By KENNETH CHANG of The New York Times
Now that the last space shuttle has landed, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the moon.
Spurred by a $30 million purse put up by Google, 29 teams — including one co-founded by Naveen Jain, a well-known figure in the Seattle-area tech community — have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the moon.
Most of them are unlikely to overcome the financial and technical challenges to meet the contest deadline of December 2015, but several teams think they have a good shot to win — and to take an early lead in a race to take commercial advantage of our celestial neighbor.
At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed moonward within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy.
One Silicon Valley venture, Jain’s Moon Express, is positioning itself as a future FedEx for moon deliveries: If you have something to send there, Moon Express would like to bring it.
Jain, chief executive of Bellevue-based Intelius and founder of InfoSpace, said Moon Express, or MoonEx, will spend $70 million to $100 million to try to win the Google Lunar X Prize but could recoup its investment on its first flight. He envisions selling exclusive broadcast rights for video from the moon and sponsorships, a la NASCAR, for companies to put their logos on the lander.
Another competitor, Astrobotic Technology, intends to sell berths on its lunar lander to space agencies and scientific institutions, which would pay $820,000 a pound to send up experiments. The company, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University, is building a large craft — much bigger than Moon Express’ — capable of carrying 240 pounds of payload (read: $200 million of cargo) and hopes to be ready to launch in December 2013.
“We can make a lot of money even if we do not win the prize,” said David Gump, president of Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh.
While NASA had wanted to send astronauts back to the moon, its program was canceled last year, a victim of budget cuts and shifting priorities. But it has awarded $500,000 each to Moon Express, Astrobotic and a third competitor, Rocket City Space Pioneers.
The contestants’ goals do not appear to face legal hurdles. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 100 nations including the United States, bars countries from claiming sovereignty over any part of the moon but does not prevent private companies from setting up shop. As for mining the moon, it could fall under similar legal parameters as fishing in international waters.
While Moon Express might initially make money by sending small payloads, the big fortune would come from bringing back platinum and other rare metals, said Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist turned entrepreneur and a co-founder of Moon Express. Pell was also the head architect behind Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
“Long term, the market is massive, no doubt,” he said.
Not all the competitors see dollar signs in the moon. Rocket City Space Pioneers, a consortium of space businesses, is using its moon effort largely to market technology that will allow multiple payloads to share one rocket, greatly reducing launching costs. (In other words, as the lander headed for the moon, it could drop off a few satellites in orbit.)
“I think the moon, it’s so expensive, we don’t know what the market is for sure in its entirety,” said Tim Pickens, chief propulsion engineer at Dynetics, an aerospace company in Huntsville, Ala., that is leading the Rocket City effort.
