It’s the last entrepreneurial frontier. Even Justin Bieber wants a piece of the action.

“let’s shoot a music video in SPACE!!” the Canadian pop star tweeted last week after Richard Branson announced that Bieber and his manager Scooter Braun have garnered seats on the British mogul’s Virgin Galactic ship.

That was music to the ears of Bob Richards, one of the world’s leading space entrepreneurs, who tweeted back “& broadcast it from the Moon!”

While Virgin is promising two-hour, sub-orbital, $250,000 (U.S.) rides for humans starting next year, Richards’ Moon Express Inc. intends to launch the first of a series of low-cost robotic missions to the moon in 2015.

Bieber “can do a space video and we can broadcast the first song, the first video on the moon,” said Richards.

Founded in 2010, Moon Ex is a privately funded lunar resource company aimed at opening up the resources of the moon for the benefit of life on earth. Headquartered in the NASA Ames Research Park in Mountain View, California, the company combines Silicon Valley lean start-up principles with expertise in aerospace engineering and planetary sciences. Other big players like Branson and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., are hoping to make money in the same field.

Moon Ex is banking on agreements to either collect data or take cargo for scientists and corporations, in order to make the estimated $50 million inaugural journey profitable.

For example, “we’ve been paid to design and build a telescope for the International Lunar Observatory Association; and we will be paid by that same customer to fly it to the moon and operate it,” explained Richards, who will be in Toronto next week to address Ideacity.

Another potential customer is Google, which will award its $20 million Lunar XPrize to the first private team to land a robot on the moon and send video, images and data back to earth.

“It’s that cluster of customers that makes our mission possible,” said Richards.

“Our private investors are putting up the risk capital for us to execute that mission and collect those revenues, some of which come along as we go, and some that are only paid after we perform, such as Google — after we take the pictures.

“We have coach class and executive for our science payloads, which we charge about $3 million per kilogram to deliver, but we’ll have lots of opportunities for participation and citizen science on the moon that are affordable to the general public.”

Once the tourism or “taxicab business” of space exploration is routine, Richards expects resource development to become the focus.

“Many of the precious metals and minerals we mine here on earth are also available in vast quantities on the moon without adverse impacts on our planetary environment,” he said.

“Some believe the stores of Helium 3 on the moon offer a new clean energy resource for Earth. The element that makes all these possibilities economical is the water on the moon, which is the oil of the solar system and a game changer for our future as a multi-world species.”

And the infrastructure required to harness those resources could be a boon for business, said Richards, a co-founder of the International Space University in France.

“When the gold rush happened there were a lot of prospectors, but also people selling the Levis and the boots and the horses and the picks and the shovels and the railroads that had to come up to service those needs of transportation of getting goods back,” said Richards. “It’s a completely new environment for entrepreneurship. I do believe the first trillionaires will be generated out of investments in space activities.”

Although Canadian mining magnate Rob McEwen, CEO of McEwen Mining Inc. and Goldcorp Inc. founder, is a “substantial” Moon Ex investor, Toronto-born Richards fears Canada is in danger of missing the “watershed period for entrepreneurship in space.

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“Not that it doesn’t have the entrepreneurs or the money, but the federal government, which sets the policy under which the Canadian space industry must operate, has not embraced the concept of entrepreneurship yet,” he said.

“I think Canada could set the standard for investment in space resources and I think the mining sector in Canada could define what Canada does in space in the future.”

Moses Znaimer’s 14th annual Ideacity conference takes place June 19, 20, 21 at Koerner Hall in Toronto. Pass information and talks can be found at www.ideacityonline.com

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