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Richard Speck is 64 and still dreams of landing on the moon.

He and a team from his small Denver company, Micro-Space Inc., are in New Mexico this weekend for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo.

The Lunar Lander Challenge is a contest aimed at speeding up development of new vehicles that could transport cargo and people between lunar orbit and the moon, which could contribute to NASA space exploration and the prospect of personal space travel.

The Lunar Lander Challenge requires an unmanned vehicle to rocket up at least 150 feet, hover and land. It must then take off, fly and land on its original launchpad.

It's the main event of the X Prize Cup this weekend. More than 80,000 were expected to attend.

Speck had hoped to compete in the contest for part of the $2 million in prize money but, like most of the teams, was unable to get the necessary Federal Aviation Administration flight permit. The only team eligible to compete is Armadillo Aerospace, from Mesquite, Texas. None of the eight other teams that were hoping to compete made it.

Armadillo was also the only team to fly in the Lunar Lander Challenge last year, the first year of the event, which Speck also attended.

From fantasy to flights

John Carmack, a founder of id Software, which created the DOOM and Quake computer games, started Armadillo Aerospace in 2000. His company planned to fly two vehicles - a modular vehicle that could be expanded and the same vehicle it flew last year, called Pixel.

Armadillo last year "came very close to winning a prize," Speck said. "And so they're way ahead."

The prize money comes from NASA, while the funds to operate the challenge come mainly from aerospace company Northrop Grumman.

"Everybody would like to see more vehicles flying," said X Prize Foundation director of space projects Will Pomerantz. "It's important to note how incredibly difficult the job is."

"Each of these teams are doing very impressive things and approaching these problems in sort of strange new ways - some of which won't work," Pomerantz said.

While turning to private development of spacecraft instead of NASA-funded endeavors is incredibly challenging, Pomerantz called the prospect of success "a nice sort of win-win for the U.S. government and therefore the taxpayer."

Setting sights higher

Speck is displaying his company's spacecraft models, including its lunar lander prototype, a mockup of a human lunar lander, a configuration for a lunar rover and examples of what Speck proposes for Mars expedition respiratory life-support systems.

He hopes to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, a separate competition that requires actually going to the moon.

Another Denver company, Paragon Labs, was also an early contender to compete in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge but also failed to qualify. The Paragon team was not attending the event, according to Pomerantz.

"One of the reasons teams still come here even if they aren't flying, part of it is because they want to see the show. Part of it is they want the education and outreach. ... They can meet potential customers, employees, investors," Pomerantz said. But "Paragon is one of a very small number of teams that is entirely self-funded and doesn't need all that stuff."

Paragon founder Kevin Sagis worked for Lockheed Martin and supported NASA centers before starting Paragon to develop aerospace technologies. His vehicle, called the Volkon, is designed to use E85 fuel.

Speck, who developed electro-optic instruments and founded Spectron Instrument Corp. and Spectron Engineering Inc. earlier in his career, said he has invested about $1.6 million into developing spaceflight systems. His company has four employees.

"And we've accomplished quite a bit - but quite a bit is not necessarily enough," Speck said.

Kelly Yamanouchi: 303-954-1488 or kyamanouchi@denverpost.com