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[b]Moon Express Raises $20 Million in its Series B-1 and Announces Full Funding for its Maiden Mission to the Moon[/b] [i]Moon Express Takes Another Leap Toward Providing Ongoing Commercial Lunar Mission Services and Winning the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE Competition[/i] Moon Express has announced the successful closing of a $20 million Series B-1 financing and full funding for its maiden lunar mission, beginning its ongoing lunar mission and payload delivery services and aimed at winning the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE (GOOG) competition. The capital will be used for funding company operations, innovation, growth, and the production and flight of the company's MX-1E robotic spacecraft, planned to launch to the Moon at the end of 2017. The company has raised over $45 million in private investment to date from individuals and venture funding sources including Founders Fund, Collaborative Fund and Autodesk. "We now have all the resources in place to shoot for the Moon," said company co-founder and CEO, Bob Richards. "Our goal is to expand Earth's social and economic sphere to the Moon, our largely unexplored eighth continent, and enable a new era of low cost lunar exploration and development for students, scientists, space agencies and commercial interests." Moon Express plans a series of low cost robotic missions to the Moon starting in 2017 in support of science, exploration and commerce, with a long term goal of prospecting and harvesting new resources, including lunar water that can be uses as rocket fuel. "We are first movers into an incredible new realm of opportunity that will be inspirational, impactful and a great business," said company co-founder and chairman, Naveen Jain. "We know that there are trillions of dollars of precious resources on the Moon, and we can now seek to unlock those resources with exponential technologies for the benefit of all of humanity, enabling entrepreneurs to do what only superpowers have done before." Moon Express has contracted five rockets from Rocket Lab USA to launch the company's robotic "MX-1E" spacecraft into Earth orbit, where after separation the spacecraft will fire its own rocket engines and begin its four-day journey to the Moon, carrying a suite of scientific and commercial payloads from government and commercial customers, including the International Lunar Observatory, the National Laboratories of Frascati of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the University of Maryland, Celestis, XPRIZE and NASA. The MX-1E is the first product in a family of spacecraft designed to radically reduce the cost of access to destinations beyond traditional Earth orbit, including cis-lunar space, the Moon, Mars, asteroids and beyond. Last year Moon Express became the first private company in history to receive government permission to travel beyond Earth's orbit into deep space and land on the Moon. The company received the landmark U.S. policy decision on July 20th, 2016, following in depth consultations with the FAA, the White House, the State Department, NASA and other federal agencies. NASA selected Moon Express as an industry partner in 2014 to spur commercial cargo transportation capabilities to the surface of the Moon and has provided technical support for the development of the company's lunar lander systems. In October 2016, NASA announced interest in sending instruments to the Moon aboard commercial lunar landers. Moon Express has begun renovations of Space Launch Complexes 17 and 18 at Cape Canaveral, where the company is investing in infrastructure to build and test its spacecraft systems and operate its ongoing missions. The company reached agreements with the U.S. Air Force 45th Space Wing and Space Florida to make the former Delta II launch complex its new permanent home last year, with the State of Florida committing nearly $2 million in matching funds for the refurbishment of the historic launch sites.
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