As for the Lunar Lander Challenge, the centerpiece of the X Prize Cup: Armadillo Aerospace will be flying its Mod vehicle for the Level 1 challenge and the larger Pixel vehicle (which flew last year) for Level 2. If all goes well, Mod will fly Saturday morning and Pixel will fly Saturday afternoon; if both are successful then they may do some demo flights on Sunday even though they’ve captured the prizes. Should they be unsuccessful Saturday morning, they will keep trying again to win Level 1 before going on to Level 2, according to Armadillo’s Neil Milburn.

Representatives of several other teams are here as well, including Masten Space, Unreasonable Rocket, and SpeedUp. During the press conference, they estimated that they spent anywhere from a little over $100,000 to $3.5 million (what Armadillo has spent since inception), with 45,000 person-hours spent in aggregate by the teams alone in pursuit of the prize.

At Space Access yesterday Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems provided a brief update on his company’s vehicle development efforts. He noted that when they decided not to participate in the Lunar Lander Challenge last fall, they thought they were two weeks away from flight. “We are still two weeks away from flight,” he said, having run into a number of technical problems in the intervening months. “But we think we’re really there this time.” Those flight tests will be of its initial small-scale prototype, the XA-0.1; once those begin they’ll start work on the larger XA-0.2, the vehicle they’re developing for this year’s Lunar Lander Challenge, unless other works keeps them from participating. “We’re going to try and fly in the Lunar Lander Challenge. There is a hope that we won’t because we’re too busy with other stuff, with other contracts.” Masten said their appearance at last year’s X Prize Cup, where they test-fired an engine, attracted the attention of some people who have asked them to perform some R&D work.

Incidentally, today’s Los Angeles Times has an article about Norton Sales Inc., the North Hollywood junkyard that has a huge amount of used aerospace parts, from valves to rocket engines. Featured in the article are Dave Masten and Jon Goff of Masten Space, visiting the warehouse to look for parts. “It’s dangerous coming to a place like this,” said Masten. “It’s like shopping on an empty stomach.” Other Norton Sales customers include Orion Propulsion, Scaled Composites, and SpaceX.

“Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork,” Wernher von Braun is credited as saying. “We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.” That’s a sentiment likely shared by some of the companies hoping to compete in the Lunar Lander Challenge late this week at the Wirefly X Prize Cup. While some companies are dealing with technical challenges, some are mired in the paperwork required to get an FAA/AST experimental permit.

As New Scientist reports, none of the four teams originally planning to compete in this year’s competition has received an AST permit. Two of the registrants, Acuity Technologies and Masten Space Systems, decided not to compete this year because of technical concerns: throttle valve problems for Masten and unspecified “rocket motor” issues with Acuity. Armadillo Aerospace and Micro-Space are still in the running, if their vehicles are ready and approved by AST.

Red Herring also looks at the paperwork issue. X Prize officials told the magazine that only Armadillo to actually compete, but that’s predicated on receiving a permit; John Carmack said he was not interested in paying for a tethered, non-prize flight if he didn’t get a permit. Richard Speck of Micro-Space said he hopes to get a permit at the last minute, saying that he has “a pretty good vehicle and a good chance” to win if he does get the permit.

Speck is also profiled in his local newspaper, the Denver Post, today; the article includes images of his Crusader LL vehicle. He said that if he doesn’t get a permit he will display the vehicle at the Cup, but not fly it, tethered or otherwise. X Prize spokesman Ian Murphy: “I would say right now the two front-runners to win money this year would be Armadillo Aerospace and Micro-Space.” Of course, they’re the only ones planning to compete—if they can lick the paperwork.

A couple of former X Prize teams plan on appearing, albeit not competing, at the X Prize Cup next month. Via the Lunar Lander Challenge blog is a press release from the da Vinci Project announcing that they plan to participate in the Cup and “show casing a new design”, and well as planning some “major announcements concerning our commercial manned space flight business initiatives”. (Unfortunately da Vinci’s web site is down as of this writing, so you can’t see what progress, if any, they have to show off at the moment.)

Meanwhile, the Romanian group ARCA plans to participate at the X Prize Cup and the International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight immediately preceding it, discussing the progress they’re making on Stabilo, their balloon-launched manned vehicle. Stabilo has an unconventional design, looking like an escape rocket mounted on one end of a dumbbell. ARCA believes that they will be ready for manned flight tests of Stabilo by the spring of 2007; presumably they’ll share more details about their test schedule at the Cup.

Finally, SPACE.com has an update about those teams competing in the two Centennial Challenge lander events at the Cup. “We are looking pretty good,” John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace, one the Lunar Lander Challenge competitors, said. Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems later told the Lunar Lander Challenge blog that his company is also still planning to participate in the event.

In just under three months the X Prize Cup will take place in Las Cruces, New Mexico. However, so far there have been few confirmed details about what is going on. The X Prize Foundation had planned to unveil more details on a revamped web site last month, but as of Saturday morning the site’s splash page now states that the new site will launch on Monday the 24th (this after the June date was still posted on the site as recently as earlier this month.)

One of the highlights of the event is going to be the Lunar Lander Challenge, and the two companies most likely to compete, Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems, provided some updates on their progress yesterday at the NewSpace 2006 conference in Las Vegas. Neil Milburn of Armadillo said that their first “Quad” vehicle is built and ready for testing, while a second is being built. (One will be flown for the Level 1 of the challenge, while the second will be used for the more challenging Level 2.) The Quad replaced their Vertical Drag Racer design, which Milburn said was “marginal” for the Level 2 portion of the challenge. Dave Masten of Masten Space Systems said that they are very busy with the development of their entry, the XA-0.1, and plan to start flight testing next week in Mojave.

It’s not clear if there are any other entrants likely to compete in Las Cruces in October, although there have been rumors of one or more stealth teams working on vehicles; if that’s true, they’re being very quiet about it. Both of the known entrants are going to have to overcome some significant technical and regulatory hurdles in the next three months, and any stumble that forces one or both to drop out could make the Lunar Lander Challenge a lot less compelling an event.

There’s also news of a separate event around the same time as the X Prize Cup. According to a report by SyFy Portal, the ashes of the late Star Trek actor James Doohan and astronaut Gordon Cooper, among others, will be launched on a suborbital sounding rocket flight from Spaceport America on October 21, the second day of the Cup. The launch is being conducted by UP Aerospace for Space Services International (SSI) (of Celestis fame). According to SSI’s web site the launch appears to be open only to family members and other Celestis “registrants”, and not the general public, although the public will be invited to a memorial service the day before, according to the SyFy Portal article. It’s not clear from the article if there will be, say, a live broadcast of the launch for XP Cup attendees or other cooperation between the Cup organizers and SSI/UP Aerospace.

Masten Space Systems has received some attention from a somewhat unexpected source: Radio Netherlands. An article on RN’s web site provides an overview of the company and its vehicle plans, which include the ability to carry passengers by the end of the decade:

And, like aeroplanes, the ultimate goal is to carry humans, rather than soda can size payloads. Michael Mealling elaborates:

“We do plan on providing sub-orbital tourism flights, starting in about 2009; very similar to Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic.”