FASTER, PLEASE: Moon Express Approved for Private Lunar Landing in 2017, a Space First.

Moon Express submitted an application to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on April 8. The document then made its way through the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission, Richards said.

The interagency approval process “took some time, not because anybody was against or averse to this,” he said. “It’s just that we asked questions that had never been asked before, and that had to be addressed and worked out.”

Moon Express can now focus exclusively on the financial and technical challenges of the 2017 moon mission, which will begin with the launch of the company’s MX-1 lander atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster.

The company also hopes to win Google’s $30 million Lunar X-Prize and says that future missions will “help assess, extract and exploit lunar resources such as water ice, helping to launch a new era in space exploration.”

Starting as soon as next year, I hasten to reiterate.