Another month, another attempt at the moon.
A robotic lunar rover launched into space early Thursday morning. If all goes well, in nine days, it will become the first U.S. spacecraft to gently touch down on the surface of the Moon since Apollo 17 landed in 1972.
It would also be the first private attempt to reach the surface of the moon in one piece. Three previous attempts, by an American company, a Japanese company and an Israeli non-profit, failed.
The company tasked with this mission, Intuitive Machines of Houston, is optimistic.
“I feel pretty confident that we’re going to be successful when we gently touch the moon,” Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, said in an interview. “We did the tests. We tried and tried and tried. As many tests as we could do.”
If private companies can accomplish this feat, at a cost far below a traditional NASA mission, it will open the door to broader NASA lunar exploration and commercial efforts.
“We’re trying to create a market in a place where it didn’t exist,” Joel Kearns, an official with NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference Tuesday. “But to do that, we have to do it at a cost–conscious way”.
NASA is the lead customer for this mission, paying Intuitive Machines $118 million to get its payloads, which include a stereo camera to observe the dust cloud ejected upon landing and a radio receiver to measure of the effects of charged particles on radio signals. surface of the moon. There’s also cargo from non-NASA clients, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and an artwork by Jeff Koons.
But if these private efforts continue to fall apart, then NASA will not get its money’s worth.
The mission began smoothly, auspiciously.
At 1:05 am EST, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the lander lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending the craft into a direct orbit toward the moon. Intuitive Machines reported less than an hour later that the spacecraft had separated from the rocket’s second stage and successfully activated with its systems operating as expected.
Intuitive Machines calls the spacecraft design Nova-C. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing feet, about 14 feet high and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines notes that the lander’s body is about the size of an old British telephone box — that is, like the Tardis in the sci-fi TV show “Doctor Who.”
At launch, with a full load of propellant, the lander weighed about 4,200 pounds.
This particular spaceship was named Ulysses after a competition among the employees of Intuitive Machines. Mario Romero, the engineer who proposed the name, said the journeys of the hero of “The Odyssey,” the ancient Greek epic poem, provided an apt analogy for the lunar mission.
“This journey is taking much longer because of the many challenges, setbacks and delays,” Mr. Romero said in Intuitive Machine’s press kit for the mission. “Traveling across the terrifying, dark sea of ​​the sea he repeatedly tests his strength, however, in the end, Odysseus proves himself worthy and returns home after 10 years.”
After a week traveling away from Earth, Ulysses is set 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. An hour later, it is near a crater called Malapert A, about 185 miles from the South Pole. The landing site is relatively flat, a location that is easier for a spacecraft to land on.
The south polar region, especially the craters that remain in permanent shadow, has become an area of ​​interest due to the presence of water ice there. Previous US missions to the moon have landed in the equatorial regions.
After landing, Ulysses will operate for seven days until the sun sets. The solar powered lander is not designed to survive the freezing cold of the lunar night.
The launch of the Intuitive Machines mission comes just a month after another US company, Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, tried to send Peregrine, its lander, to the moon. But a malfunction in its propulsion system shortly after launch prevented any chance of landing. Ten days later, as Peregrine turned back to Earth, it burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program. The object of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the moon instead of NASA building and operating its own lunar landers.
The space agency hopes this approach will be much cheaper, allowing it to send more missions more often as it prepares to send astronauts back to the Moon as part of the Artemis program.
Thomas Zurbuchen, the former deputy science director at NASA who launched the CLPS program in 2018, said the space agency expected half of CLPS missions to fail and that he had repeatedly told Congress, scientists and companies to expect that. “That’s how it was sold,” he said in an interview.
But even if half of these commercial missions fail, NASA will still be ahead because a traditional mission costs $500 million to $1 billion, Dr. Zurbuchen said, while in a CLPS mission, NASA pays a company about $100 million to fly its payloads.
Even a 50 percent success rate may be too optimistic. “Even if you’re a proponent of this, you have to see if this strategy works,” said Dr. Zurbuchen.
Mr. Altemus, who spent six years as director of engineering at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the drive to cut costs has spurred a much faster pace of innovation than was possible at NASA.
“Innovation that wouldn’t have happened if we had more money and more time,” he said. “If you look at all the milestones leading up to the moon landing, all the technical achievements we’ve been able to do for that little money, it’s just amazing.”
The most difficult part of the mission – the landing – is still ahead.
Mr Altemus admitted they had to make decisions that cut costs but increased risks.
“Now, did we go down too cheap?” said Mr. Altemus. “Probably.”
If so, CLPS companies may have to raise prices for future missions, although they would still be cheaper than what NASA has traditionally undertaken. Mr. Altemus said that if Intuitive Machines fails this time, NASA and Congress should not abandon the moon idea in a budget.
“It’s the only way to really move forward,” Mr. Altemus said.
