California-based commercial space company Moon Express, Inc. or MoonEx, has received official approval from the U.S. government to launch a mission that will deliver its "MX-1 lunar lander spacecraft" to the Moon in late 2017.

MoonEx becomes the first private firm that will mine the Moon. Previous to this historic breakthrough, only states or groups of states have landed on the Moon to retrieve samples of the lunar surface but have not done so for commercial mining purposes.

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Moon Express submitted an application to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on April 8. It's the first time the federal government has granted regulatory approval for a private mission beyond Earth orbit.

"This is not only a milestone, but really a threshold for the entire commercial space industry," said Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards.

"Nobody's had a deep-sea voyage yet. We're still charting those waters," he said. "Somebody had to be first."

The U.S. government has given MoonEx permission to explore the Moon for two weeks. MoonEx said its lunar mining operation will start by landing the MX-1 and progress to exploring for resources; mining these resources; learning how to process them and transporting them back to Earth.

MoonEx was founded in 2010 with the goal of winning the Google Lunar X Prize and ultimately mining the Moon for resources such as Helium-3; platinum group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum) and rare earth elements (the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium).

The Google Lunar X Prize will award $20 million to the first team to put a robotic spacecraft on the Moon and deliver data, images and video from the landing site and 500 meters away.

In September 2015, MoonEx signed a rocket launch contract with Rocket Lab, a New Zealand startup company that will use its Electron rocket system to launch three missions for MoonEx. Two launches are set for 2017 with the third to be scheduled at a later date.

The size of a large coffee table, MX-1 will be carried to geosynchronous transfer orbit by Electron and from this orbit launch itself towards the Moon and land on the lunar surface. MX-1 is a spacecraft and mining robot rolled into one. 

The main MX-1 rocket engine is a dual mode bi-propellant system. It uses kerosene as an afterburner to give the spacecraft the power to break free of Earth orbit; accelerate faster than a bullet then brake to zero velocity using its outboard thrusters as it touches down on the lunar surface.

MoonEx also hopes to win the Google Lunar X Prize with this breakthrough robotic space vehicle capable of a multitude of applications. These include delivering scientific and commercial payloads to the Moon at a fraction of the cost of conventional solutions.

MX-1 combines proprietary robotic technologies; advanced micro-avionics and a unique toroidal structure to produce a "green" robotic spacecraft powered by sunlight and that uses hydrogen peroxide available in drug stores as rocket fuel.  

TagsMoon Express, Inc., MoonEx, MX-1, Federal Aviation Administration, moon, Google Lunar X Prize