The Ansari XPRIZE helped kick off a new era of space exploration by opening up a challenge for private suborbital flight. But since then, the XPRIZE Foundation set its sights a little higher – about 238,000 miles away. And now, Israeli team SpaceIL looks to be the closest to the finish line of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, becoming the first team in the competition to certify a launch with the foundation.

While other teams have announced work on contracts to fly, SpaceIL is the only one certified by the XPRIZE Foundation thus far, and by reaching that milestone, the team has extended the deadline for all other competitors by a year. SpaceIL's contracted SpaceX for a Falcon 9 flight to an unspecified part of the moon in late 2017. Once there, the team will have to get a lander to the surface and move a craft 500 meters to claim the $30 million prize.

But rather than a rover, the team has used a concept that's been on NASA's drawing board for years but has never been successfully tested in-situ: a hopper. Instead of relying on wheels, the craft the craft will propel itself through a series of jumps.

"By the time we registered for the competition in the end of 2010, other teams already had two years of advantage over us, managing to build rovers," Eran Privman, CEO of SpaceIL, said in an email. "We had to come up with a creative solution to close this gap that would also be efficient, so we figured that if we ignite the engines again after landing, we could move 500 meters by hopping over the moon's surface without having to use a rover. "

"It turned out to not only save us two years of development, but also saved us the cost of a large, heavy rover."

Chanda Gonzalez, prize lead of the Google Lunar XPRIZE, says spurring innovation and opening up commercial opportunities in space to private actors is all part of the goal. The foundation also works towards balancing audacious and achievable in its prizes, meaning that once the Lunar XPRIZE is won, the foundation can figure out what the next step is toward furthering innovation in space exploration, a goal that's close or one that's wildly far away.

"It could be guys working in a garage or students at a university," Gonzalez says. "The prize was created so that all mankind could know they could someday reach space."

Though SpaceIL is the first with a certified launch manifest, it may not be the first to the moon. Plenty of teams are still in the running, and if they can hit every milestone without a hitch, they could beat SpaceIL to Luna. More teams have launch manifests awaiting certification. Someone will likely get a rover to the moon–but now the heat is on to see who it is.

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