“Three locations have been found which have skylights on the order of 100 meters across,” says Astrobotic Technology Inc.’s President John Thornton.”It’s a good parallel to where humans settled on earth. They chose caves because they provided shelter and protection.”

Astrobotic’s mission is to provide cost-effective landers and roving robots for planetary missions.”The Moon is a first step in human beings learning to live off beyond the Earth,” Thornton continues. “It’s very important to the future of mankind to expand beyond our home planet: to satisfy our innate curiosity, for exploration and potentially for survival should we damage this Earth beyond repair.”

To survive on another planet, we would need a reliable water supply, food, basic manufacturing facilities like 3D printers to make spare parts or new machines, and robots for exploration and transport. In October 2015, Astrobotic will send a lander and rover to the Moon to search for the most basic of those requirements: water.

Water is an almost magical chemical whose components can be used to make everything from air for breathing to rocket fuel. Procuring water and making fuel locally could dramatically cut the cost of planetary exploration, since currently all resources are carried from Earth at a cost of million of dollars per kilo.

Astrobotic’s Polaris Rover

Astrobotic’s robot rover Polaris will hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by SpaceX. After landing, it will prospect for polar ice and determine how to harvest it. The rover has three vertical solar panels to generate 250W of power, stereo cameras and laser to generate 3-D video and models of the surface and for navigation. Polaris can drive and avoid obstacles autonomously. 

The polar mission is also an attempt to win Google’s Lunar X prize, a $20 million reward for the first privately-funded robot to land on the surface of the Moon, drive 500 meters and send video and images back to Earth. There are bonus prizes for other robotic feats like driving 5 km or surviving 14 frigid lunar nights (at liquid nitrogen temperatures) intact. While most X-prize entries are small-scale, Astrobotic will bring 100kg of payload to the Moon and the company sees it as just a first step in lunar colonization and commercialization.NASA cancelled its manned lunar space program last year so future manned lunar exploration is now the domain of private industry. 

The first lunar industry may be mining. “The Moon could be a potentially huge source of a lot of exotic materials,” Thornton explained. “It has platinum. It has Helium-3, a third generation, nuclear fusion fuel which creates no radiation as a byproduct. It comes from solar wind and doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.”

To mine, you need permanent settlements suitable for human beings. That’s where the caves come in. Robots could prepare landing sites, find new caves, map the cave network, construct infrastructure for returning to those caves and finally create habitats for humans. “Most of the technology is there,” said Thornton. “There are some issues we are focusing on like precision landing with an accuracy of 10s of meters. That’s important when you want to return to same place. There will be a new type of robot to descend down into the cave the first time and then set up the infrastructure to access it regularly.”

Astrobotic’s first customers are, however, the space agencies themselves. The company is developing robotic equipment for NASA and will haul payload from space agencies and scientific institutions to the Moon. Later, space agencies may even buy tickets for their astronauts. Thornton claims that the role of the commercial sector is to take established space technology and put it into an affordable form, while government agencies should continue to push the boundaries.

It’s not all about the money though, even for commercial space companies. “One of the most important things about space exploration is exciting a new generation about space,” Thorton muses. “It’s been 40 years since Apollo landed on the surface of the Moon. How many young people were inspired at that time to become scientists or engineers or the next astronaut? We have lost a bit of that. If we can revive interest in the Moon it’s a first step towards reinvigorating the next generation and that’s important to the future of all of us.”

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The InSight mission is yet another feather in NASA’s cap, but in the future, NASA will be getting lots of help from entrepreneurs. Here’s why: The cost of technology has dropped exponentially. What was once the exclusive realm of the government is now open to entrepreneurs.

Witness the success of the Dragon spacecraft in May — when it successfully docked with the International Space Station and returned with cargo. This vessel was built by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a company that entrepreneur Elon Musk founded in 2002. According to SpaceX, the capsule was built from scratch in just 4 and a half years at a cost of around $300 million. SpaceX has constructed launch sites at Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral and Kwajalein, and a manufacturing facility in Hawthorne, California. The total cost of everything, including the Dragon launch, was $800 million. Compare this to the estimated $200 billion that NASA’s Space Shuttle program cost. That’s an average of $1.5 billion for every shuttle flight.

SpaceX isn’t the only private company shooting for the stars. In 2004, Scaled Composites, a startup founded by entrepreneur Burt Rutan, launched a spacecraft called SpaceShipOne to the edge of space. This was the result of 10 years of effort and an investment of more than $20 million by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It won a $10 million prize from the X Prize Foundation (which was founded by my friend Peter Diamandis, who also founded Singularity University — where I head innovation and strategy). Billionaire Sir Richard Branson acquired this technology and founded a company called Virgin Galactic. Branson’s company will offer suborbital flights to private individuals on a craft called SpaceShipTwo starting in 2013. Tickets will cost $200,000 and reservations are currently available (there is only one class of service, however).

Entrepreneurs are also looking at mining other planets and asteroids for minerals that are rare on Earth. One company whose progress I’ve been watching is Moon Express. It is on track to land a spacecraft on the Moon in 2014. Its first lander will carry scientific and commercial payloads to the Moon. Subsequent missions aim to have robots extract resources from the lunar soil and bring them back to Earth. The company’s founder Bob Richards (a founding trustee of Singularity University) said this past weekend during an alumni event at Singularity University that these planetary resources “are essential to humanity’s future on Earth and in space.”

Richards hopes to win the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. But he is in for some stiff competition. There are 24 other privately-funded teams competing to be the first to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth.

To NASA’s credit, it realizes the potential of these entrepreneurs. In 2008, it contracted SpaceX to provide 12 Dragon spacecraft cargo missions to the international space station for a fixed, inflation-adjusted, cost of $133 million per flight. NASA also provided Moon Express with technology that helped it to get its start, and recently signed a contract to purchase the data that it gathers.

Private industry participation in the space industry isn’t a new thing. Defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin have long been subcontracting work from NASA. But they never created the revolution and disruption that these up-and-coming entrepreneurs promise to. For example, massive cost overruns are common in government contracts. But SpaceX proudly proclaims on its Web site that “if there are cost overruns, SpaceX will cover the difference. (This concept may be foreign to some traditional government space contractors that seem to believe that cost overruns should be the responsibility of the taxpayer.)”

What is so special about these entrepreneurs (or should I say “spacepreneurs”)?

To start with, they are not encumbered by bureaucracy and don’t need to preserve the status quo – in fact, they stand to thrive if the status quo is all but completely done away with. SpaceX was able to rethink the way rockets were designed and thermally protected, the materials used to construct external heat shields, and even the very production process itself. This gave them significant cost and quality advantages.

Moon Express is engineering NASA’s Common Spacecraft Bus into a low cost lunar lander configuration and rapidly prototyping software, sensors, engines, and avionics with the latest computer systems and simulation tools. Most importantly, as Richards says, “We’re a bunch of entrepreneurs trying to change the world. We can incentivize our workforce with equity—our workers are the owners. We can make decisions unconnected to congressional or White House politics. We can work in small teams with minimal overhead and high signal-to-noise organizations — noise being management. We can attract capital and expertise from the best entrepreneurs on the planet, and we can work with NASA as a partner to take advantage of the deep expertise and knowledge, while applying commercial entrepreneurial principals to achieve symbiotic goals”.

So, congratulations to NASA for raising our hopes then and again now. But the future of space travel lies in NASA-entrepreneur partnerships. Given that, don’t be surprised if we see a Coca-Cola logo on the next Mars lander.

[Editor's note: A version of this story previously appeared on WashingtonPost.com]

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations. You can also follow him on Twitter — @wadhwa.

Top image credit: Tom Cheredar