In an exclusive interview on The Great Beyond, Nature reporter Geoff Brumfiel explores Romanian hopes to launch a balloon to the Moon. Bogdan Sburlea, project manager of the non-profit Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA), talks about plans to test-launch 'Helen', ARCA's proof-of-concept rocket for its bid for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. The contest will award millions of dollars in prize money to privately funded teams that successfully land and manoeuver a robot on the Moon, and send data and images back to Earth, before 31 December 2014.

Sburlea describes why the test vehicle will not actually make it into orbit: “We need to check the launch from the water, the usage of [the] world's largest solar balloon, not to mention the stabilization method and the strange position of the stages. We've got enough things to test; reaching orbit is not an objective for this launch.”

You can check out the full interview, along with a short video of Helen's flight plan, set to music, at http://go.nature.com/zi4j2s.