Jain’s Moon Express receives ‘milestone prizes’ in all 3 categories.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Billionaire entrepreneur and space visionary Naveen Jain is one of three key backers behind a Google Lunar XPrise team that is leading competition in all three key areas of consideration.
Jain – along with Bob Richards, one of the original co-founders of the International Space University back in 1987, and Barney Pell, a former manager at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – are at the helm of Moon Express, a team that is one of the leading contenders of the Google Lunar XPrise competition.
The goal of the competition is to have teams create a spacecraft that can do the following three things: make a soft landing on the moon, detach a lunar module that can travel a minimum of 500 meters on the moon’s surface, and develop an imaging system that can transmit a high-quality picture and video feed back to Earth.
Moon Express is one of only two team to have received “milestone prizes†in all three of those categories (Landing, Mobility, and Camera, as the competition calls them); the other is Astrobotic, which is headed up by Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor William Whitaker. Another Indian-fronted team, Team Indus, has received the milestone prize in the categories of landing system and imaging system – only two and three other teams have been named in each field, respectively.
The competition was first announced in 2007, with teams finalized in 2011. The originally 33 have been whittled down to 18, a result of some dropping out and other joining forces with each other. Each category has its own prizes – for example, the team with the best landing system stands to win $1 million – with a total of $40 million being given out by Google.
Jain has been at the forefront of privatizing space travel in an effort to cut through governmental red tape and allow more innovative people in the private sector to advance the stagnating field of space exploration.
In an interview last month with The American Bazaar, Jain discussed the importance of “disrupting†the status quo in order to foster growth and new ideas.
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“[T]he problem with governments is the bureaucratic nature, the unwillingness to take risks – that is where countries fail and private companies succeed,†Jain said. “For example, look at NASA. It’s not that people at NASA are dumb and can’t do what we do – they simply don’t take risks. They have a t-shirt that says “Failure is not an option.†Well, when you say that, when you say you’re not willing to fail, it means you’re unwilling to take risks. So they go back and use the same methods and same technology they used ten years ago because it worked then. They never want to innovate because they’re afraid [they] might fail.â€
Google’s Lunar XPrise competition shares that same mentality, and is striving to create a fully functional transport from Earth to Moon with private dollars, and at a fraction of what it would cost for a government.  More information about the Google competition can be found at its official website, located here.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com