“Ten years ago, the Moon was an inspiration to poets and an opportunity for lovers. Ten years from now it will be just another airport.”---Emmanuel Mesthene
When we were kids, nobody talked about going to the moon. Why bother? There was no beach, no ballfields, no clam joints. And worst of all, no air. If you wanted to play baseball on the moon, you’d have to wear one of those big klunky space suits with the bubble tops. Ever try to steal second base in one of those things? It’s ridiculous. Also, they had no roads on the moon. You had to walk everywhere. Oh, wait a minute, that’s right. There wasn’t actually anywhere to walk to.
Say, just for the hell of it or maybe because you’re on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, you decide to hole up on the moon for awhile. So you slap up a house, knock together some rudimentary furniture and sit back in your La-Z-Boy. Then what? No TV stations, except for that pesky Outerspace eBay channel on Mars. No pizza delivery. And the only liquor store is on the dark side of the moon, a gazillion kilometers away. It’s almost as bad as living in Palatka. Almost, because there’s no crime on the moon.
Then, one day when we were nine years old, Captain Video showed up, followed a year later by Buck Rogers and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. These guys were amazing. They blasted all over the universe in space ships that looked like they were assembled by nincompoops in your uncle Ernie’s salvage yard. They fought heinous beings equipped with scary ray guns. If somebody happened to get zapped with one of these ray guns, they didn’t take the guy to the ER to get the bullet out. He was….um….dematerialized. Captain Video and the boys skipped off to the moon just for fun but it never occurred to us this was a realistic possibility. We were smart enough to know that in real life those space ships wouldn’t make it from Newark to Canarsie. At the time, the main thing we knew about the moon was when it hit your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore. That was good enough for us.
“We Choose To Go To The Moon….” (John Fitzgerald Kennedy)
On September 12, 1962, Kennedy told us we were going to the Moon within the decade. Okay, so if JFK said so, it must be true. Seven years later, it was. Neil Armstrong became the first human since Tom Corbett to set foot onto another planetary body. Six more manned U.S. landings occurred between 1969 and 1972. After the original big whoop-de-doo, it was “been there, done that” and we went back to spending U.S. dollars on much more important things like regulating llama farmers out of existence and figuring out what bugs do near lightbulbs. No, really. You can look it up. Don’t worry, though, the Moon is all the rage again. And this time, we’re not fooling around. Come 2018, an outfit called Moon Express will launch its first mission to your friendly neighborhood orb. Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of ME swears it on a stack of Vedas. Not only that. Jain goes on to promise that the first human colony will be on the Moon within the next five years. Whoa! And don’t you worry about your amenities. McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts will set up shop a hasty six months later. (Okay, we made that last part up.)
Dancin’ In The Moonlight
We know what you’re thinking. We don’t know this Naveen Jain from Wonder Wart Hog, nor the horse he rode in on. But we’re here to tell you that Naveen is not just another Mumbai shuck-and-jive artist, he’s the real Patel. Or is he? Jain, now 58, was born and grew up in New Delhi, earned an engineering degree in 1979 from the Indian Institute of Technology (Roorkee) and moved to the United States the same year. His first stateside job was at Burroughs (now Unisys) in New Jersey as part of a business exchange program in 1983. He moved to Silicon Valley and worked for several startup companies before joining Microsoft in 1989. Jain worked on OS/2, then DOS, Windows NT and Windows 95. He was awarded three patents related to the latter and became best known for his work as a program manager.
Jain joined the management team for Microsoft Network prior to its launch, but became restless after eight years at the company, feeling that a single person couldn’t make a significant difference. About that time (1995), Netscape Communications raised $2.l2 billion in an initial public offering, illustrating that internet companies can have large IPOs without first making a profit. Naveen quit Microsoft to start InfoSpace the same year, with the aim of having his own initial public offering as quickly as possible.
Jain started InfoSpace with six employees, mostly from Microsoft, and began developing email and telephone directories. By April of 2000, the company was working with 1500 websites, 60 content providers and 20 telecommunications companies. InfoSpace was praised by Wall Street analysts, and at its peak enjoyed a market cap of $31 billion, making the company the largest internet business in the American Northwest. Naveen Jain’s net worth grew to $8 billion, mainly from his 47% of InfoSpace stock. But, like everywhere else, sometimes there are problems in Big Genius Land. Several lawsuits against Jain arose from partners and employees alleging he used promises of stock options to attract talent and business partners, then fired employees or broke off relations without providing the promised shares. Consultants said they were offered deals in which they could buy shares for 1 to 10 cents each, but shortly afterwards Jain tried to change the deal or fired them over a dispute without the promised stock-based compensation. When the dot.com bubble burst in March 2000, InfoSpace stock fell from $138 to only $1.56 by July 2001. Three months later, Jain sold $80 million of his own shares at an even lower price. Lawsuits continued to proliferate, culminating in a December 2004 settlement between Jain and InfoSpace, which would result in dismissal of all the legal cases.
In 2003, Jain co-founded Intelius, which collected and sold background information on individuals. It grew to $18.1 million in revenues by 2004 and $88.5 in 2007, with $22.5 million in profits. According to TechCrunch, however, the site was the subject of many consumer complaints alleging that consumers were led to believe they were answering a short survey for $10 cash when they were actually signing up for a $20-per-month subscription. Are we beginning to see a pattern here? Are we beginning to wonder if Naveen Jain’s Moon villages will have faulty garbage pick-up and flickering streetlights? Will the bike lanes be too narrow and the interstates too lumpy? Are we placing all our interstellar eggs in one leaky basket? Bob Dylan said it best: The answer, my friend, is blowing in the astral wind.
Fly Me To The Moon (and hopefully back, if the need arises)
Moon Express is a private spaceflight company noted for being the first of its kind to receive United States government approval for lunar travel. The company is also one of many competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, an inducement competition in which private firms vie to land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, travel 500m, then broadcast high-definition images and videos back to Earth. The deadline for this contest is March of 2018. To that end, Moon Express is collaborating with American aerospace corporation Rocket Lab. While Moon Express built the lander for the contest, Rocket Lab will provide the booster to propel the lander to the Moon’s surface. According to Jain, however, Google’s $20 million reward is not the main priority, though it tends to buck one up a tad. First and foremost, Moon Express aims to mine lunar resources which can be sent back to Earth, assuming there are any. Once that has been accomplished, setting up human colonies will become the next step. Speaking to CNBC.com, Jain said “I really believe that lunar is going to become like our eighth continent. We are going to have a permanent presence there, we are going to have internet there and we are going to be able to communicate just like we communicate from here to Australia. I think a lunar colony will be set up in the next five years, so it’s not that far away. I believe in the next 10, 15 years, we will be able to have a baby on the moon and somewhere along the line the parents are going to be looking at the baby and say, ‘We come from that planet over there.’ It’s very exciting times.” Frank Zappa’s daughter, Moon Unit, will be proud.
We’re a little worried, though. What about all those errant asteroids and other space junk which pock-marks the Moon on a daily basis? There’s nothing worse than a bunch of giant rocks falling on your nice lunar bar mitzvah. What if the thermostat goes on the fritz and the temperature in your moonhouse goes up to 260 or down to minus 396 degrees? The latter could be uncomfortable no matter how many Patagonia shirts you put on. What happens when our moonshoes get a little worn and the gravitational heels fail? Lunar gravity is 1/6 that of the Earth---will we go floating off to Barcelona? It’s a dilemma. We’d like to believe good old Naveen Jain that everything will be alright but the fella is a little spotty in the integrity department. Remember when your mother would only buy stuff that had the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval? Maybe Naveen could get one of those from Elon Musk.
That’s all, folks….
