Last week, we announced the dates and the opening of registration for the 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. The timing of this announcement is bit late when compared to 2007 -- when registration opened in mid-February and closed at the end of April--but is a bit ahead of schedule compared to the 2006 event. I'm hoping that with two year's worth of momentum behind the event, we'll see more teams and better results that ever before.

I've been emailing with most of the 2008 teams lately, and I know that they are really fired up. It's wonderful to see so many of them getting their vehicles into the air (even if not all of those flights go as planned). Despite John Carmack's understandable grievances about the Challenge being a once-a-year event, I think that that strategy has actually massively benefited NASA, the New Space Industry, and probably even Armadillo itself. I don't have perfect insight into Armadillo's plan, but I like to think that the failure to win the Level One purse probably helped push Armadillo more quickly and more forcefully towards making changes like their shift to a film-cool engine chamber--which, they note in their most recent blog, "was absolutely the right thing to do. We are improved on every metric from the cooled graphite engines of last year."

Registrations for this year's event are already starting to come in, and it's been really rewarding for me to see how each team has taken the opportunity of another year's worth of competition to really improve themselves at all levels: they are better prepared technically, financially, and legally than they were at this point last year. I'm glad also that a lot of that progress has come as the teams help each others--for example, see Masten's blog post about getting help from and even hiring some of their competitors. I've certainly touched on this issue before, but it still makes me happy!

Anyway, with the Lunar Lander Challenge up and running again, I hope to be able to discuss it much more on this blog--but I promise not to neglect the Google Lunar X PRIZE. In fact, I hope that circumstance will evolve to the point where those two competitions converge and we start seeing more overlaps between them