Moon Express, a California-based privately funded lunar resources company, announced its plan to send a robotic lander to the Moon in 2016 and to mine the Moon for rare minerals later on.

MoonEx co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain said their lander -- called MX-1-- will be ready to travel to the Moon next year. He said the robotic probe will be attached to a satellite that will take the lander into a low Earth orbit.

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From this orbit, MX-1 will fire its own hydrogen peroxide-powered rocket to reach the Moon. The lander is on a one-way trip and won't be coming back, said Jain.

"The purpose is to show that for the first time, a company has developed the technology to land softly on the moon," he said. "Landing on the moon is not the hard part. Landing softly is the hard part."

While the Moon's gravity is one-sixth that of the Earth's, the lander will be hurtling towards the Moon's surface like a bullet. Jain said that without the right calculations to indicate when its rockets have to fire in order to slow it down, the lander will smash into the Moon and be obliterated.

"Unlike here on Earth, there's no GPS on the moon to tell us this, so we have to do all these calculations first," he said.

At the end of March, MonEx will conduct a completely free flight test of MX-1 with no tethering to hold the lander. The lander will take off from the launchpad, go up and sideways, then land back at the launchpad.

"This is to test that the vehicle knows where to go and how to get back to the launchpad safely," Jain explained.

He said the lander's second and third missions will likely involve bringing precious metals, minerals and moon rocks back to Earth.

MoonEx is, after all, a lunar mining company with a long-term goal of mining the Moon for resources, including elements that are rare on Earth such as titanium, niobium, yttrium, dysprosium and Helium 3, among others. It was founded in 2010.

Jain envisions a day some 15 to 20 years from now when the Moon will be a sort of way station enabling easier travel for exploration to other planets like Mars.

The company is also participating in the Google Lunar X Prize competition and was awarded a US$1 million milestone prize in January for being the only company in the competition so far to test a prototype of its lander.