Washington D.C. On Friday March 13, Odyssey Moon CEO Bob Richards spoke at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce explaining to the audience about the origin of the X PRIZE, how Google is using a prize to drive robotic exploration of the moon, and how his team had started working on a private robotic lunar mission even before the contest was announced.

Sitting in the Chamber's hall of flags was an inspiring backdrop for his talk. There was a flag for each early explorer hung King Arthur style from the wall, very ornate carvings in the wood beams and paintings of various explorer modes of transportation adorned the ceiling. It is quite a room. In it the panelist spoke of the importance of space and satellites to our everyday life already ($250B in 2008) and how that importance may only grow larger over the coming years.

The representative from Cisco also shared with the audience about the work that Cisco is doing to create an in space router- a very exciting and interesting project to say the least- but even more surprising was that Cisco took on the effort not to be visionary and cutting edge (which it is) but because the government asked them to after the prime contractor for the effort began failing.

Still the message from the panelist was clear. We are headed out to explore new places, just as these explorers here did. Our job is to make that effort bear fruit and have life on the frontier sustainable. Maybe even contribute to humankind finding that holy grail, cheap access to space.