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One of the participants of the Google Lunar X-Prize, a company called Moon Express, just got regulatory approval for their mission. This has two very significant meanings: First, it means that all that's left for them to do now is in their own hands. The launch contract is signed and verified by the X-Prize foundation, they have official permission in accordance with international law to put a spacecraft onto the lunar surface, and they have the mission plan and partner support needed to pull it off. Now all that remains is actually finishing the spacecraft, launching it, and getting it down on the Moon by December 31st, 2017. No other participant of the X-Prize is this far along. They all still have regulatory hurdles to overcome, and most of them don't even have a launch contract yet. Up until now, it wasn't guaranteed that any participant would get to launch at all. But now it is. Private, commercial lunar landings - it's gonna happen! (Moon Express will launch on Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. Which hasn't flown yet, but is planning its first test flight very soon, pending the wrap-up of the construction of the launch site in New Zealand. Electron is theoretically capable of pushing roughly 10 kg's of mass to lunar surface, so the Moon Express lander will be sized something like a hypothetical 9U cubesat.) Second, this regulatory approval is a unique historical precedent. No non-government entity has ever before been given permission to touch the lunar surface... and not because governments are jealous, but because something like this is unheard of. Being well outside what's considered Earth orbit, the Moon is the first destination in the grand area called 'outer space'. And as such, any activities there are subject to the Outer Space Treaty. Which, among other things, demands that any signing nation polices the activities of its residents in outer space. Specifically, these activities must be officially authorized, and then they must be continually supervised. Moon Express is a US company, and the United States have ratified the Outer Space Treaty, so it applies to them. But... how does the US government authorize and supervise Moon Express during its mission? Nothing like that has ever happened. There are no protocolls, no processes, no agencies tasked or equipped for such a thing! Which is precisely why this is so important. On one hand, it established a precedent that future requests like this can refer to. Though the Federal Aviation Administration is a little bit out of their league here, they agreed for now to oversee this process on a case-by-case basis, since they are getting more and more involved with spaceflight-related activities anyway. (Traditionally, the FAA oversees civil aviation, not spaceflight, and started working on space mostly because they need to clear airspace during launches.) On the other hand, it impressed on the US government the need to formally establish processes, which they have now started to talk about in earnest. This is a good thing, because it will remove a lot insecurity around commercial ventures in outer space. One party who should be particularly pleased by this outcome is SpaceX, as they are also planning a commercial outer space mission out of the US in the near future (Red Dragon, aiming for 2018). But pretty much anyone wanting to do business on or around the Moon, near-Earth asteroids or even Mars is affected. This includes names like ULA, Masten Space Systems, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, and more... as well as of course all the other US-based Google Lunar X-Prize teams. And it even looks like the FAA might officially get the job in the end. Who knows, maybe the agency will be renamed to Federal Aerospace Adminsitration in the future?