Let's try to reach the moon again in one more month.
Early Thursday morning, a robotic lunar lander was launched into space. If all goes well, in nine days, an American spacecraft will quietly land on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 landed on the moon in 1972.
It will also be the first private effort to reach the moon's surface independently. Three previous attempts by an American company, a Japanese company, and an Israeli nonprofit organization have failed.
Intuitive Machines, the Houston company responsible for the mission, is optimistic.
Intuitive Machines President and CEO Stephen Altemus said in an interview that he is “very confident that we will be able to successfully make a soft landing on the moon.” “We've tested. We've tested and tested and tested. We've tested as much as we can.”
If private companies can accomplish this feat at a much lower cost than traditional NASA missions, it would open the door to broader lunar exploration and commercial efforts by NASA.
“We're trying to create a market where no market existed,” Joel Kearns, a NASA Science Mission Directorate official, said at a press conference Tuesday. “But we have to incur a cost to do that.”–A conscious way. ”
NASA is the primary customer for the mission, paying Intuitive Machines $118 million for its payload, which includes a stereo camera to view the dust plume kicked up during landing and a radio signal that detects charged particles. Contains a radio receiver to measure the impact of surface of the moon. Other shipments have come from non-NASA customers, including cameras made 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 fail, NASA won't get its money's worth.
The mission was off to a good start.
At 1:05 a.m. ET, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the lander lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, placing the lander on a straight trajectory toward the moon. Intuitive Machines reported that less than an hour later, the spacecraft separated from the rocket's second stage and successfully powered on, with systems working as expected.
Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft design Nova-C. This is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs and is approximately 14 feet tall and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines says the lander's body is about the size of an old British phone booth and resembles the TARDIS from the science fiction TV show Doctor Who.
The lander weighed approximately 4,200 pounds at launch, fully loaded with propellant.
This particular spaceship was named Odysseus after a contest between Intuitive Machines employees. Engineer Mario Romero, who proposed the name, said the hero's journey in the ancient Greek epic Odyssey was an apt analogy for lunar exploration.
“This journey will take longer because of the many challenges, setbacks and delays,” Romero said in Intuitive Machine's press kit about the mission. “Traveling across the daunting wine-dark sea tests his mettle again and again, but in the end Odysseus proves himself worthy and lands in his homeland ten years later. I decided to do it.”
After a week's journey from Earth, Odysseus will enter orbit around the moon about 92 miles above the Earth's surface. And he will start the engine after 24 hours and begin the final descent. An hour later, it sank near a crater named Malapart A, about 295 miles from Antarctica. The landing site is relatively flat, making it easy for spacecraft to land.
Antarctic regions, especially craters that remain in permanent shadow, are interesting because of the presence of water ice there. Previous American moon exploration missions have landed in equatorial regions.
After landing, Odysseus will operate for seven days until sunset. Solar-powered landers aren't designed to withstand the frigid temperatures of moonlit nights.
The launch of the Intuitive Machines mission came just a month after another American company, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, attempted to send the Peregrine lander to the moon. However, shortly after liftoff, a problem occurred in the propulsion system, eliminating any possibility of landing. Ten days later, Peregrine circled back toward Earth and burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
Odysseus and Peregrine are both part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Service Program (CLPS). The goal of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the Moon, rather than NASA building and operating its own lunar landers.
The space agency hopes this approach will be much cheaper and allow it to send more missions more frequently as it prepares to send astronauts back to the moon as part of the Artemis program. There is.
Former NASA Deputy Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen, who launched the CLPS program in 2018, said the agency expects half of CLPS missions to fail and has repeatedly told Congress, scientists and companies to expect that. Ta. “That's how it sold,” he said in an interview.
But even if half of these commercial missions fail, Dr. Zurbuchen said, NASA would still have an advantage because traditional missions cost between $500 million and $1 billion. Meanwhile, for CLPS missions, NASA pays companies about $100 million to fly payloads.
Even a 50% success rate may be too optimistic. “Even if you support it, you need to make sure the strategy is working,” Dr. Zurbutchen says.
Altemus, who spent six years as director of engineering at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said cost-cutting efforts have spurred innovation at a much faster pace than was possible at NASA.
“Innovations that wouldn't have happened if we had more money and time,” he says. “When you look at all the milestones leading up to the moon landing, the technological accomplishments we were able to achieve at that fraction of the cost are amazing.”
The most difficult part of the mission, landing, is still ahead.
Altemus acknowledged that decisions need to be made that reduce costs while increasing risk.
“Now, have I made it too cheap?'' said Artemus. “Maybe.”
If that happens, CLPS companies may have to raise prices for future missions, but they will still be cheaper than what NASA has traditionally undertaken. Altemus said that even if Intuitive Machines fails this time, NASA and Congress should not give up on the idea of getting to the moon on budget.
“This is really the only way to move forward,” Altemus said.
