On Wednesday, the USA government gave permission to the private Florida company to fly a spaceship beyond Earth’s orbit and land on the moon.
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Moon Express also intends to win the Google Lunar X-PRIZE competition, which will award $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit HD video of it all before 2017.
Spaceflight venture Moon Express just became the first private company to receive approval from the US government to land on the moon in 2017. Bob Richards, Naveen Jain, and serial entrepreneur and computer scientist Dr. Barney Pell.
“We applaud Moon Express and the Federal Government for this historic ruling to allow private enterprise to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and more fully open a new era of commercial exploration and discovery”.
Moon Express, a Florida-based company with headquarters in Cape Canaveral, has finally won U.S. government clearance to send commercial and scientific missions to the moon.
Analysts have said this approval could pave the way for future licensing of commercial space activity outside of Earth’s orbit, such as SpaceX’s mission to Mars set for 2018.
The unprecedented interagency approval process was necessary for the simple reason that no serious request like Moon Express’s had ever been made.
According to the FAA, Moon Express’s MX-1E spacecraft is 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”.
Many agencies were needed to sign off on Moon Express’s plan to send a robotic lander.
Other private companies are expected to follow Moon Express and seek permission to fly to the moon.
NASA and other agencies, including the Defense, State and Commerce departments, ultimately agreed that no new law was necessary, Richards said.
Three of the 16 teams still in the running are based in the United States, although Moon Express is the only one so far to receive approval.
Moon Express had to wait for over a year to get approval for its 2017 moon landing.
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If successful, Moon Express would become the fourth entity in history to soft-land on the moon, after the first three which were all superpowers – the US, USSR and China.
