Private moon lander still working, but not for long

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA.>> The first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo era was still working Wednesday but not for long, company officials said.

Intuitive Machines, the company that built the lander, released new photos that showed at least one broken leg on the six-legged spacecraft. The lander came in too fast, skidded and tumbled over as it touched down near the moon’s south pole last Thursday, hampering communications and power.

CEO Steve Altemus said the lander, named Odysseus, was still generating solar power Wednesday even though it was on its side. He said flight controllers would put the craft to “sleep” and see if it can be awakened in three weeks, once lunar night ends.

The shutdown will cut short an experiment being conducted by the University of Colorado.

CU helped build an instrument called ROLSES (Radio Wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the Photo Electron Sheath). It was created to collect data about electrical charges that scientists suspect hover above the moon’s surface and radio waves coming from around the Earth.

Jack Burns, a CU astrophysicist involved in the ROLSES project, said the mission was intended to collect eight days of data. “Having toppled over and only gotten a small fraction of the data is disappointing, but it’s also a triumph in that we finally made it to the moon,” Burns said.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he considers the Odysseus mission a success, given that all six of the space agency’s experiments on the lander were still working as of Wednesday morning, six days into what should have been eight days of operations.

But he noted: “There’s a big difference on landing a crew and landing a bunch of instruments.”

The space agency paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to fly its experiments to the hilly and shadowed south polar region. That’s where NASA plans to land astronauts in another few years as part of its Artemis program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister.

NASA safely landed 12 Apollo astronauts on the moon from 1969 through 1972, then withdrew from surface operations until Odysseus’ arrival last Thursday.

Intuitive Machines is the first private business to pull off a moon landing, a feat previously achieved by only five countries. Japan was the latest country to score a landing, but its lander also ended up on its side last month.