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Moon Express approved for first commercial lunar mission

James Dean
FLORIDA TODAY
Artist rendering of a Moon Express lander orbiting the moon.

The U.S. government has given a Cape Canaveral company the go-ahead to fly the first commercial mission to the moon.

The first-of-its-kind approval announced Wednesday morning clears the way for Moon Express to fly a robotic lander about the size of the “Star Wars” droid R2-D2 to the lunar surface as soon as next year.

“It’s certainly trailblazing,” said Bob Richards, Moon Express co-founder and CEO. “It’s a huge milestone for us.”

A startup with Silicon Valley roots and investors, Moon Express becomes the first from a growing group of entrepreneurial space firms authorized to fly a mission beyond near-Earth orbit, and to attempt a moon landing that only a few national space agencies have achieved to date.

Other companies may not be far behind.

SpaceX hopes to launch an unmanned "Red Dragon" mission to Mars as soon as 2018. Planetary Resources wants to mine asteroids. And Bigelow Aerospace, which recently attached a prototype habitat to the International Space Station, envisions lunar and Mars bases.

Moon Express aims for 2017 moon shot

Each at some point will need an approval like the one given to Moon Express by the Federal Aviation Administration, which led a months-long review also involving the White House, State Department, NASA and Defense Department.

Although it is considered a one-time approval setting no precedent for "non-traditional" space missions until more formal rules are put in place, industry advocates cheered the government’s willingness to work with a small, private space venture rather than blocking it.

“We’re extremely excited about the government’s decision,” said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Space Federation. “It’s definitely a huge step forward in the development of space resources and doing missions in deep space.”

Elliot Pulham, CEO of the Space Foundation, called the approval a major milestone that would "more fully open a new era of commercial exploration and discovery."

NASA already relies on two companies, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, to ship cargo to the ISS. By 2018, Boeing and SpaceX are expected to fly astronauts to the orbiting laboratory 250 miles above Earth.

Commercial missions farther out in space, well beyond the realm 22,000 miles high where many communications satellites orbit, present more of a challenge.

Congress last year passed a “finders’ keepers” law that granted companies ownership of any resources they might extract from an asteroid or lunar soil.

But a problem remained: No federal agency was responsible for approving such missions, so there was no green light to proceed.

Moon Express needed to show that its mission would comply with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, including commitments not to contaminate another planetary body, to be subject to government oversight and to not interfere with other missions. The latter provision included promising not to disturb NASA's historic Apollo landing sites, for example.

“It was completely uncharted territory,” said Richards. “We boldly went where no private sector company had gone before in terms of regulatory frameworks.”

Now Moon Express just needs to pull off the moon shot.

The company, which has raised more than $30 million since being founded in 2010, this fall plans to unveil the MX-1E lander it is now developing and testing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

MORE: Moon Express to test lander at historic Cape complexes

A first launch optimistically is targeted for late 2017 on Rocket Lab’s new Electron rocket, either from Rocket Lab’s launch site in New Zealand or possibly Cape Canaveral. The FAA has not yet issued a launch license, which will be considered separately from the mission itself.

A soft moon landing late next year to start two weeks of operations on the surface would position Moon Express to win the Google Lunar XPRIZE’s top award of $20 million.

But the company has grander long-term ambitions, including sending people to the moon.

Co-founder Naveen Jain said Moon Express would help develop a “trillion dollar space economy” that holds opportunities comparable to the Internet — hence the space industry’s appeal to tech titans including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen.

“You can re-phrase John F. Kennedy and say: We choose to go to the moon, not because it’s easy, because it’s a great business, because it’s inspiring,” he said.

Jain said potential business applications are as numerous, profitable and unpredictable as those on smart phones, joking that Moon Express would enable the moon’s equivalent of Pokemon Go, Angry Birds or Snapchat.

Examples might include harvesting water ice whose hydrogen and oxygen could fuel rocket engines and sustain colonies, helping humanity establish a foothold beyond Earth and a stepping stone to Mars. Moon rocks returned to Earth could become more desirable than diamonds. The moon could become a honeymoon destination.

Symbolically, Jain said he also hoped a privately-led moon landing accomplished by a small group of people would inspire others to pursue their own moon shots and their own dreams.

“It would change the trajectory of how humanity lives,” he said.

Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 orjdean@floridatoday.com.And follow on Twitter at@flatoday_jdeanand on Facebook atfacebook.com/jamesdeanspace.