Moon Express

Naveen Jain is Founder and Chairman of Moon Express, Inc. (MoonEx) a privately funded lunar transportation and data services company that will provide access to the Moon directly to consumers and small businesses.

The aim of MoonEx is to bring together experienced people, partners and financial resources to blaze a trail to the Moon and establish new avenues for commercial space activities beyond Earth orbit.

MoonEx is among the six organizations selected by NASA for its $30M Innovative Lunar Demonstration Data (ILDD) program. The top three of this group will receive a contract from NASA when the final selection is made in December 2010. Under the contact, MoonEx would provide technical data to NASA resulting from MoonEx’s development of lunar vehicle capabilities and robotic lunar landing missions. The data will inform the development of future human and robotic lander vehicles and exploration systems.

Moon Express is also a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, a global competition that challenges space professionals and engineers from around the world to build and launch to the Moon a privately funded spacecraft capable of completing a series of exploration and transmission tasks.

Team MoonEx, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, is among 24 teams from a dozen countries that are competing for their share of the $30 million prize purse.

Naveen Jain is also co-Chair of the X PRIZE Education & Global Development Advisory Group, part of the X PRIZE Foundation whose mission is to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity by driving innovators to solve some of the greatest challenges facing the world today.