Moon Express has become the first private enterprise given permission to fly beyond geostationary orbit.
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CEO Bob Richards said that the approval is a big decision for them.
The company now has no plans to send humans back to the Moon, but it does want to send a robotic lander by the end of 2017. So just why would some private company want or even need to go to the Moon? Moon Express also makes plans for another mission in 2020 to bring home some lunar materials, The Guardian wrote.
If Moon Express is successful in its mission, Google would award the company US$20 million (A$26.11 million) for winning its Lunar XPRIZE competition. The robot will conduct science experiments, send pictures and video to Earth, and travel with commercial cargo, including cremated human remains.
Citation: Showstack, R. (2016), Government OK’s Moon Express mission to the Moon, Eos, 97, doi:10.1029/2016EO057283. Nevertheless, many find themselves frustrated that they, too, can’t take the famous “one giant leap”. “Space travel is our only path forward to ensure our survival and create a limitless future for our children”, Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, Inc., said in a statement.
Moon Express submitted an application for the landing in April with the Federal Aviation Administration, which proceeded to vet the document with a number of agencies – he U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission.
Having previously only been achieved by governmental programs in the United States and other nations, the privilege of landing on the moon may soon be in the grasp of regular citizens.
For the first time, the USA government has granted regulatory approval for a commercial company to travel beyond Earth and land on the Moon.
Founded in August 2010 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Naveen Jain, Barney Pell, and Bob Richards, MoonEx has expressed intent to develop a low-priced spacecraft and mine the Moon for resources in an effort to “expand Earth’s economic sphere”.
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“Up until now all commercial companies have been limited to operations in Earth’s orbit, and only governments have sent missions to other worlds”, it added.
