Billionaire teams up with NASA to mine the moon

Excerpt from cnbc.com
By Susan Caminiti

Moon Express,

a Mountain View, California-based company that’s aiming to send the

first commercial robotic spacecraft to the moon next year, just took

another step closer toward that lofty goal. 

Earlier this year, it became

the first company to successfully test a prototype of a lunar lander at

the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The success of this test—and a

series of others that will take place later this year—paves the way for

Moon Express to send its lander to the moon in 2016, said company

co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain.

Moon Express conducted its tests with the support of NASA

engineers, who are sharing with the company their deep well of lunar

know-how. The NASA lunar initiative—known as Catalyst—is designed to

spur new commercial U.S. capabilities to reach the moon and tap into its

considerable resources.In addition to Moon Express,

NASA is also working with Astrobotic Technologies of Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, and Masten Space Systems of Mojave, California, to develop

commercial robotic spacecrafts. 

Jain said Moon Express also recently signed an

agreement to take over Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. The

historic launchpad will be used for Moon Express’s lander development

and flight-test operations. Before it was decommissioned, the launchpad

was home to NASA’s Atlas-Centaur rocket program and its Surveyor moon

landers.

“Clearly, NASA has an amazing amount of expertise

when it comes to getting to the moon, and it wants to pass that

knowledge on to a company like ours that has the best chance of being

successful,” said Jain, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Internet

companies Infospace and Intelius. He believes that the moon holds

precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help

address Earth’s energy, health and resource challenges. 

Among the moon’s vast riches: gold, cobalt, iron,

palladium, platinum, tungsten and Helium-3, a gas that can be used in

future fusion reactors to provide nuclear power without radioactive

waste. “We went to the moon 50 years ago, yet today we have more

computing power with our iPhones than the computers that sent men into

space,” Jain said. “That type of exponential technological growth is

allowing things to happen that was never possible before.”

An eye on the Google prize

Testing in stages

Jain said Moon Express has been putting its lunar lander

through a series of tests at the space center. The successful outing

earlier this year involved tethering the vehicle—which is the size of a

coffee table—to a crane in order to safely test its control systems.

“The reason we tethered it to the crane is because the last thing we

wanted was the aircraft to go completely haywire and hurt someone,” he

said. 

At the end of March, the company will conduct a

completely free flight test with no tethering. The lander will take off

from the pad, go up and sideways, then land back at the launchpad. “This

is to test that the vehicle knows where to go and how to get back to

the launchpad safely,” Jain explained.

Once all these tests are successfully completed,

Jain said the lander—called MX-1—will be ready to travel to the moon.

The most likely scenario is that it will be attached to a satellite that

will take the lander into a low orbit over the Earth. From there the

MX-1 will fire its own rocket, powered by hydrogen peroxide, and launch

from that orbit to complete its travel to the moon’s surface. 

The lander’s first mission is a one-way trip,

meaning that it’s not designed to travel back to the Earth, said Jain.

“The purpose is to show that for the first time, a company has developed

the technology to land softly on the moon,” he said. “Landing on the

moon is not the hard part. Landing softly is the hard part.” 

That’s because even though the gravity of the moon

is one-sixth that of the Earth’s, the lander will still be traveling

down to the surface of the moon “like a bullet,” Jain explained. Without

the right calculations to indicate when its rockets have to fire in

order to slow it down, the lander would hit the surface of the moon and

break into millions of pieces. “Unlike here on Earth, there’s no GPS on

the moon to tell us this, so we have to do all these calculations

first,” he said. 

Looking ahead 15 or 20 years, Jain said he

envisions a day when the moon is used as a sort of way station enabling

easier travel for exploration to other planets. In the meantime, he said

the lander’s second and third missions could likely involve bringing

precious metals, minerals and even moon rocks back to Earth. “Today,

people look at diamonds as this rare thing on Earth,” Jain said.

He added, “Imagine telling someone you love her by giving her the moon.”

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Billionaire teams up with NASA to mine the moon