Moon Express

Moon Express (MoonEx), is an American privately held early stage company formed by a group of Silicon Valley and space entrepreneurs, with the goal of winning the Google Lunar X Prize, and ultimately mining the Moon for natural resources of economic value.

In August 2010,Robert D. Richards,Naveen Jain, and Barney Pell co-founded Moon Express, a Mountain View, California-based company that plans to offer commercial lunar robotic transportation and data services with a long-term goal of mining the Moon for resources, including elements that are rare on Earth, including niobium, yttrium and dysprosium. Moon Express based itself at the NASA Ames Research Center from 2010 to 2015, and the company announced its relocation to Florida's Cape Canaveral in 2015.

On June 30, 2011, the company held its first successful test flight of a prototype lunar lander system called the Lander Test Vehicle (LTV) that was developed in partnership with NASA.

On September 11, 2011, Moon Express announced that it had set up a robotics lab for a lunar probe named the "Moon Express Robotics Lab for INnovation" (MERLIN) and hired several engineering students who had successfully competed at the FIRST Robotics Competition.

In mid-2012, Moon Express announced that it will work with International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) to put a shoebox-sized astronomical telescope on the Moon. Additional details were released in July 2013, including that there would be two telescopes: a 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) radio telescope as well as an optical telescope. The preferred location is 5 kilometers (3.1 mi)-high Malapert crater, with plans to land the mission no earlier than 2018.

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