Two years remain. The Google Lunar X Prize

, inaugurated in 2007, challenges private companies to put a lander on the moon, maneuver on the lunar surface, and send back messages to Earth. The contest includes a $30 million prize, but the deed must be done by December 31, 2015. Today the X Prize Foundation announced that five teams are pulling out of the race to the moon. So, with so little time remaining, is any one team on track to win the prize?

There are still 18 teams in the running, and X Prize says that several of them have been making good progress toward the first private moon landing. Earlier this month Moon Express, a private company headquartered at the NASA Ames Research Park in Mountain View, Calif., unveiled its lunar lander, which will run on solar power and hydrogen peroxide-based fuel. They have already successfully demonstrated their software control system using NASA's test platform. X Prize says that it can't share the details of scheduled launches, but half the teams have shared their launch plans for 2015.

And though five teams have dropped out of the running, that doesn't mean they've left the private space industry. In fact, some are still contributing to Lunar X Prize projects. California-based team Phoenicia, one of the last teams to enter the race, decided their efforts were better spent assisting other teams with launching their crafts into space. They'll be helping their former competitor, the Penn State Lunar Lion Team, which have already reserved space on the payload delivery rack that was initially developed for Phoenicia's X Prize attempt.

Others might be leaving the moon race, but they are using their tech to take on other projects in the space industry, says Lunar X Prize senior director Alexandra Hall. "I don't really see this as a downer, actually," Hall says. "One of the key goals is to stimulate the new space economy. That's not just about landing on the moon. It's about all facets: the technology and the supply chain."

Hall says that another team to drop out of the competition, Team ARCA (which also competed for the Ansari X Prize to build a reusable manned spacecraft), have used their technology development to create a space industry in Romania. "They recently won a contract to test parachutes for the next Mars mission. They've become a force to be reckoned with," she says. ARCA will be working with the European Space Agency to perfect the parachutes for ESA's ExoMars 2016 mission.

Two other teams are leaving the competition to develop their technology for Earth-based initiatives. Team Selenokhod, based in Moscow, have already adapted their image-processing and navigation systems for use in warehouse-stacking vehicles. And the Baltimore-based Jurban Team withdrew from the race to enter another X Prize challenge: They will try to build a tricorder.

The fact that new technologies applicable on Earth as well as in space have already come out of the race to the moon means the prize competition is beginning to be a success. Many of today's key technologies came out of NASA research and just found their way into society afterward. X Prize Foundation Founder Peter Diamandis, the winner of PopMech's 2013 Breakthrough Leadership Award, talked to us earlier this year about how X Prize wants to encourage "intelligent risk-taking" in pursuit of a defined goal like visiting the moon. And even teams that don't win the prize could stumble upon breakthrough technologies.

The Lunar X Prize will become even more heated in the next few months. For one thing, launch schedules need to be locked down about 18 months ahead of the 2015 prize deadline. And not all the remaining competitors will make it to the end. There were 26 teams still in contention for the Ansari X Prize when it was won—but by the final year only two were making headlines.

"By the time we get to 2015 I don't think we'll have 18 teams with launch contracts," Hall says. "What's fascinating right now is that it isn't obvious who will win. There are many permutations and combinations with how this can end up."

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