The longterm goals for Moon Express are to continue to launch more lunar missions that will, hopefully, culminate in the retrieval of lunar material back to Earth by 2020.
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The mission is set to take place toward the second half of 2017 and will either launch from Moon Express’ Space Launch Complex 17 and 18 in Cape Canaveral or at Rocket Lab’s launch site in New Zealand.
Moon Express has been given the go-ahead by the United States government for a two-week mission which will include sending a lander to Earth’s satellite late next year.
While on the moon, the probe will not only take photos and film video to transmit to Earth.
This will be the first time a non-government entity has flown beyond Earth’s orbit and landed on the moon.
The company also hopes to win the Google Lunar XPrize, a competition to land a privately funded robotic vehicle on the moon by the end of next year.
Moon Express’s robotic MX-1 Lander is about the size of a large coffee table.
“Space travel is our only path forward to ensure our survival and create a limitless future for our children”, Naveen Jain, the company’s co-founder and chairman, said in a statement.
Elon Musk, founder and chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies, plans to fly a spacecraft to Mars in 2018, a mission that raises a host of issues dealing with protecting potential indigenous life on the planet from contamination by Earth microbes.
The approval for the Moon mission came from a collection of government agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the White House, the State Department, and NASA, after the company submitted an application for the mission to the FAA on April 8. This is the first time that a private enterprise has been licensed by the U.S. Government to venture to the lunar surface. “We have a moon shot; it’s a real moon shot”.
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The vision of Moon Express is to start commercial lunar exploration. “On Aug. 3, Moon Express announced this mission approval, which came out of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation”. Established in 2007, this award will reward the first private company that will land a capsule on the moon. The company intends to bring rocks from the moon to Earth by 2020.
