Golden Spike Company

The Golden Spike Company was an American commercial lunar exploration startup founded in 2010 and based in Colorado, established by Alan Stern — NASA's former associate administrator for science (2007-2008) and principal investigator of the New Horizons Pluto mission — together with former NASA Johnson Space Center director Gerald 'Gerry' Griffin as founding board chairman.

Golden Spike announced plans in December 2012 to offer privately funded, crewed round-trip missions to the lunar surface, initially targeting flights by around 2020 at an estimated cost of roughly $1.5 billion per two-person mission, using a mix of existing and to-be-developed launch vehicles, a lunar lander and a lightweight 'pumpkin'-shaped reentry capsule. The company contracted Northrop Grumman in January 2013 to perform an initial lunar lander design study, and assembled a high-profile advisory board including Esther Dyson, Newt Gingrich, Wayne Hale, Homer Hickam and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson.

Golden Spike never secured the multi-billion-dollar financing needed to proceed past early design studies: an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in 2013 raised only about $19,450 against a $240,000 goal, and a planned 2013 funding round did not materialise. The company ceased publicly reported activity after about 2013, and Wikipedia records its corporate website as having been taken offline by September 2015; an attempt to load the former company site in September 2026 returned an access-denied error, consistent with the site no longer being maintained.

Golden Spike Company is defunct and never flew hardware or conducted any mission. Its exact headquarters city (Boulder) is reported in secondary sources but is not stated in the primary sources consulted, which give only 'Colorado.'