US start-up aims to put robotic lander on the moon

CAPE CANAVERAL — A small start-up has received the green light from the United States government to do something the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has not done for more than four decades: Land on the moon.

Moon Express, based in Cape Canaveral, Florida, announced yesterday that it had received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to set a robotic lander on the moon.

That feat would win the Google Lunar XPrize competition for the first private organisation to reach the moon and an accompanying US$20 million (S$27 million) reward.

But, more than the prize, company officials say it will be the opening of a profitable frontier for entrepreneurs.

“Rephrasing John F Kennedy, we choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s a good business,” said Mr Naveen Jain, the Moon Express chairman.

“Everything we fight over — whether it’s land or it’s fresh water, whether it is energy — is in abundance in space.”

To be sure, Moon Express has a way to go before it can reach the lunar surface, which it hopes to do next year. It still has to assemble the lander. The rocket it plans to launch on has yet to fly even once.

And, one of its competitors could beat it to the moon, and the US$20 million.

At present, commercial ventures have gone as far out as geosynchronous orbit, the telecommunication satellites that fly 35,785km above the Earth.

Moon Express wants to go 10 times as far, to the moon, a place where just three nations have landed: the US, the Soviet Union and, more recently, China.

The XPrizes, started by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, seek to re-create the barnstorming prizes of the early 20th century that spurred aviation advances such as Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.

The first XPrize, for the first private piloted vehicle to reach space, led to the development of SpaceShipOne, a rocket-powered plane that made two flights in two weeks in 2004, to win the US$10 million prize.

In the bubbly optimism that followed, the XPrize Foundation enlisted Google to finance reaching the loftier target of the moon.

The Google Lunar XPrize, announced in 2007, called for putting a spacecraft on the moon that would be able to send back video and images and also move more than 500m.

The first team to achieve that would claim US$20 million; while second place would be rewarded with US$5 million.

More than 30 teams signed up, including Moon Express, founded in 2010 by Mr Jain, who made a fortune creating the website InfoSpace and then lost most of it in the Internet bust of 2000, Dr Robert Richards, a space entrepreneur; and Dr Barney Pell, a former Nasa computer scientist.

The original deadline, at the end of 2012, was extended several times. Now the remaining 16 teams have until Dec 31, 2017, to claim the prize.

Two teams, Moon Express and SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit, have secured launch contracts for their spacecraft.

Mr Jain said the greatest opportunities were the ones not yet imagined, just as Apple — when it created the iPhone — did not foresee the explosion of apps that would run on the device.

“More importantly,” he added, “we don’t know what the Pokemon Go of the moon is going to be.” the new york times