The Google-sponsored Lunar X-Prize will be fought over by 29 teams from 17 different countries. The final line-up of teams competing for the $30 million robotic Moon-explorer prize has been confirmed.
The prize will go to the builders of the first robot to send back video as it travels over 500 metres of the Moon's surface. Competition organisers hope to spur the development of low-cost robotic space exploration.
Organisers believe that the competition - first announced in 2007 - could have a winner by 2015.
"The official private race to the Moon is on," said Peter Diamandis, chief executive of the X-Prize Foundation. The teams come from a wildly divergent background, ranging from non-profit consortia and university groups to well-funded businesses.
Several of the teams have already bought rides on spacecraft to transport their robots.
Astrobotic Technology, a spin off-off from Carnegie Mellon University has signed a deal with SpaceX - the private space company set up by PayPal founder Elon Musk - to use its Falcon 9 rocket.
Government-backed space agencies are also planning to send craft to the Moon. A modern-day space race to land an unmanned probe on the Moon is emerging between Russia and India on one side and China on the other.
After months of negotiations, Russian and Indian engineers have started working on a robotic mission together. This would see the landing of a small four-wheeled rover on to the surface of the Earth's celestial neighbour. It is set to launch in 2013, to roughly match the scheduled lunar landing of China's Chang'e-3 spacecraft.
Whichever team gets there first, it would be the first human hardware to function on the lunar surface since the Soviet Luna-24 spacecraft returned to Earth with Moon's soil samples in 1976.
Known in Russia as Luna-Resource and in India as Chandrayaan-2, the joint mission will include an Indian-built lunar orbiter and the Russian-built landing platform both launched by a single Indian rocket.
But the X-Prize's backers think the future of space exploration will be driven by privately-funded groups.
"The most successful and revolutionary discoveries often come from small, entrepreneurial teams," said Tiffany Montague, of Google Space Initiatives.
The main focus of the scientific instruments would be the geochemical analysis of the lunar soil, including the detection of water.
Confirming the existence of lunar water became especially important for planetary scientists in 1990s, after a US probe found signs of water ice around the lunar poles. By doing so, scientists would not simply write an important chapter in the geological history of the Earth's natural satellite, but also provide a major imperative if humans ever attempt to establish a habitable base on the Moon.
In order to win, a team must complete its mission prior to December 31, 2015, but although the goal is to reach Earth’s satellite, there are additional awards dependent on other possible accomplishments.
These additional goals are looking at possibilities of whether the team can stay overnight on the Moon, how far they may travel on the Moon’s surface and how close they can land to the original Apollo landing site.