The awkward-looking, four-legged object crammed with circuitry and silver propellant tanks that sits in a hanger at NASA’s Ames Research Center hardly looks like a world-changing device.

But for Moon Express, the prototype of the 3-foot tall robotic spacecraft the private company hopes to land on the moon less than three years from now represents the next step in humankind’s economic evolution, a first giant leap for commerce off the Earth.

Moon Express is among 26 teams — the multinational field includes several strong competitors with ties to the Bay Area — vying for the $30 million Google (GOOG) Lunar X Prize, a competition with a 2015 deadline to land a private robotic spacecraft on the moon.

For Moon Express, however, the goal is greater than winning the X Prize. The Silicon Valley startup, which already has two development contracts with NASA, says it has a realistic chance to land on the moon in 2014. But that would only be a first small step in a long-range strategy to tap the moon’s economic opportunities.

“We’re going with the purpose of expanding the economic sphere and creating an economy between the Earth and the moon,” said Bob Richards, a technology engineer and entrepreneur with experience on interplanetary space missions, who, along with Internet entrepreneurs Barney Pell and Naveen Jain, is one of the three co-founders of Moon Express.

“The company is building a railway system — private sector — out to the moon,” said Richards, the CEO of Moon Express. The goal is “to build out a transportation business that we think is profitable by itself for scientific and commercial payloads, but also to really start exploring the moon from an entrepreneurial perspective, which has never been done before.”

Jain and Pell, along with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are hardly the only Internet entrepreneurs fueling the private commercialization of space. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk are all trying to develop space for tourism or other business objectives.

Musk’s SpaceX, for instance, is trying to win the job of permanently resupplying the International Space Station for NASA, now that the space shuttle program is finished.

“They want the next big mountain to climb,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at UC Berkeley and Duke University who recently took a post at Singularity University, the high-powered Silicon Valley educational and research program that brought Pell, Jain and Richards together. “Once you’ve built your software company and made your millions, what is the next big thing you can do to change the world?”

Silicon Valley venture capital is also jumping in. Founders Fund, whose co-founder Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal with Musk and who was an initial investor in Facebook, made a $20 million equity investment in SpaceX in 2008, and an angel investment in Moon Express.

For Google, a big part of the reason for putting up the $30 million purse for the Lunar X Prize competition was to put Silicon Valley’s fast-moving, build-ship-and-iterate stamp on the commercialization of space.

“We will only have achieved success from this competition if there is a repeated, economic interest and awareness about the moon,” said Tiffany Montague, manager of space initiatives for Google. “If we only make it a stunt, that’s not good enough. The idea is that this has to be an entrepreneurial, sustainable opportunity.”

The Lunar X Prize, Montague said, is similar to Google’s efforts to develop a driverless car, where the long-term payoff to Google is unclear, but where there is promise to create world-changing technology.

Pell, who co-founded the Internet search startup Powerset, which Microsoft bought for $100 million in 2008; Jain, who founded Internet firms Intelius and InfoSpace, and Richards, who worked on key technology for NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, believe the moon holds a massive mineralogical bounty that could be mined profitably by robots or human astronauts.

That bounty, they believe, could include more platinum than exists on Earth and significant amounts of helium-3, the rare isotope that could be used for nuclear fusion. Moon Express is also interested in valuable rare earth elements such as niobium, yttrium and dysprosium that have important applications in everything from consumer electronics to gas pipeline alloys, and are thought to be common on the moon.

“It could be $15 (billion) to $20 billion of infrastructure you’d have to put in place to actually economically liberate that wealth,” Richards said. “But those kinds of numbers, although big to a startup like us, are not big to existing mining concerns on Earth. Those are the prices of a typical mine, or even an offshore oil platform. If the resources are there, then the economics are there to liberate them.”

In addition to a data purchase contract with NASA that could be worth up to $10 million, Moon Express has landed a prominent space figure in Alan Stern, a former NASA executive who is the lead mission scientist and architect for NASA’s current New Horizons mission, a spacecraft on its way to Pluto. Stern is chief scientist for Moon Express.

“A lot of the other teams, the Google X Prize, that’s the entire reason for their existence,” Stern said. Winning the X Prize “is important to us, but our business plan is much further reaching.”

Moon Express, which was founded in August 2010 and has 23 employees, hopes to make its initial landing for about $70 million. While Richards declined to say how much investment Moon Express has raised from Founders Fund and other investors, the startup has completed an oversubscribed Series A round of venture funding, and plans to raise a Series B round in 2012.

A key next step will be buying a ride on a launch vehicle, something Richards said the startup plans to announce by the end of 2012, and possibly sooner. But space ventures by nature are an inherently risky business, and one reason Richards said the company hopes to launch in 2014 is to allow time for a second try before the 2015 X Prize deadline if its first attempt fails.

“All you have to do is take a look at the history of rocket launches” to see how difficult it is, Richards said.

Moon Express doesn’t know yet whether it would form an alliance with another company to extract mineral resources, or develop that expertise itself. But part of their goal in sending early robotic spacecraft to the moon is to establish a legal precedent to mine the moon, which Richards and Stern said is legally similar to commercial fishing operations in international waters.

Other early customers could include space burial companies like Celestis, which already is offering future lunar burial services for cremation ashes for about $10,000.

The first Moon Express mission will also carry what would be the first privately financed telescope based on another world, one being developed with the International Lunar Observatory Association, a nonprofit group with Silicon Valley ties.

Turning the moon into a scientific and economic outpost “is super-important” to humanity, said Steve Durst, founding director of the association, and director of Palo Alto-based Space Age Publishing. “This is the gateway to developing the solar system, and to reclaiming that high ground that we occupied for a few brilliant days 40 years ago. We’re a multiworld species.”

Other Lunar X Prize teams with Bay Area ties, including Menlo Park-based Team Phoenicia and Team FREDNET, whose founder and CEO Fred Bourgeois is in Santa Cruz, also say they are helping to prove that private entrepreneurs can do things in space much more cheaply and faster than government.

“We need to be developing resources in space faster, and using government to do that is the most inefficient way possible,” said Bourgeois, whose team is planning its lunar landing for the bargain-basement price of $31 million. “The only way to make it self-sustaining is to get commercial development to drive the research and the exploration.”

Moon Express is tapping another resource — 20-something software and hardware engineers — many of whom are putting off their formal graduate and even undergraduate educations for the chance to make history.

A big part of what they contribute, they say, is fresh thinking.

“We’re not in the mindset of, let’s just use things that have been proven before,” said Brandon Plaster, 22, who put off grad school to work for Moon Express.

Mike Stewart put off his undergraduate degree in Indiana to work on software development for Moon Express.

“It seemed a lot more fun than going back to school,” said Stewart, 20. “I’m pretty sure that landing something successfully on the moon will look better on a résumé than a diploma.”

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories and view his Google+ profile.