While most of us were sleeping off Christmas dinner or watching college football on TV, teams of engineers, students and aspiring rocketeers around the globe were working to become the first private enterprise to land a working rover on the Moon. The $30,000,000 Google Lunar X PRIZE, first announced a bit more than three years ago, officially closed to new registrations on December 31, 2010, with over 20 participating teams.

Some teams are tightly knit groups of entrepreneurs with decades of industry experience, some are college students and recent graduates working on the biggest design project of their lives, and some are volunteers and self-described "part-time scientists" relying on hundreds of online collaborators for success. Some have already earned contracts from NASA and other groups in support of their work to date—but at the end of the day, only one group can get to the Moon first. Who will it be? And does every team really think they have a shot? Let's take a look at a few of the teams who are competing.

But first, a quick refresher. If you're not immediately familiar with the Google Lunar X PRIZE, you may remember it better as one of the successors to the Ansari X PRIZE, the $10,000,000 competition for sub-orbital human spaceflight which produced SpaceShipOne and Virgin Galactic. The GLXP is much the same concept: a $20 million prize awaits the first team to successfully land a robotic craft on the lunar surface, have it move at least 500 meters, and transmit high-definition images and video. The second team to succeed gets a $5 million prize, with the remaining $5 million left for 'bonuses' such as traveling over 5 kilometers on the Moon or landing near lunar "sites of interest" such as an Apollo landing.

"My favorite part of the Google Lunar X PRIZE is the way it provides the impetus for these incredibly brilliant innovators from all over the world to throw themselves all out into such a difficult and inspiring mission," says Will Pomerantz, senior director of Space Projects for the X PRIZE Foundation. "Many of these team members are people who would never have responded to a standard RFP from a space agency, but these people have proven track records of success and the great ideas and practices they've honed in other industries, and it's tantalizing to see those concepts applied to space exploration."

The Rocket City Space Pioneers

The Google Lunar X PRIZE has worked hard to include a strong social component—their official blog frequently hosts interactive "Friday Fundays" involving Q-and-As and Photoshop contests, and teams are highly encouraged to provide weekly updates on their own webspace. Even the most dedicated fans, then, may run the risk of finding themselves unable to keep up with each team's progress. Fortunately, one space blogger has helped spectators out by creating a running scorecard of each team, roughly depicting their perceived likelihood of being able to win the GLXP. Near the top of that list is the Rocket City Space Pioneers, a team of propulsion and rocketry experts from Huntsville, Alabama.

RCSP was a late entry to the Google Lunar X PRIZE, waiting until last September 7 to announce their registration, but they appear dedicated to make up for their late start with a surplus of experience and institutional support. Team leader Tim Pickens, for example, was the lead propulsion designer for the SpaceShipOne craft which won the inaugural X PRIZE, though many in the space industry known him equally well as the guy who created a rocket-powered pickup truck (complete with "In Thrust We Trust" bumper sticker). Pickens currently heads the propulsion efforts for Dynetics, one of several Huntsville-area groups putting their support behind Rocket City, along with Andrews Aerospace and the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

Although the Rocket City Space Pioneers' design plans are still in the works, they have revealed that (like the majority of GLXP teams) they'll be using SpaceX's recently debuted Falcon 9 rocket to launch their craft into Earth orbit, with self-designed propulsion module injecting their lander/rover into lunar orbit and, ultimately, onto the Moon's surface. The system as a whole is designed to be capable of exploring a variety of planetary bodies, helping to illustrate one of the chief appeals of the incentive prize system: just as the Ansari X PRIZE produced advances in low-earth-orbit transportation which are currently being explored for space tourism and scientific research, so may the Google Lunar X PRIZE lead to breakthroughs in inexpensive unmanned planetary exploration.

RCSP's potential derives in large part from their centralization and collaborative history; on the complete opposite end of the spectrum lies FREDNET, a team dedicated to applying the principles of open source development to lunar exploration. Founded by Fred Bourgeois, III, a software developer and engineer from the Bay Area, FREDNET aims "to demonstrate that open source collaborations are capable of phenomenal successes" in the space industry; "[a]s individual scientists and engineers, we know or suspect that open collaboration produces open products in the most productive and efficient way possible." Although FREDNET is guided by an advisory board and internal development team, topics ranging from rover prototypes to discussions of how to split the money are discussed and developed on the public team forums and wiki, which have hundreds of active participants from over 60 countries on 6 continents.