Moon Express gets FAA approval to travel to the Moon in 2017

After six years of effort and about $30 million in investments, space-exploration startup Moon Express Inc. just became the first commercial venture to get U.S. regulatory authorization for a mission beyond Earth’s orbit.

Now the Northern California-based company and entrepreneur Naveen Jain, its chairman and co-founder, need a reliable rocket, formal launch license and another cash infusion to turn that historic dream into reality.

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Government and Moon Express officials confirmed, as expected, that an interagency group headed by the Federal Aviation Administration has signed off on the company’s plan to send a tiny, unmanned scientific spacecraft to the surface of the moon in the second half of 2017.

Months of deliberations leading to Wednesday’s announcement have been closely watched by the burgeoning commercial-space industry, because the result could set an important legal and diplomatic precedent for how U.S. authorities will review and regulate future private missions to the moon, deeper into space and perhaps eventually to Mars.

Moon Express on the Moon - illustration

Moon Express on the Moon – illustration

The principles are likely to apply to nongovernmental spacecraft the potential purposes of which will range from mining asteroids to tracking space debris.

Moon Express hopes to mine and retrieve minerals, as well as provide a potential platform for producing propellants to power future deep-space missions. Reaching those goals will require a host of engineering and scientific breakthroughs.

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Moon Express also has attracted attention due to the relatively low cost of its MX-1 lander and anticipated launch contract, are expected to amount to about $10 million. That is a fraction of the many hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to build and send traditional unmanned missions to the moon, other parts of the solar system or further into space.

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