and dramatically lower costs. The most immedi- aries, evangelists, dreamers, eccentrics, and pos- ate reward, the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize sible crackpots involved in the burgeoning space (or GLXP) will be awarded to one of five finalist industry, the answer is an enthusiastic yes. teams from around the world. They’re the first President John F. Kennedy famously urged ever privately funded teams to attempt landing a America in 1962 to “choose to go to the moon

36 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • AUGUST 2017 in this decade and do the other things, not be- 7KLQND/XQDU;3UL]H PLOOLRQ cause they are easy, but because they are hard.” IRUƃUVWSODFHDQGPLOOLRQIRUVHFRQG  Today Bob Richards, founder and CEO of Moon ZRXOGJLYHDQLFHERRVWWR\RXUEDQN account? There are a few things Express, the American team, ofers a diferent, if \RXŠOOQHHGWRGR consciously cheeky, rationale. “We choose to go to the moon,” he says, “because it is profitable!” Whether Richards is correct about that, and if Launch so, just when it might prove true, is wildly un- EHIRUH'HFHPEHU clear. Setbacks are the norm in the space busi- ness, and realistically, many companies will make their early money mainly from govern- ment contracts, not private customers. None- /DQG DVSDFHFUDIWRQWKHPRRQŠVVXUIDFH theless, Richards predicts that the world’s first trillionaire will be a space entrepreneur, perhaps one who mines the for helium-3, a gas that’s rare on Earth but plentiful on the moon Travel and an excellent potential fuel source for nucle- PHWHUVRQWKHPRRQ ar fusion—a holy of energy technology that scientists have been trying to master for decades. Or a huge fortune may be minted from the aster- Talk oids and other near-Earth objects, where robot- WR(DUWKXVLQJYLGHRDQGLPDJHV ic technology could help mine vast amounts of gold, silver, platinum, titanium, and other prized elements bound up in them. “There are $20 trillion checks up there, just waiting to be cashed!” says , a physician and engineer who is co-founder of , a company backed by Ava- tar director and several tech bil- lionaires. Planetary Resources also acquired the company Asterank in 2013. Asterank’s website ofers scientific data and projects the economic value of mining more than 600,000 asteroids. Diamandis is also founder and executive chairman of the XPrize Foundation, which has sponsored several other award competitions de- signed to push the boundaries of invention and technology in fields as diverse as artificial intel- ligence, mathematics, energy, and global health. The whole thrust of the Lunar XPrize competi- tion, says Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer, a senior di- rector at the foundation, is to help pave the way to “a new era of afordable access to the moon and beyond.” Just as the worldwide acclaim for Lindbergh’s bravura feat sparked huge interest in civil avi- ation, the lunar competition is intended to fire

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LANDER HOPPER public imagination about private space pioneers, is dropping, and it is doing so dramatically,” ex- who already are ferrying cargo to the Internation- plains John Thornton, the chief executive at As- al Space Station and deploying satellites, orbital trobotic, a Pittsburgh-based firm whose aim is to rocketry, and test modules. Soon the crafts may “make the moon accessible to the world” with lo- be carrying passengers: , which gistical services that involve carrying everything billionaire founder Richard Branson calls “the from experiments for universities to MoonMail world’s first commercial spaceline,” says it’s gear- for customers who just want to leave a tiny some- ing up to take passengers on brief space tours in thing on the lunar surface—a note, a photo, a which they will experience weightlessness and lock of hair from a deceased loved one. awe-inspiring views of Earth. SpaceX found- “A company like ours can do the math and er announced in February that his show investors that we really do have a feasible company would fly two as yet unnamed private plan to make money,” Thornton says. “Not many citizens around the moon in late 2018 aboard its years ago, that would have been science fiction.” Dragon . Two months later Amazon If the race to put a man on the moon was the founder Jef Bezos said he’d be selling a billion equivalent of building one of those giant, room- dollars in stock a year to fund Blue Origin, his size, prodigiously expensive mainframe comput- own commercial and enterprise. ers in the early days of high technology, today’s race is analogous to a diferent era of computing: THERE ARE PLENTY OF REASONS to be skep- the race to put an afordable computer on every- tical about how soon these firms will actually be one’s desktop or, a few years later, in everyone’s carrying private customers to space; after all, a telephone. Today computers are so tiny—and 2014 crash of Virgin Galactic’s prototype passen- the batteries that power them so compact—that ger spacecraft set that company’s efort back by we can reach the moon with increasingly small- several years. And while the Lunar XPrize com- er and decreasingly expensive devices. Rather petition appears to be coming to a head, there than golf cart–size rovers on the moon, the next are plenty of obstacles to contend with: the pos- generation of machines exploring, mapping, and sibility of a missed deadline, failure of prelaunch even mining the lunar landscape may well be the rocket tests, to name just two. Plus, the impact size of a child’s Tonka truck. More than anything of the race on the public imagination could well else, that’s the driving factor behind today’s prove limited. For one thing it simply lacks the space economy. human drama and suspense of the 1969 moon “Think micro-rovers and miniature CubeSats,” landing and safe return of men to Earth, a feat says William L. “Red” Whittaker, legendary ro- that began an era of human exploration on the boticist at Carnegie Mellon University and a pi- lunar surface that wound up lasting a mere three oneer in both rover and self-driving automobile years. Unmanned lunar rovers have been around technology. “It’s astonishing what’s going on. for decades now: When China landed Yutu in Small is the next big thing. Very small.” 2013, it became the third nation to put a rover on The physics of human spaceflight remain the moon. more complex—we are growing neither smaller So, really, then: What’s the big deal? nor more compact, so it still takes plenty of fuel “What’s new is that the cost of getting to space to get us up there—but these advances could

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0RRQ([SUHVV herald a smaller, nimbler, cheaper way to get array of laptops, tablets, and sensors through a people back on the moon and far beyond. wooded clearing and out onto the dunes. Then In fact, some in the space industry say the came—literally with white-glove treatment—a moon may one day be less the object of our jour- pair of roving robots designed to work mostly in ney than a sort of giant Atlanta airport that we’ll tandem when they’re on the moon, but partly in- have to go through on our way to somewhere else, dependently, which is where Hakamada’s profit- where both the engineering and the economics of making idea comes in. blasting of from a place with only one-sixth the Team Hakuto’s entry features a four-wheel rov- gravity of Earth will make a lunar hub the ideal er—dubbed Sorato by the crew, after a song by a way station in exploring the universe. Japanese alternative rock band—which in future Water, now locked in the form of ice at the missions beyond XPrize will be tethered to a sepa- lunar poles, would be both lifeblood and fuel rate, two-wheel tilting robot. Both units are made source: water to drink, water to irrigate crops, largely of very lightweight, strong, carbon fiber and water to be split into oxygen and hydrogen, components. Hakamada, a thin, thoughtful man the former for us to breathe and the latter to pow- with a mop of unruly hair, who has been a space er our spacecraft beyond this lunar base. Again, geek since he saw his first Star Wars movie as an whether that will prove true, and if so, when, is elementary school student, said the smaller robot unknowable. But what is known now is that the can be lowered deep into fissures, lava tubes, and first destination of the emerging space industry caves. It will gather vital data on such spots, which is obvious: the moon. could serve an essential function one day as tem- porary habitats for future lunar bases, shielding TO WITNESS A TEST MISSION of Team Haku- arriving humans for a period of time while more to—Japan’s entry in the Lunar XPrize compe- permanent digs are constructed. tition—I traveled last September to a remote, The Tokyo-based company Hakamada runs, windswept region of western Japan known as iSpace, plans to leverage Japanese advances in the Tottori Sand Dunes. For days, ferocious and technology miniaturization to probe, photograph, very un-moonlike rain whipping of the Sea of Ja- map, and model the moon in much higher detail pan pelted the coast, drowning out proper condi- than can be seen in the photos and soil-testing re- tions for testing a . In a nearby youth sults from earlier lunar rover missions. hostel, team leader Takeshi Hakamada and his “We are not in this just to win a prize, although colleagues were getting restless. Dressed in spify that would be nice,” Hakamada told me shortly gray jackets with a rabbit logo (Hakuto is a myth- before the test run. “We are in this to demon- ological white rabbit in Japanese folktales) and strate to the world that we have a viable technol- tossing back energy drinks, they kept fine-tuning ogy that can produce important information that software that carefully mimicked the communi- people will be willing to pay for.” cations delay of 2.5 seconds between Earth and With wheels that each look a bit like an the moon, nearly a quarter million miles away. old-fashioned waterwheel, the main rover Then abruptly one evening the skies cleared reached a “drop point” on the dunes, a stand-in and stars emerged. Amid a crackle of walkie- for the harsh lunar surface. It’s hitching a late De- talkies, Hakamada’s team carted an impressive cember launch with the Indian Space Research

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SHOOT FOR THE MOON 51 Organisation, the government agency whose system probes and for closer observation of the rocket will be carrying TeamIndus’s lunar rov- sun itself. er as well. (To win the XPrize, a team must be On a pleasant March evening this year, the launched by December 31, 2017, but can complete only sound at SLC-17 was a slight breeze from the its mission in early 2018.) sea whistling through the rusting towers of the It was quiet out on the Tottori Dunes as the complex. But behind a locked door in a former clock neared midnight, the roar of the sea muf- maintenance shed, the prototype vehicle belong- fled by the blufs. Hakuto’s tiny rover looked a bit ing to the first U.S. company to receive govern- forlorn out on the sandy simulacrum (a simula- ment approval for a space mission beyond Earth tion of the lunar surface). Hakamada and his crew orbit was ready to hit the beach—on its way, ulti- coordinated a series of computer-entered com- mately, to the moon. mands through the lunar time lag, and suddenly To Bob Richards, once an assistant to famed the rover clicked to life, cutting cleanly through astrophysicist Carl Sagan and now head of Moon the sand, traveling just a few inches per second. Express, the beauty of the company’s MX-1E It correctly sensed and navigated around sever- lander design is its dual-purpose utility. “There’s al hazards placed in its path. This ability will be no need for a rover at all if your landing craft can critical on the moon, where a large enough rock provide the same function,” Richards told me. In or ditch could scuttle a whole mission. fact, he added, the Google Lunar XPrize is too of- “The rover did great,” Hakamada said later, ten misconstrued as a rover competition. beaming like a proud new father. In fact, he ex- “The greatest challenge of the GLXP is to land plained, his confidence in its performance was on the moon,” he said. “Rovers can’t land on the no longer his biggest challenge. “We believe that moon themselves, and in fact the term ‘rover’ the biggest problem for space innovation now is doesn’t appear in competition rules at all, just a really not technology itself but the entrepreneur- requirement to accomplish mobility of at least ship involved. To open new markets in space, you 500 meters.” have to convince people this is for real—and thus Thus was born the idea of hopping to victory defy all those old stereotypes about how only big by bouncing along with the help of thrusters. Af- government agencies can undertake this sort ter an initial rocket launch to low-Earth orbit, the of exploration. MX-1E—a single-stage that is “That’s what’s great about this race,” he added. shaped and sized more than a bit like R2-D2 of “Whoever wins will show it can be done.” Star Wars fame—will blast away using a super- high-test hydrogen peroxide as its main pro- A FEW STEPS from the Atlantic Ocean, on a pellant to travel at bullet speed on course for its giant patch of Florida scrubland visited by alli- lunar goal. After establishing , Moon gators, sea turtles, and the occasional bobcat, Express’s vehicle will eventually achieve what Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex (SLC) engineers euphemistically call a “soft landing”: 17 appears at first glance to be a relic. From 1957 Aided by reverse thrust, the vertical descent will to 2011, the site was used for both Thor and Delta nonetheless be violent enough to require cush- rocket launches, the former for the country’s first ioning by a flexible landing-leg system capable ballistic missiles, the latter for satellites and solar of absorbing the blow and springing back with

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Team Hakuto, Japan 0HPEHUVRIWKH-DSDQHVHPHGLDDVVHPEOHRQWKHUHPRWH7RWWRUL6DQG'XQHVWRVHH 6RUDWRXQGHUJRƃHOGWHVWV7KH\ORRNRQDV+DNDPDGDFDUULHVWKHURYHUWRDVDQG\WHVWEHGWKDWVLPXODWHV WKHPRRQŠVVXUIDFHŢ:HZDQWWRGHPRQVWUDWHWRWKHZRUOGWKDWZHKDYHDYLDEOHWHFKQRORJ\ţKHVD\V enough life to take on the next stage of the mis- was referring to the impact the Apollo space pro- sion. With a small amount of fuel remaining, the grams had on youth in the 1960s and ’70s, when MX-1E will take of on a big hop—or, perhaps, a the enterprise’s successful missions inspired series of smaller hops—to travel the required dis- many of the founders of today’s leading high- tance to win the XPrize. tech companies. With his TED Talk–worthy profundities and an industry reputation (not always a posi- ROUGHLY THE SIZE of a small refrigerator but tive one) for the gift of gab, Richards makes it more circular in shape—a bit like a flying saucer— all sound so brilliantly achievable that you’re SpaceIL’s lander is expected to weigh 1,323 pounds tempted to invest. But there are arguments for when it detaches from a SpaceX rocket, holding on to your wallet—for one thing, Moon though about two-thirds of that weight will be fuel Express is currently slated for launch not with used up by the time it is ready to land. With some a proven carrier such as SpaceX, with its Falcon residual spring action in its legs similar to the MX- rocket lines, but instead with Rocket Lab, a U.S.- 1E’s, it will use the little fuel left to hop the nearly based company whose launch site at the Mahia one-third of a mile set by the XPrize rules. Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand The Israeli efort began in late 2010 as “three opened this past September. crazy guys with not a lot of money but with the Testing is just beginning this year, meaning thought that it would be really cool to land a ro- that the firm will be on a very aggressive time- bot on the moon.” That’s how co-founder Yariv table to achieve the XPrize’s stipulation of an Bash described the beginning to me during a visit actual launch by the end of the year. Previous to the testing lab for the lander’s main computer. milestone deadlines have been extended, but They struggled down to the wire to meet an ini- XPrize says it is committed to wrapping up the tial competition deadline requiring them to show competition soon. Thus it could conceivably end plans for a landing strategy and at least $50,000 with no winner, though a foundation oicial in- in assets. sists it “really, really wants someone to win.” “We asked anybody we could for money,” Bash The other team aiming to hop the distance recalled. “It got to where I was asking my wife for needed to win is based in a small complex of in- money in my sleep.” While short on capital, the dustrial buildings on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Its group was not short on know-how: Bash is an elec- leader is hardly less evangelistic than Richards. tronics and computer engineer who once headed “Our vision is to re-create an ‘Apollo efect’ R and D eforts for Israeli intelligence forces. (“You here in Israel, to really inspire a rising genera- know Q in the James Bond movies?” Bash asked tion of kids to excel in science and technology,” me with a wink. “It was a bit like that.”) said Eran Privman, a national hero and the CEO Their initial designs were far smaller—one as of SpaceIL, whose eclectic résumé includes com- small as a two-liter soda bottle—than the land- bat experience as a pilot in the Israeli Air Force; er they are assembling with parts from around a doctorate in computer science and neuro- the world this summer. And rather than a for- science from Tel Aviv University; and a range of profit enterprise, SpaceIL has wound up as the research, development, and executive posts for only nonprofit in the remaining field of XPrize several major technology companies in Israel. He competitors, with generous funding from two

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:DLW7KHUHŠVPRUH well-known billionaires, technology entrepreneur Morris Kahn and casino magnate Sheldon Adel- /XQDU;3UL]HƃQDOLVWVWKDWODQGFDQ FRPSHWHIRUDSRWRIXSWRPLOOLRQ son. Its mission now is essentially twofold—to PRUHIRUDGGLWLRQDOKHURLFVRQWKHPRRQ win the prize, of course, but also to educate and inspire a new generation of potential tech leaders 9LVLWDQGWUDQVPLWIURP DKLVWRULFOXQDUVLWH in a country often referred to as Start-up Nation. As in India, national pride is clearly on the line here. Virtually every school in Israel now  million has a teaching unit about the SpaceIL efort, and schoolkids will be closely following the mission 7UDYHOƃYHNLORPHWHUV once it blasts of for the moon, hoping theirs will become the first country ever to send a privately $2 million funded mission to explore the lunar surface. “We wanted all kids in Israel to be heads-up 6XUYLYHDQGWUDQVPLWRQ about this,” said Privman, adding with a laugh: WZROXQDUGD\V “We want these kids to be able to explain to their parents what’s going on.” $2 million Enough with the hopping already. Hakuto, TeamIndus, and a California-based interna- tional consortium known as all 3URYLGHSURRIRIWKH SUHVHQFHRIZDWHU plan to use a separate, wheeled rover to gather data, which points up an arguable loophole in the rules: Hakuto could win by subcontract-  million ing out both launch and landing, only needing to deploy its Sorato rover to achieve victory. Gonzales-Mowrer, the XPrize race director, says that would be just fine: “We wanted teams to come up with various approaches to accomplish- ing the mission,” she explains. From a financ- ing point of view, the main threshold is simply that competitors must show XPrize judges that at least 90 percent of their money comes from nongovernment sources. “It’s been fun to watch the teams network with each other and with outside providers to drive down the cost,” she said. “In that sense, the ultimate goal of this competition has already been achieved.”

IF THERE IS TO BE a giant Walmart—or perhaps an Ikea—for spacefaring ventures someday, then , the primary company be- hind the Synergy Moon consortium, is deter- mined to fill that role. It aims to be “the lowest cost launch provider in the commercial space industry,” says its co-founder and CEO, Randa Relich Milliron. To do this, she explains, it will build rockets in modular, standardized units;

60 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • AUGUST 2017 use of-the-shelf components wherever possible, from a barge at an ocean site of the California including industrial irrigation tubes and micro- coast. With a humble budget they decline to quan- controllers; and experiment with lower cost fuels tify publicly, but with grand dreams they describe such as turpentine as propellants. expansively, it is hard to know exactly what to In her oice at the Mojave Air & Space Port make of them or of the Synergy Moon entry in the in the California desert, a hundred miles or so space race, which their firm essentially anchors. north of downtown Los Angeles, Milliron point- The team does have a verified launch contract, ed with pride to the company brochure, which although it appears to be essentially with itself, ofers a do-it-yourself TubeSat Personal Satellite since it’s the only entrant in the race planning to Kit for around $16,000, a price that “Includes do all the things needed to win—launching, land- Free Launch!” and could drop to $8,000 for ing, roving, and transmitting—on its own. high school or college students. Customers will “Sometimes we feel like renegades or outcasts, assemble the tube (there is also a more expen- building these rockets by ourselves,” said Randa sive CubeSat available) and outfit it with what- Milliron on a tour of Interorbital’s workshop. “But ever small additional gear they can fit, such as that’s the whole point, really. We are disrupters. a camera for tracking migratory animals from We are out to show the world this can all be done orbit or sensors that can monitor weather condi- at truly radically lower costs.” tions. The company plans to launch the personal From this Mojave Desert outpost to the Atlan- satellites into orbit 192 miles above the Earth, a tic shore at Cape Canaveral, from the outskirts of suicient height to allow them to operate from Tel Aviv to the Japanese sand dunes and a Ban- three weeks to two months, depending on solar galore warehouse, all five teams are forging ahead activity, after which the devices will burn up safe- on their respective missions. Each is driven to ly after reentering the atmosphere. win—but each is also surprisingly friendly with Milliron and her husband, Roderick, have been its competitors. Over the past several years, even working on and of for more than 20 years to get as the number of teams oicially dwindled from the company—and its rockets—of the ground. 29 to 16 and down to the five remaining at time of It’s safe to say that several remaining and former writing, one of them has hosted an annual sum- competitors in the GLXP race admire their pluck mit meeting for everyone else, as well as XPrize but doubt their chances. Even if they reach the Foundation oicials, with each leader ofering moon with one of their DIY rockets, their plan a frank presentation on successes and setbacks to use a customized “throwbot” as their roving to date. Alliances have formed, such as an agree- device on the moon has also raised eyebrows. ment between TeamIndus and Hakuto to share a (Throwbots, throwable robots, are frequently ride on the Indian space agency’s rocket and the used by the military, police, and firefighters to Indus lander, essentially duking it out once they provide video “eyes” in a location too dangerous reach the moon. An industry is being born. to enter, such as a terrorist hideout, a suspected “There’s really a ‘Yes We Can’ theme going on meth lab, or a burning building.) here,” says Rahul Narayan, the charismatic lead- Even so, the couple and a small crew of em- er of the 112 members working for TeamIndus. ployees press on in their warehouse set amid “This is the time. How it will all evolve, exactly, I the large, military-issue sheds and Quonset huts don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. But this that make up the spaceport side of the dusty is the time.” j desert complex—the other side of the runway is a giant “boneyard,” where commercial airliners -RXUQDOLVW6DP+RZH9HUKRYHNLVEDVHGLQ6HDWWOH such as old Boeing 747s and DC-10s have come DQGLVWKHDXWKRURIJet Age: The Comet, the 707, and to die, parked for good and waiting to be cut up the Race to Shrink the World. 9LQFHQW)RXUQLHULVD )UHQFKDUWLVWDQGSKRWRJUDSKHUOLYLQJLQ3DULV,QWKLV for scrap. LVVXHWKH\ERWKPDNHWKHLUƃUVWDSSHDUDQFHLQNational The Millirons say their initial launches will be Geographic PDJD]LQH

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