US Set To Approve First Commercial Mission To Moon By Private Company

US officials seem to be on the verge of making history by giving the nod to the first private space mission, Moon Express, to go beyond the orbit of our planet. The news was reported by representatives familiar with the details and published on the Wall Street Journal.

The US government's approval would remove the regulatory hurdles faced by Moon Express to send an approximately 10 kilograms package, comprising of scientific hardware, to the lunar surface sometime over the course of next year. As per a report, the endorsement by US officials would also make the Moon Express mission the first for-profit projects for exploration of the solar system, giving a huge federal boost to unmanned space investigation ventures.

According to officials in the know-how of the information, the anticipated decision will probably set significant diplomatic and legal precedents for how the government will safeguard the compliance of such nongovernmental projects with long established and prevalent space treaties. The set clauses will also, in all likelihood, apply to spacecraft in the future that will be used for the purposes of tracking space debris to mining asteroids, among a wide range of other reasons.

Meanwhile, the formal launch license approval is still going to take some time and is speculated to take place sometime during the second half of 2017. In addition, Moon Express still has to crossover its technical hurdles, which includes the fact that its proposed rocket for the mission has not been flown yet.

Moon Express, also called MoonEx, is an American private stage company that was founded in 2011 by a team of space and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, with the aim of winning the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) and subsequently foraying into Moon mining for the extraction of natural resources that have an economic value. Incidentally, the GLXP or the Moon 2.0 is organized by nonprofit organization XPRIZE and sponsored by Google. Participants will have to win the challenge of being the first to land a privately funded robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface, which has to make a journey of 500 meters on the Moon and send back high definition images and videos.

The competition deadline is until December 2017 as of now, and currently there are 16 participating teams out of which two teams, namely Moon Express and SpaceIL have won verified launch contract approvals for 2017. The other teams have until the end of 2017 to work on their secure launch contract verification. In addition to taking part in the GLXP, Moon Express is planning to place the International Lunar Observatory (ILO) on the Moon sometime during the early phase of 2018.