Jay Bennett reports down by the hard-packed beaches at the edge of the country, the rumble of rocket launches has defined Florida's Space Coast for more than half a century. But the end of 2017 could mark the beginning of a new era in solar system exploration. For the first time in history, a private company is going to launch a mission to land on another celestial body.
Moon Express (or MoonEx), a space exploration company powered by industry engineers and Silicon Valley money, has accelerated its program and is making the final adjustments to its lunar lander in its facilities at Cape Canaveral. Its goal is to achieve something that has only been accomplished by the three largest superpowers in the world: a soft landing on the moon by early 2018, two years before it originally planned to go to the Moon.
"It will be the space equivalent of the four-minute mile. I think we're going to redefine the possible," MoonEx co-founder and CEO Bob Richards tells Popular Mechanics. "We've seen this throughout history - everybody thinks something is impossible until they see it done."
To win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize, a private company must land on the moon, have its spacecraft travel 500 meters across the lunar surface, and transmit high-definition video back to Earth. While four other teams are hoping to launch before the end of the year, it's starting to look like only MoonEx will meet the deadline.
This is spaceflight, though, and nothing is guaranteed. Rocket Lab's first flight of the two-stage Electron rocket was called a success, with clean stage separation and ignition of the second stage engine. The test payload did not quite make it to orbit, however, as that second stage engine shut down prematurely. But as Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck tells Popular Mechanics, "getting to orbit on your first flight is incredibly rare, even for a country."
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