Naveen Jain is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Moon Express, Inc., a competing team in the Google Lunar X PRIZE. They intend to be the first privately funded team to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth.
The members of this highly motivated team see the moon as a new continent and have set their sights on our nearest neighbor island for a scheduled landing in the summer of 2013. The goal is to be an important step in the process of seeing the Moon become a place human-kind will one day learn to live, develop navigational infrastructures, and establish trade in. Moon Express is a part of building this new Earth-Moon highway which will be the testing ground for continuing steps to a permanent foothold there, and interplanetary exploration from that point onward. When we get there we’ll find galactic resources not available on Earth, and set up trade and technical infrastructures as the “sailways,” or navigation systems needed to reach them.
The Moon has always been a source of wonder and inspiration for people and now it continues to beckon us to reach further and strive harder to understand our place in the universe—for those who will follow us into the great cosmos beyond.
