All good ideas start as crazy ideas.
Then at some point they occur.
Then they become "Why haven't we been doing that all along?"
We are right now in that transition for changing the way people think about the Moon.
The Apollo missions were like Christopher Columbus
and the early explorers that came over to the New World.
This generation right now is like the Mayflower.
It's time to go back.
It's time to discover the riches of the New World.
We need to go back to stay.
We need to go back to push humanity beyond Earth.
We need to go back to become a multi-planet species.
Yinzer is like Pittsburgh-speak for y'all, or you-all.
Could you use yinzer in a sentence?
How are yinz doing?
Or... Are yinz hot or cold, or should I adjust the temperature a little?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
What's the first thing you think of?
My bet is steel mills, or maybe the Steelers.
You're probably not thinking of a new space company that has visions of becoming
FedEx to the Moon.
Meet John Thornton, co-founder and CEO of a little startup called Astrobotic.
I came to Carnegie Mellon to study mechanical engineering,
and so for me, space was something that I discovered at Carnegie Mellon.
It was something that I stumbled upon by a combination of robotics and space,
and it just clicked with all of my passions.
That's when Google XPRIZE was announced.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE for us is not just a mission.
It's a new way of doing business.
It's a new way of inspiring a cadre of math and science engineers, technologists
around the planet to dream big.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE is a $20 million prize to land on the Moon, drive 500 meters,
and send back HD video and imagery, and that just was incredibly exciting,
and immediately we knew we were going to put our hat in the ring.
We signed up days after it was announced,
and we were one of the first teams to get on board.
As fate would have it, one of John's professors was a guy named Red Whittaker,
who in the world of robotics is kind of a giant.
At the time the XPRIZE was announced, he was just coming off winning the $2 million
DARPA grand challenge, in which he and his students designed some of the first self-driving cars.
There's always the question, what's next?
Everyone needs a new rodeo, and the XPRIZE came along at just that moment.
When I heard about it I knew that it was for me, and there was no question to swing for it.
$20 million.
It sounds like a lot of money, but it turns out it costs a lot more to get to the Moon,
Quickly we realized that we needed to build a business to make that possible,
and the XPRIZE became an enabler and a catalyst to get things started.
I think it goes without saying that starting any sort of business is really hard,
but a business built around going to the Moon?
Hard doesn't even begin to describe it.
In the early going we had a few different business models.
We played a little bit with the payload idea, but there was also a bigger idea of data services,
so the idea was that data would be collected on the Moon and sold as subscriptions
to space agencies all over the world.
It turned out after testing that model, it wasn't working.
What John's not telling you is that Astrobotic almost went out of business,
and they probably would have had they not had a breakthrough.
They were already building a lander to take their rover to the lunar surface.
What if other organizations had stuff they wanted to send to the Moon too,
and what if they were willing to pay for that service?
The delivery business is no mystery.
Post office has been around for a long time.
Companies like FedEx, DHL, make their money by delivering packages.
The only difference with Astrobotic is we deliver to the surface of the Moon.
Let's say you're a space mining company
and you need to send some equipment to the surface of the Moon.
Astrobotic can get you there,
or if you're a university and want to run some experiments on the Moon
but don't have the cash to commission your own rocket, you get it to ride with Astrobotic.
The possibilities are endless.
Astrobotic's goal is to make the Moon accessible to the world,
and towards that what we are creating is an affordable, routine delivery service to the Moon,
where space agencies and commercial organizations and even individuals
all over the world can access the Moon
and send their packages, science instruments,
rovers, even marketing campaigns, to the surface of the Moon.
We have ten deals toward Mission One.
We're making the Moon accessible in ways that have never been possible before.
While the lunar XPRIZE has yet to be won and Astrobotic has yet to send anything to the Moon,
they already have ten paying customers, nations and companies and individuals
who have put down real money to put their stuff on Astrobotic's lander.
One of those paying customers happens to be an XPRIZE competitor,
Tokyo's very own Team Hakuto.
Most people think about a prize as a competition.
We took a very unique approach to that, so we're flying to the Moon,
and we're competing with others flying to the Moon.
What we realized was that those other people flying to the Moon could become partners
and customers of our service.
We reached out to the community, and Team Hakuto in particular stood up
and they had just a rover at the time and they needed to hitchhike to the Moon.
Everybody talks about democratizing space,
but what's really cool about the Astrobotic - Team Hakuto partnership
is they're actually doing it.
In fact, Team Hakuto has an army of everyday people who volunteer their time,
hoping to be a part of Japan's first mission to the Moon.
Our goal is to make the Moon accessible to the world, and that includes our competitors
and includes partners that want to fly to the surface, so we are accomplishing our goal
because we are proving our delivery service model.
They're accomplishing their goal because they can send their rover to the Moon
and compete in the Google Lunar XPRIZE, so it's a true win-win partnership.
I'm sure some people are thinking, "We've kind of already done the Moon.
We went there in the '60s, right?
Why spend all this time and money to go back?"
Humanity has an inevitable destiny in space,
and a Moon landing enterprise is absolutely essential
to deep space exploration, development, and science that is yet to come.
The Moon is our nearest neighbor, and it's a place
where we will need to go to learn to live off the land.
It's the natural next step.
This is the moment in history when people will look back
and say that this is the turning point for pushing humanity deep into space.
There is no un-inventing, and there's no going back.
These transformations are forever.