The X Prize Foundation announced Jan. 24 that five of the 16 teams in the Google Lunar X Prize competition have verified launch contracts and can continue in the $20 million race to the moon.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...