Another month, another try at the moon.
A robotic lunar lander launched into space early Thursday morning. If all goes well, on Feb. 22 it will become the first American spacecraft to gently set down on the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972.
It would also become the first private effort to reach the surface of the moon in one piece. Three earlier attempts, by an American company, a Japanese company and an Israeli nonprofit, failed.
The company in charge of this mission, Intuitive Machines of Houston, is optimistic.
“I feel fairly confident that we’re going to be successful softly touching down on the moon,” Stephen Altemus, the president and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in an interview. “We’ve done the tests. We tested and tested and tested. As much testing as we could do.”
If private companies can pull off this feat, at a cost much lower than a traditional NASA mission, that will open the door to wider exploration of the moon by NASA and commercial endeavors.
“We’re trying to create a marketplace in a place where it didn’t exist,” Joel Kearns, an official in NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference on Tuesday. “But to do that, we have to do it in a cost–conscious manner.”
NASA is the primary customer for this mission, paying Intuitive Machines $118 million to take its payloads, which include a stereo camera to observe the plume of dust kicked up during landing and a radio receiver to measure the effects of charged particles on radio signals, to the moon’s surface. There is also cargo from customers other than NASA, like a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and an art project by Jeff Koons.
But if these private efforts continue to crash, then NASA will not be getting its money’s worth.
The mission got off to a smooth, auspicious start.
At 1:05 a.m. Eastern time, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the lander lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the lander on a direct trajectory toward the moon. Intuitive Machines reported less than hour later that the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s second stage and successfully turned itself on. The spacecraft can keep itself pointed in proper direction, its solar panels are generating power and it is in radio contact with Intuitive Machines’ mission control in Houston, the company said later on Thursday morning.
“We are keenly aware of the immense challenges that lie ahead,” Mr. Altemus said in a statement. “However, it is precisely in facing these challenges head-on that we recognize the magnitude of the opportunity before us: to softly return the United States to the surface of the moon for the first time in 52 years.”
Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft design Nova-C. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs, about 14 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines notes that the body of the lander is roughly the size of an old British police telephone booth — that is, like the Tardis in the “Doctor Who” science fiction television show.
At launch, with a full load of propellant, the lander weighed about 4,200 pounds.
This particular spacecraft was named Odysseus after a contest among Intuitive Machines employees. Mario Romero, the engineer who proposed the name, said the travels of the hero of the “Odyssey,” the ancient Greek epic poem, provided an apt analogy for the lunar mission.
“This journey takes much longer due to the many challenges, setbacks and delays,” Mr. Romero said in Intuitive Machine’s press kit for the mission. “Traveling the daunting, wine-dark sea repeatedly tests his mettle, yet ultimately, Odysseus proves worthy and sticks the landing back home after 10 years.”
After a week traveling away from Earth, Odysseus is to enter orbit around the moon about 62 miles above the surface. Then, 24 hours later, it will fire its engine to begin its final descent….
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