As I promised a few posts ago, this blog went silent for a small amount of time while we finished up the Google Lunar X Prize Team Summit and then while I took a few days vacation to tour Vienna, Austria, and to propose to my lovely fiancée. Then, as soon as I got back into the USA, I jumped straight into the 2008 International Space Development Conference here in Washington, DC.

I've got a ton of stuff to write about, but a million other things to catch up on as well. I debated for a while how best to catch up on these overdue blog posts (chronologically? reverse chronologically?) before deciding to just see where inspiration strikes! So, apologies for what will likely be the rather disconnected chronology of the blog posts that will come in the next few days.

I'll begin with the most recent subject matter. ISDC 2008 was a lot of fun! It was actually something of a personal milestone for me, because it was at ISDC 2005--the last time ISDC was here in Washington--that I received the offer to come and work for X PRIZE. Yes, that means I've been here three years!

Happily, the Google Lunar X PRIZE and space prizes in general were both mentioned quite a lot during the course of the conference. For example, prizes seemed to be endorsed (tacitly or explicitly) by each of the presidential candidates representatives during the 2008 Election Panel; and the Google Lunar X PRIZE received some shout-outs during a presentation of the results of the recent study conducted by the Tauri Group and the Personal Spaceflight Federation. Always nice to get those mentions!

But in addition to those asides, the Google Lunar X PRIZE was the subject of a full panel on Saturday. I had the pleasure of moderating, but the exciting part was hearing presentations from representatives of five teams:

• Bob Richards of Odyssey Moon
• David Gump of Astrobotic
• Paul Carliner of Quantum 3
• Jayfus Doswell of JURBAN
• Jeff Krukin of STELLAR

Each team gave a short (~5 min) overview of their efforts, then we opened the floor to questions.

Both the presentations and the Q&A were liveblogged by the always-excellent Clark Lindsay at HobbySpace. There were a few points of particular interest to me. I was really excited to hear that ALL of the teams represented on the panel have or are finalizing relationships with universities--a great win-win that I hope to see continued in the future by other teams. I was also happy to hear the teams state explictly that winning the Google Lunar X PRIZE is not in the critical path for their business plans--a reassuring sign that shows that we may well end up with a competitive landscape of multiple lunar service providers in the not-too-distant future.

We hope to be able to offer similar panels at other space conferences and events in the future.

In the meantime, I'll note that I'm giving another talk tomorrow, at the 2008 NASA Academy at Goddard Space Flight Center.