Moon Express

Moon Express is a US-based commercial lunar transportation and resources company founded in 2010 by Bob Richards, Naveen Jain, and Barney Pell, headquartered in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company was the first private company in history to receive US government permission to travel beyond Earth's orbit, obtaining FAA approval in 2016 to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon. Moon Express competed in the Google Lunar XPRIZE and developed a series of robotic lunar landers — the MX-1, MX-2, MX-5, and MX-9 — intended to deliver commercial payloads to the lunar surface at significantly lower cost than government missions. The company aims to exploit lunar resources including helium-3, rare earth elements, and water ice at the lunar poles, positioning the Moon as the eighth continent of Earth with a path to sustainable human activity in cislunar space.