The U.S. government, for the first time ever, is allowing a private spaceflight company the ability to go to the Moon. Moon Express announced on its website Wednesday that it received the green light to send a robotic spacecraft to the moon in 2017, potentially ushering in a new era of commercial space exploration and discovery.
Advertisement
In a monumental decision, Moon Express, a spaceflight company, was given an approval by the USA government to proceed with their lunar mission.
Moon Express is now in competition for the Google Lunar XPrize, which promises to award a $20 million grand prize to the first team to successfully land a privately funded rover on the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit back high definition video and images.
The space startup, with a home base in Cape Canaveral, was co-founded in 2010 by billionaire entrepreneur Dr.
The FAA performed an interagency review with an analysis of how this mission would comply with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is a preventative measure to ensure no nation declares sovereignty over sections of the solar system or moon as well as establishing a form of authorization and prolonged supervision of the mission, wrote The New York Times.
“There is no existing regulatory framework for private missions beyond Earth orbit, which is the fundamental reason why Moon Express created a proposed framework out of necessity to fill the regulatory gap for its 2017 lunar mission”, says Bob Richards, Moon Express CEO, in an email to Mashable.
The company, a contender for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE competition, envisions bringing precious resources, metals, and Moon rocks back to Earth in the near future, according to Moon Express cofounder and chairman Naveen Jain.
In 2014, NASA partnered with Moon Express and two other USA companies to advance lander capabilities to enable payload delivery to the surface of the Moon.
But before the mission was approved, it had faced a number of challenges since there is no framework yet to regulate private missions beyond the Earth’s orbit.
Unfortunately, this is not a precedent-setting case.
Advertisement
Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native.
