"By leveraging commercial launchers, orbiters, landers, and platforms, NASA will be able to explore and conduct science on the moon far more quickly and cost-effectively than if the agency was planning a more traditional exploration strategy," writes Moon Express CEO Bob Richards.

Moon Express, a former Google Lunar X Prize competitor developing commercial lunar landers, has raised $12.5 million to further development of its spacecraft for commercial and government customers.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...