Next Giant Leap, a small company that was the fourth team to register for the Google Lunar X-Prize, publically announced its name and team members at a press conference held today at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Based in the United States, the Next Giant Leap (NGL) team boasts highly qualified members from the academic, aerospace, and small business communities. NGL was founded on the concept that a small but focused team is the ideal vehicle to efficiently engineer the winning Google Lunar X PRIZE entry. Founded by entrepreneur Michael Joyce in November of 2007, the team was known only as the “Mystery Team” for the first year.

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million prize purse, on September 13, 2007. Teams from around the world are competing to land a privately funded, robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of completing several mission objectives. Those objectives include travelling at least 500 meters across the lunar surface and sending video, images and data back to the Earth. The lead systems integrator is MicroSat Systems, Inc., known for its innovation in small spacecraft. On May 7, 2008, MicroSat Systems was awarded a contract to build 18 Orbcomm Inc. satellites with an option for 30 more. In charge of the difficult task of landing safely on the Moon is the Draper Laboratory. Draper has been involved in space guidance navigation and control since the earliest days of the space program supporting Apollo, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. The Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a key academic partner. The MIT team includes five time Shuttle astronaut Jeff Hoffman and Professor David Miller, head of MIT's Space Systems Laboratory and developer of the innovative SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) payload on the International Space Station. Other innovative small companies that are partners on the team include Aurora Flight Sciences, a company that operates on the frontiers of flight with specialties in unmanned aerial vehicles and manned space hardware, and Busek Co. Inc., a company that specializes in advanced space propulsion, especially electrical propulsion systems.

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