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With only four minutes to go, the scrappy little rocket team of Masten Space Systems fought through a series of problems and disappointments to qualify Friday morning for the $1 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X-Prize. Mechanical and electrical glitches had dogged the company’s efforts to qualify Wednesday and Thursday even though the rocket had flown flawlessly on Tuesday.

Thursday’s attempt ended with the company’s rocket in flames, but assisted by volunteers, some of whom work for competing rocket companies, the Masten team repaired and modified their rocket.

It went on to make two successful flights with sufficient accuracy to put the team in first place for the Lunar Lander competition.  That purse is worth $1 million.  Second place is worth $500,000.  Only one more team, Paul Brede’s Unreasonable Rocket, is scheduled to fly its entrant for the Level 2 purse on Saturday.

Masten Space Systems, a six-man rocket company based in Mojave, saw its rocket, XA0.1E, nicknamed “Xoie,” (pronounced Zoh-ee) make two flights to qualify for the X-Prize.  The combined purse of $2 million is provided by NASA. The primary sponsor of the contest is Northrop Grumman.

The prize is designed to spur development of the technology needed to land and take off from the moon.  The easier Level One contest, involved take off from a flat platform, climbing to an altitude of 50 meters (over 164 feet) moving sideways — in rocketry this is called “translation” — 60 meters and descend to a predetermined spot on another flat surface. The vehicle then can be refueled, and repaired if necessary, but then it must make a return trip to the pad from which it departed.

Both flights must last at least 90 seconds, and have to be performed within a time period of 2 hours and 15 minutes.  In the event of two teams qualifying, the tie is broken on the basis of landing accuracy.

The Level Two competition involves flying from a flat pad to one modified with craters and boulders to resemble a lunar landing site.   The rocket must also stay aloft for three full minutes during each flight.  Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace won the first place purse of $350,000 for the Level One competition in 2008, and was the first to qualify for the Level One competition by making two successful flights in September. It landed with an average accuracy of 89 centimeters, or 35 inches.

Greg Jones of Mojave, and Brian Bernard, of Los Angeles, are both with Orbital Expeditions and worked all night with the Masten crew.  So did Keith Stormo, a molecular biologist from Moscow, Idaho, who started the High Expectations rocket team with his adult son.  “I took a week vacation to come watch the rocket launches, but it turned out to be a working vacation,” he said with a weary smile.  “I wanted to see someone fly, even if it couldn’t be us, so it was good to be a part of the Masten team in this effort.”

By Friday morning, an exhausted team rolled Xoie out to the test site.  The rocket made its first flight with an unofficial accuracy of 28 cm, and returned with a ten cm meter accuracy.  The average was 19 cm or 7 and a half inches. The team now has to wait out the flights of Unreasonable Rocket.  But in true rocket community fashion, most of the Masten team piled into some vehicles and headed out to the secluded Cantil launch site.  If needed, they will help Unreasonable with their effort.

After the two flights were finished, company founder Dave Masten said, “I can’t say enough good about the Masten team.  They take my crazy ideas and make them work.”

“I also have to say this shows the high caliber of people in the rocket community.  People from High Expectations, Speedup, , XCOR, Orbital Expeditions and others volunteered and pitched in on the all-night effort to repair Xoie, and prepare her for flight.”

“Our next stop?  We’re going to go for higher alittude flights as we begin designing and building our suborbital launcher.”

“Contests such as this are a very cost-effective way to spur interest in aerospace engineering, developing new technology, and building the foundation of talent and experience that America needs to remain competitive in space,” Masten said.