Steve Gorman and Joey Roulette
(Reuters) – A spacecraft built and operated by Texas company Intuitive Machines touched down near the moon’s south pole on Thursday, marking the first U.S. landing on the lunar surface in more than half a century and a first for the private sector. .
The unmanned, six-legged robotic lander, dubbed Odyssey, touched down at approximately 6:23 pm EST (2323 GMT), the company and NASA commentators said in a joint webcast of the landing from Intuitive Machines’ mission control center in Houston. .
The landing capped a harrowing final approach and descent that included a problem with the spacecraft’s autonomous navigation system that forced engineers on the ground to use an untested workaround at the 11th hour.
It also took some time after an expected radio blackout to reestablish contact with the spacecraft and determine its fate some 239,000 miles (384,000 km) from Earth.
When contact was finally resumed, the signal was weak, confirming the lander had landed, but mission control was immediately unsure of the craft’s exact condition and position, according to the webcast.
“Our hardware is on the lunar surface and we’re transmitting, so congratulations to the IM team,” Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crane said at the operations center. “We’ll see what else we can get out of this.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson immediately hailed the feat as a “triumph,” declaring, “Odysseus captured the Moon.”
According to the webcast, the spacecraft stopped as planned in the Malapert A crater near the moon’s south pole. The spacecraft was not designed to broadcast live video of the landing, which occurred a day after the spacecraft reached lunar orbit and a week after its launch from Florida.
Thursday’s landing marked the first controlled descent of an American spacecraft to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972, when NASA’s last manned lunar mission landed there with astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.
To date, only four other countries have landed spacecraft on the Moon – the former Soviet Union, China, India and, most recently, just last month, Japan. The United States is the only country to ever send humans to the surface of the Moon.
Odyssey carries a suite of science instruments and technology demonstrations for NASA and several commercial clients, designed to operate for seven days on solar power before the sun sets over the polar landing site.
NASA’s payload will focus on collecting data on the interaction of space weather with the lunar surface, radio astronomy and other aspects of the lunar environment for future landers and NASA’s planned return of astronauts later this decade.
The IM-1 mission launched to the Moon last Thursday on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
DAWN OF ARTEMIS
Odyssey’s arrival also marks the first “soft landing” on the Moon of a commercially produced and operated vehicle, and the first under NASA’s Artemis lunar program, as the US seeks to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own manned one. spaceship. there.
NASA aims to land its first crewed Artemis in late 2026 as part of a long-term, sustainable exploration of the Moon and a stepping stone to eventual human missions to Mars. The initiative is focusing on the moon’s south pole in part because there is a supposed supply of frozen water there that could be used for life support and rocket fuel production.
Many small landers like Odyssey are expected to pave the way for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, designed to deliver instruments and equipment to the Moon at a lower cost than the US space agency’s traditional build-and-launch method. these vehicles. .
Relying more heavily on smaller, less experienced private enterprises comes with its own risks.
Just last month, a lunar lander from another firm, Astrobotic Technology, encountered a leak in its propulsion system en route to the Moon shortly after it was launched into orbit on January 8 by the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan rocket on its debut flight. .
The malfunction of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander was the third failure of a private company to land on the moon, following ill-fated attempts by companies from Israel and Japan.
Although Odysseus is the final star of NASA’s CLPS program, the IM-1 flight is considered an Intuitive Machines mission. The company was founded in 2013 by Stephen Altemus, former deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and now the company’s president and CEO.
The proliferation of commercial space enterprises has itself been driven by the technological leaps of recent decades.
The Apollo program and the robotic lunar rover missions that preceded it began at the very dawn of the computer age, before the advent of modern microchips, electronic sensors and software, the development of ultra-light metal alloys, and many other advances that fueled the revolution in space exploration. (This story has been corrected to show launch day as last Thursday in paragraph 13 rather than Wednesday)