The Next Big Thing: Own a Piece of the Moon?

By John Cook, co-founder of GeekWire

Naveen Jain is looking to save planet Earth by reaching for the moon. The Seattle Internet entrepreneur emerged today as the co-founder of a new startup company called Moon Express, which is attempting to “blaze a trail to the moon and establish new avenues for commercial space activities beyond Earth orbit.” Jain previously co-founded the Bellevue Internet search engine InfoSpace, but who knew that the former Microsoft manager wanted to explore actual space?

We certainly didn’t see this one coming, though it is getting harder and harder to be surprised by Jain’s activities. (A press release says that the entrepreneur also is exploring ways to develop neuroscience based multi-sensory video games; create bio-factories to reduce food shortages and utilize microbes to create clean drinking water, among other things).

Moon Express, which has already won a $10 million NASA lunar contract and is a contender for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, is building new vehicles to deliver payloads to the moon and search the lunar surface for precious materials.

“From an entrepreneur’s perspective, the moon has never truly been explored,” Jain tells the Los Angeles Times. ”We think it could hold resources that benefit Earth and all humanity.”

Jain is serving as a chairman of the Silicon Valley company, but he’s not the only technology executive on board. Barney Pell, the head architect on Microsoft’s Bing search engine and founder of search engine Powerset, also is an investor and co-founder. The CEO is Bob Richards, a founder of International Space University.

For the rest of the story, check GeekWire.

Editor’s Note: We’ve gotten some requests for tech info here at Patch of late, rather than report on what’s already been reported on, we thought we’d alert readers to a great local tech site, GeekWire. For the rest of the story, check GeekWire.