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" Never mind the fact that the Google Lunar X Prize teams won&amp;#039;t launch their crafts until 2015. Those teams are already meeting extremely high demand for their still-hypothetical moon missions as different organizations lobby for space onboard. &amp;quot;Our first mission payload is oversubscribed and our second is fully subscribed,&amp;quot; said Alan Stern, director of the Florida Space Institute and chief scientist for the Google Moon Express team. &amp;quot;There are a number of market segments for commercial lunar travel.&amp;quot; Stern and his fellow X Prize teammates are hoping that the demand for access to their experimental lunar lander is a hint at things to come. At the recent SETIcon II conference, the entrepreneurs and scientists on hand say that the only way humanity is going to stay in space, especially with governments continuing to tighten the belt around their space agencies, is for commercial space companies to make a sustained profit. And the signs of change are already showing. According to Alex Hall, senior director of the Google Lunar X Prize, Stern&amp;#039;s team was not the only one whose phones rang off the hook after announcing room for payloads on their mission. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s interesting about the discussions in Europe is, because of the way payloads get funding, there are a lot of research institutions that basically have stuff sitting on the shelf,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;ve already sunk their cost into something and they can dust it off. It&amp;#039;s low-risk to put it on an X Prize mission. We&amp;#039;re trying to work with the different agencies to help them figure out how they can enable this science. This is a real shift in how science is done.&amp;quot; Stern, a former associate administrator of NASA, is one of a growing number of space experts who envision a future in which NASA and other space agencies turn over the task of building the technology and infrastructure of space travel to private industry. With the commercial sector sorting out the expensive aspects of figuring out how to get off the planet and landing off-world, NASA would be freed up to focus on exploration and research, such as building robotic explorers and other payloads that private rockets could carry into space. Doing so would cost government space programs a fraction of what they spend now to launch their own rockets, Stern argued. &amp;quot;I came out here from Denver as a hosted payload on United Airlines,&amp;quot; said Stern. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the model we&amp;#039;re using. It&amp;#039;s not that revolutionary. It&amp;#039;s a great model for NASA because they don&amp;#039;t have to afford an entire mission at 10 to 20 percent of the cost. They just have to afford a payload. Spots on a Moon Express lander are a tiny fraction of the whole. Most countries don&amp;#039;t have the technical capability to fly a mission on their own. The market of lunar science is open.&amp;quot; And as the science evolves, the technology for standardizing payload travel can change along with it. According to Bob Richards, co-founder of the Moon Express mission, says that eventually commercial spacecraft developers will be able to create payload-carrying systems that are universal, so anyone can fit their science into any craft, regardless of the manufacturer. &amp;quot;As the prices drop you can look at collaborative science across countries\u2014multiple science on one mission. More bang for your buck is evolving,&amp;quot; he said. The SETIcon panelists say the upcoming moon landings will be the first step in testing out how to commercialize payload travel; there&amp;#039;ll be other ways to make money in space besides hauling cargo. Mining companies are already cozying up to Google in hopes of making money off trips to space, Hall says, and ultimately the hope is that the world&amp;#039;s governments will assist with building infrastructure, moon-to-Earth communication systems, and policy initiatives to help turn the experiment of commercial space travel into a true business. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a4332/how-the-lunar-x-prize-is-a-preview-of-the-new-space-age-10624613/>