The 3rd Google Lunar X PRIZE Team Summit took place on February 1-2, 2010, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Will Pomerantz, Senior Director of Space Prizes at X PRIZE, and Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE, both reported from the event:

The Pomerantz Report:

Peter Diamandis on the announcement of NASA's budget and the Team Summit:

By Peter Diamandis, Chairman & CEO, X PRIZE Foundation
(Originally posted on The Huffington Post on 2/1/10)

After 30 years of doing business the same way, NASA is finally entering the 21st century by embracing competition, capitalism and entrepreneurship. In NASA's new budget, President Obama and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden have proposed spending billions of dollars to purchase commercial human launch services and invest in game changing technologies.

Many of the traditional players have translated this to mean that NASA's "Moon Mission" has been canceled, that NASA is out of the exploration business and is making a risky move turning over the 'right stuff' from Government hands to entrepreneurs and commercial industry. In reality, NASA is making a brilliant move.

During the past 30 years the cost of getting humans into space has gone up, while reliability has gone down. Rather than have two or three commercial suppliers of human spaceflight, we have been solely dependent on the Space Shuttle. When the Shuttle stands down from service in a year's time, NASA will need to send American Astronauts to Kazakhstan to launch aboard the Russian Soyuz at a price of over $50 million per person... Until, at least, new commercial U.S. vehicles are made operational.

The U.S. Government doesn't build your computers, nor do you fly aboard a U.S. Government owned and operated airline. Private industry routinely takes technologies pioneered by the government and turns them into cheap, reliable and robust industries. This has happened in aviation, air mail, computers, and the Internet. It's about time that it happen in space.

The President's plan for commercial competition will ultimately take us much farther and much faster, not only to the Moon, but to Mars, the asteroids and beyond. Private companies will drive a very high level of safety because they will cease to exist if they do not. America's capitalist engine drives reliability in our aircraft, our cars, our computers and will do so in space, as well. Private companies will also inject innovation and breakthrough technology into our space program because that is their ethos.

So, I applaud the President's bold decision for NASA to focus not on their past glories, but on building a sustainable space exploration program that can inspire all of us. Today's decision has laid the ground for the future Apple, Cisco and Google of space to be born, drive job creation and open the cosmos for the rest of us.

Aviation Week, a widely-read aerospace publication, featured their "Person of the Year" on the cover of the January 4th, 2010 issue: The Space Entrepreneur.

The cover image includes Dave Masten, CEO of Masten Space Systems, Inc., and the XA-0.1E ("Xoie") vehicle that was flown to win a $1,000,000 prize from NASA in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, managed by the X PRIZE Foundation, in October 2009.

In addition to Masten Space Systems, the article covers several other commercial space companies such as Scaled Composites and XCOR Aerospace. The full article can be found here.

The X PRIZE team wishes these ambitious entrepreneurs all the best as they build the next generation of space vehicles in the new decade!