California startup gets FAA approval to put robotic lander on the moon

A small start-up has received the green light from the federal government to do something NASA has not done for more than four decades: land on the moon.

Moon Express, based in Cape Canaveral, Fla., announced Wednesday that it had received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to set a robotic lander on the moon.

That feat would win the Google Lunar X Prize competition for the first private organization to reach the moon and an accompanying $20 million reward.

But more than the prize, company officials say that it will be the opening of a profitable frontier for entrepreneurs. "Rephrasing John F. Kennedy, we choose to go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's a good business," said Naveen Jain, the Moon Express chairman. "Everything we fight over — whether it's land or it's fresh water, whether it is energy — is in abundance in space." Moon Express has a ways to go before it can reach the lunar surface, which it hopes to do next year. It still has to assemble the lander. The rocket that it plans to launch on has yet to fly even once.

And one of its competitors could beat it to the moon — and to the $20 million.

The approval reflects an effort to encourage 21st-century commercial space endeavors while staying within an international space treaty written 49 years ago when outer space was a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the idea of a start-up going to the moon an unlikely fantasy.

"There are a lot of things in the treaties we're testing the limits of right now," said Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "We're trying to define them in ways that will encourage private investment and private opportunities but not violate any international agreements."

The X Prizes seek to recreate the barnstorming prizes of the early 20th century that spurred aviation advances like Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007, called for putting a spacecraft on the moon that would be able to send back video and images and also move more than 500 meters. The first team to achieve that would claim $20 million; second place would be rewarded with $5 million.

More than 30 teams signed up, including Moon Express, founded in 2010 by Jain, who made a fortune creating the website InfoSpace and then lost most of it in the internet bust of 2000; Robert D. Richards, a space entrepreneur, and Barney Pell, a former NASA computer scientist.

The original deadline, at the end of 2012, was extended several times; now the remaining 16 teams have until Dec. 31, 2017, to claim the prize. Two teams, Moon Express and Space­IL, an Israeli nonprofit, have secured launch contracts for their spacecraft.

Jain said that low-cost missions to the moon — under $10 million — would transform space exploration. But the company has revealed little about its customers and much of the hoped-for business like the mining of platinum and helium-3 is speculative. (The helium-3 would be for fusion power plants that do not yet exist.)

At present, there is little worry that the moonscape is about to be scarred by a commercial onslaught. The Moon Express' MX-1 lander is about the size of a coffee table, and NASA has left far more litter on the moon, most recently crashing its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer into the far side of the moon in 2014.

Jain said the greatest opportunities were the ones not yet imagined, just as Apple, when it created the iPhone, did not foresee the explosion of apps that would run on the device.

"More importantly," Jain said, "we don't know what the Pokémon Go of the moon is going to be."