Last year, Google and X Prize Foundation promised $30 million to the first team to land a privately-funded craft on the Moon, move it at least 500 meters and send “Mooncast” video back to Earth.

If a company will be able to make a rover that will land on the Moon until December 31st 2012, then it can claim the Grand Prize of $20 million. But if the mission will be completed until December 31st 2014, then the Grand Prize it will be worth only $15 million. On December 31st 2014 the competition will be terminated.

The 10 team are as follows: Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA), Astrobotic, Chandah, FREDNET, LunaTrex, Micro-Space, Odyssey Moon, Quantum3, Southern California Selene Group and Team Italia.

Astrobotic is an organisation formed by Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon Company and other institutions and lead by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon brings several decades of experience in developing robots that walk into volcanoes, conduct field research in Antarctica, and crawl into failed nuclear plants to inspect the damages. Astrobotic will compete for the prize using their “Artemis Lander” and “Red Rover.”

Odyssey Moon was the first company to enter the competition on December 6th at the Space Investment Summit in San Jose, California, unveiling its plans to make history with the first private robotic mission. Odyssey Moon’s craft will be “a small robot”, according to the organization’s chairman, Ramin Khadem, also a founder of Inmarsat. Ramin Khadem explained that his team’s mission is modest if compared to manned space travel funded by national governments, but that Odyssey Moon will “complement, not compete, with China, Russia and the US.”

“Human Lunar Lander” is the name of the craft created by Micro-Space, a former competitor for the Ansari X Prize. Helmed by Richard Speck and based in Colorado, Micro-Space, Inc. has a 31-year history of producing world class, high tech products.

ARCA is another former contender in the Ansari X Prize and their craft is called  “European Lunar Explorer”. Two of ARCA’s most innovative projects to date have been the Demonstrator 2B rocket and Stabilo, a two-stage manned suborbital air-launched vehicle.

LunaTrex, the team led by Pete Bitar, hopes to win the prize with “Tumbleweed”. The team is comprised of several individuals, companies, and universities from all over the United States, some of whom were also competitors for the Ansari X Prize.

Chandah team hopes to land on the Moon with a spacecraft named “Shehrezade.” Chandah,

meaning “Moon” in Sanskrit, was founded by Adil Jafry, CEO of Tara, the largest independent retail electricity provider in Texas.

Quantum3 is a U.S.-based team that proposes to field a small spacecraft launched from an East Coast range using launch-coast-burn trajectory for a propulsive soft landing on the surface of the Moon at the Sea of Tranquility. Their craft will be called “Moondancer.”

For the moment, Team Italia has to make its choice between two alternatives. They proposed a single big rover or a colony of many robots, light and mobile, with many legs and wheels, able to be compacted in the lander and distributed quickly on the Moon's surface.

Harold Rosen, the leader of the Southern California Selene Group, is ready to conquer the Moon with  “Spirit of Southern California”, a spacecraft will combine the control and communication systems used in some of the earliest communications satellites with the latest in electronic and sensor technology.

The X Prize Foundation is known for its prizes offered to encourage privately funded research groups. In 2005 the foundation announced $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first private company that will build and launch a a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The prize was won by a space SpaceShipOne designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Later SpaceShipOne flights inspired Richard Branson's Virgin Group to build a fleet of commercial suborbital spacecraft for Virgin Galactic.

In 2006, XPrize Foundation announced another prize, the $10m Archon X Prize for Genomics, which will be given to the first private research group to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days.