The U.S. government has licensed the private company Moon Express Inc.to send a robot to the moon in 2017.
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The mission will be the first time a private enterprise has been given approval to operate beyond Earth’s orbit, and could be a watershed in worldwide attitudes to commercial space exploration. Richards says they want to explore the moon because there’s trillions of dollars of resources that could benefit Earth.
The approval has been granted for a planned 2017 mission, which will see Moon Express attempt to land a robotic lunar lander on the moon’s surface.
According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the United States bears global responsibility for any space flights performed from its territory by national non-government entities.
The MX-1E is a spacecraft/lander capable of transfer from Earth orbit to the Moon, making a soft landing on the lunar surface, and performing post-landing relocations through propulsive “hops”, the FAA said in a release. “Once there, one of the landers will act as a booster sending the other one toward the moon”, Naveen Jain, co-founder of Moon Express, described their flight plan in an interview with PopSci.com.
Co-founder Bob Richards is a Canadian-born space entrepreneur, and the firm’s third founder is entrepreneur Barney Pell.
A Cape Canaveral, Florida-based start-up has become the first private company approved by the U.S. government to land on the Moon with less than 17 months remaining in the Google Lunar X Prize Foundation. The company submitted its request to the FAA on April 8, 2016. The government is working on fixing that, but for now Moon Express managed to get around the problem by sharing more information about its goals and plans than the government asked for.
There have been no private space missions so far beyond Earth’s orbit and only state agencies have performed outer space missions. In October 2015, Moon Express announced a launch contract with Rocket Lab USA for 3 launches to the Moon beginning in 2017.
Crank up that Sinatra song because a private company might be flying you to the moon in the future.
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The company, is also competing with several other groups for the Google Lunar X Prize.
