A real moon shot: Feds okay first private trip to the moon - CNET

The US govement has approved a private company to land on the moon for the first time.

Moon Express disclosed on its website today that it had received the signoff from the Federal Aviation Administration to send an unmaed rover to the lunar surface. If successful, the 2017 mission would allow the company to lay claim to Google's Lunar XPrize, the $20 million bounty the search giant has put up to jumpstart this very sort of private space exploration. (It has already secured $1.25 million in prize money based on its incremental success to date.)

For Moon Express, the inaugural mission would be the begiing of its eventual business plan to mine rare elements from the Earth's moon.

While that sounds like science fiction, the field already has competition in the form of Planetary Resources, a startup looking to mine asteroids. And the moon may be just the begiing: Elon Musk's SpaceX includes "the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets" in its short mission statement, and the entrepreneur has already made the case for human trips to Mars.

Read up on our earlier coverage of the Lunar XPrize, and watch 2015 video of the Moon Express lander being tested below.