The Gazette: Courtney Stadd the former NASA executive and Bethesda-based businessman has created a privately funded team working on an unmanned robotic spaceship to head back to the Moon.

His company, Quantum3 Ventures — which Stadd founded in January along with space industry veterans Paul Carliner of Washington, D.C., and Liam Sarsfield of Deale — is one of 10 entrants from as far away as Romania and Italy competing for the Google Lunar X Prize.

The competition is sponsored by the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant Google, and the X Prize Foundation, a Santa Monica, Calif., nonprofit institute that wants to ‘‘create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.”

To collect the prize money, a team has to be first to land a robot on the moon that travels at least 500 meters and transmits images and other data back to Earth.