Open Moon has withdrawn the Google Lunar X-Prize!
Posted by gps2 | Filed under Veranstaltungsprotokolle
Dear Commoonity and Space Enthusiasts!
While having the last STS Mission orbiting us, the fifth annual GLXP-TeamSummit is just on its way.
We aren´t there, because c-base Open Moon has sadly to announce its withdrawal today after 923 days being in the operational competition.
After long and difficult discussions we had to come to the conclusion that we aren´t able to keep up with the requirements of the last Master Team Agreement.
At the end of 2010 it became more and more clear for us, that we wouldn’t be able to stay in the GLXP the way we were organized at that time. This was even more obvious, when we realized how the MTA was structured and what kind of organization would be necessary to keep up with it.
The efforts to change into a company, for improving our capabilities to focus on several parts of the technological and administrational efforts defined not only be the MTA turned out to be much to complicated to be taken within a few months.
We are not a company. We are just a bunch of Open Source Evangelists, and morphing into entrepreneurs over night was hardly to achieve. That’s more or less the whole truth.
Nevertheless, taking part in the competition was not only an inspiration, but an honor as well for all of us. We still believe in the importance of this competition, and we are sure that further important results will be achieved, although this time without us.
On the other side:
Open Moon is not dead!
We all have learned a lot and will use this for our further explorations.
Here are some pretty results yet:
Some of us will go on in bringing forward the idea of private space exploration within the Open Source community.
Neven, our Head, is about to found a new company by using the experience he made within the competition.
In our education project European Science Agency Jirko Weber will actively go on getting robot programming across kids.
Open Moon just left a footprint in the Berlin art-scene with its artefact high altitude ballooning Voyager3 spin-off.
The last start took place just three weeks ago:
Right now we are looking for downsized space projects or competitions we might be able to enter and we are bringing up up some ideas for a competition we could run by our own. Please have a look onto our media channels as known. We continue communicating….
The future is ours, but not ours to see.
Thank you very much for having given us the opportunity to be part of this first private race to the moon.
We appreciate the great time we had with you greatly and wish all the remaining teams the best.
You all are doing a great job and we can´t await watching you reaching the moon.
Neven Dološ, Head of c-base Open Moon
Alexander Last, Communication
