Private moon lander lifts off aiming for first US lunar touchdown in 52 years
A solar-powered lunar lander designed by a former Nasa engineer who became frustrated by the space agency’s bureaucracy lifted off from Florida early on Thursday on a mission to become the first private spacecraft to achieve a controlled moon landing.
Odysseus, the working name for the uncrewed Nova-C lander built by the Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines, lit up the skies above Cape Canaveral shortly after 1am on a Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
Its scheduled 22 February touchdown near the moon’s south pole would be the first lunar landing of a US spacecraft since Nasa’s final Apollo mission in December 1972, and the first by a non-government entity. It will deliver a suite of scientific equipment belonging to the agency that will gather data about the lunar environment to help prepare for the next landing of US astronauts, the Artemis III mission currently scheduled for 2026.
“There have been a lot of sleepless nights getting ready for this,” Steve Altemus, the co-founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, said in an interview before the mission.
Altemus was formerly Nasa’s director of engineering and deputy director of the Johnson Space Center before founding his company of about 90 employees in 2013. He told the How I Built This podcast in December that he became frustrated at lawmakers’ throttling of Nasa’s budget.
“We were like a Ferrari running at idle,” he said. “I really wanted to step on the gas and see what we could do, and not be entangled in a bureaucracy that was forced through legislative direction to kind of dither and just study capabilities.”
His company invested about $130m into the IM-1 mission, with Nasa funding a further $118m to get it off the ground. Thursday’s launch of Odysseus’s 240,000-mile, weeklong journey to the moon had been delayed for 24 hours because a propulsion system malfunction, but the rocket and vehicle behaved perfectly during its ascent.
The lander is a 14ft (4.3 meter) hexagon-shaped craft with six legs, and is aimed towards a landing at crater Malapert A close to the lunar south pole. Nasa is targeting the craggy area for the first Artemis landing, believing it rich in frozen water that could help sustain a permanent lunar base crucial to future human missions to Mars.
Odysseus is carrying a payload of six Nasa science instruments and technology demonstrations as part of the agency’s commercial lunar payload services initiative tied to its Artemis program.
During its journey, instruments will measure the quantity of cryogenic engine fuel used, and collect data on plume-surface interactions and test precision landing technologies during the descent.
On the moon, instruments will focus on space weather effects on the lunar surface, while a network of markers for communication and navigation will be deployed.
“Nasa scientific instruments are on their way to the moon, a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century,” the Nasa administrator, Bill Nelson, said.
“These daring moon deliveries will not only conduct new science at the moon, but they are supporting a growing commercial space economy while showing the strength of American technology and innovation. We have so much to learn that will help us shape the future of human exploration for the Artemis generation.”
Further Intuitive Missions lunar projects set to launch later this year include an ice drill to extract key ingredients for rocket fuel, and another Nova-C lander containing a small Nasa rover and four small robots that will explore surface conditions.
The launch of Odysseus comes a month after the failure of the Peregrine Mission One, a partnership between Nasa and the private Astrobotic company. A fuel leak forced the mission to be aborted and the spacecraft broke apart and burned up over the Pacific.
Only five countries have landed on the moon. Japan joined the US, Russia, China and India last month when its Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (Slim) made a successful, if awkward touchdown after a three-month flight.