TeamCringely:About

From TeamCringely

In the words of Bob Cringely, Team Cringely leader:

"When Google and the X Prize Foundation announced the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize contest for the first private group to land a remote-controlled rover on the moon and complete a set of mission goals, I knew I had to try to win. There was no choice: this was my destiny."

Team Cringely is a consortium of like-minded, brazen, clever enthusiasts from around the world determined to land a rover on the moon and navigate the surface, whilst sending video and images back to our home world. Our goal is to accomplish this by April 1, 2009, two and a half years ahead of the X prize deadline.

"Team Cringely prefers cavalry charges. And what a charge it will be! Team Cringely benefits from a gleeful willingness to fail over and over again on our way to succeeding. We plan to build and launch as many as 20 spacecraft to ensure at least one succeeds."

With early success, we'll go for bonus tasks of finding and imaging previous lunar landers, navigating over 5,000 meters, and surviving through a lunar night - slightly over two earth-weeks.

This is one of the grand adventures of our century and we feel like we are in exactly the right place to achieve this milestone in private space flight. We hope it will be an inspiration to our kids and to kids like them around the world.

Our plans: "Build and launch a bunch of rockets and rovers, document every moment of it on a huge educational website, in blogs, and ultimately on PBS, probably with an episode of NOVA. And at some point there's a fair chance that we'll split a huge jackpot..."