"Clearly, NASA has an amazing amount of expertise when it comes to getting to the moon, and it wants to pass that knowledge on to a company like ours that has the best chance of being successful," Jain was quoted as saying.

Jain, who also founded Internet companies Infospace and Intelius, said the moon holds precious metals and rare minerals that can be brought back to help address Earth's energy, health and resource challenges.

Moon Express also recently signed an agreement to take over Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Jain said.

The historic launchpad will be used for Moon Express's lander development and flight-test operations.

Before it was decommissioned, the launchpad was home to NASA's Atlas-Centaur rocket programme and its Surveyor moon landers.

"We went to the moon 50 years ago, yet today we have more computing power with our iPhones than the computers that sent men into space," Jain was quoted as saying.

"That type of exponential technological growth is allowing things to happen that was never possible before."

Moon Express is already at the front of the pack of companies vying for the Google Lunar X Prize - a competition organized by the X Prize Foundation and sponsored by Google - to spur privately funded space exploration.

It will award $30 million to the first company that lands a commercial spacecraft on the moon, travels 500 metres across its surface and sends high-definition images and video back to Earth - all before the end of 2016.

In January, Moon Express was awarded a $1 million milestone prize from Google for being the only company in the competition so far to test a prototype of its lander.

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