A new race to the Moon is underway, with the United States, Russia, Japan, India, China, and private companies all planning missions within the same decade. The film tracks what each is after: a Russian mission burying seismic detectors to monitor moonquakes and core heat flow, a Japanese probe using x-rays to hunt rare minerals, and an American mission prospecting for water in permanently shadowed polar craters. Private teams chasing the 30 million dollar Google Lunar X-Prize, modeled on the Orteig Prize that sent Lindbergh across the Atlantic, are shown building rovers meant to explore the surface on camera. NASA's shuttle program and its planned Constellation successor appear alongside footage of astronauts on the space station testing exercise routines and life-support systems for longer stays off Earth. The film loops back to Galileo, who in 1609 turned a spyglass on the Moon and found a cratered, rocky world rather than a perfect crystalline sphere, and to the Apollo rock samples that later showed the Moon formed from debris blasted off Earth by a Mars-sized impact billions of years ago.