by Another month, another day, another attempt on the moon.
A robotic lunar lander launched in the early hours of Thursday morning, a day after a technical problem postponed the first launch attempt. If all goes well, it will become the first American spacecraft to soft-land on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.
It is also the latest private effort to send spacecraft to the moon. All previous attempts ended in failure. But the company behind the latest effort, Intuitive Machines of Houston, is optimistic.
“I feel pretty confident that we will make a soft landing on the Moon,” said Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines. “We have done the tests. We have tested, tested and tested. All the tests we could do.”
The spaceship is on its way to space.
The Intuitive Machines lander, called Odysseus, launched at 1:05 a.m. ET Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
SpaceX and POT are streaming coverage of the flight, which you can watch in the embedded player above.
The first minutes of the flight went as planned with the rocket heading into space and the vehicle’s second stage separating moments later from the Falcon 9 booster, which then began its return to a landing site. The Intuitive Machines spacecraft remains attached to the second stage of the SpaceX rocket and will travel for about 48 minutes before heading on its own toward the moon.
SpaceX announced late Tuesday that it would postpone a launch attempt on Wednesday morning. The company said in a post on X that the temperature of the methane fuel for the lander was “off nominal.” That problem was overcome on Thursday.
When and where is the landing?
If the launch occurs this week, the landing will be on February 22 near a crater called Malapert A. (Malapert A is a satellite crater of the larger Malapert crater, named after Charles Malapert, a 17th-century Belgian astronomer ).
Ulysses will enter orbit around the Moon about 24 hours before the landing attempt.
The landing site, about 185 miles from the south pole on the near side of the Moon, is relatively flat, an easier place for a spacecraft to land. No American spacecraft has ever landed at the lunar south pole, which is the focus of many space agencies and companies because it can be rich in frozen water.
How big is the spaceship?
Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft design Nova-C and named this particular lander Odysseus. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs, about 14 feet high and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines notes that the lander’s body is about the size of an old British telephone booth, i.e. like the Tardis in the science fiction TV show “Doctor Who.”
At launch, with a full propellant load, the lander weighs about 4,200 pounds.
What goes to the moon?
NASA is the primary customer for the Intuitive Machines flight; is paying the company $118 million to deliver its payloads. NASA also spent an additional $11 million to develop and build the flight’s six instruments:
A set of laser retroreflectors to bounce laser beams.
A LIDAR instrument to accurately measure the altitude and speed of the spacecraft as it descends to the lunar surface.
A stereo camera to capture video of the dust plume kicked up by the lander’s engines during landing.
A low-frequency radio receiver to measure the effects of charged particles near the lunar surface on radio signals.
A beacon, Lunar Node-1, to demonstrate an autonomous navigation system.
An instrument in the propellant tank that uses radio waves to measure how much fuel is left in the tank.
The lander also carries a few other payloads, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida; a precursor instrument for a future lunar telescope; and an art project by Jeff Koons.
Wasn’t it just another American spacecraft heading to the moon?
On January 8, Astrobotic Technology sent its Peregrine lander toward the moon. But a malfunction of its propulsion system shortly after launch prevented any chance of landing. Ten days later, as Peregrine spun back toward Earth, it burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. The goal of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the moon instead of NASA building and operating its own lunar landing modules.
“We’ve always seen these initial CLPS deliveries as a bit of a learning experience,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a press conference Tuesday.
The space agency hopes this approach will be much cheaper, allowing it to send more missions more frequently as it prepares to send astronauts back to the moon as part of its Artemis program.
