Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
After last month’s failed Moon landing mission, NASA is pinning its hopes on a second spacecraft developed by a separate company that would make the first US Moon landing in more than fifty years.
The lunar lander, nicknamed Odysseus, or Odie for short, is set to fly atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 12:57 a.m. Wednesday.
The rocket will propel the spacecraft into an oval-shaped orbit extending up to 380,000 kilometers (236,100 miles) around Earth. In the words of Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus, this will mean “a high-energy fastball shot to the moon.” His Houston-based company developed Odysseus.
Once in Earth orbit, the lunar lander will separate from the rocket and begin adventuring on its own, accelerating itself in a direct orbit toward the lunar surface using an onboard engine.
Odysseus is expected to spend a little more than a week of free flight in space, with an attempt to land on the lunar surface on February 22.
If successful, Odysseus will be the first US spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Why is the Odysseus mission important?
The launch of this lunar lander comes a month after Peregrine, a vehicle developed by Astrobotic Technology with NASA funding, failed in its mission. The Pittsburgh-based company discovered a target-destroying fuel leak just hours after Peregrine launched on January 8. The spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere 10 days later while returning towards Earth.
But NASA has sponsored the creation of a small fleet of specially developed lunar landers as part of a program the space agency calls CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
“In CLPS, American companies used their own engineering and manufacturing practices rather than complying with official and traditional NASA procedures and NASA oversight,” said Joel Kearns, the space agency’s deputy administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “CLPS is a test of this philosophy.”
The goal of the program is to develop lunar landers under relatively cheap, fixed-price contracts, with the hope of using the spacecraft to give the United States a presence on the moon as a new international space race heats up.
China, India and Japan are the only countries in the 21st century to have soft-landing vehicles on the moon. While NASA is confident that the United States will be the first country to send humans back to the lunar surface, the global rush to put robotic spacecraft on the Moon is reaching its peak.
What sets NASA’s approach apart is its embrace of commercialization; the idea that multiple spacecraft could be developed more cheaply and quickly if the space agency developed its own spacecraft, with private industry competing for contracts.
Intuitive Machines’ Altemus calls this strategy “forced innovation.”
“Companies needed to think of ways to offset risk (and) think of ways to overcome technical problems quickly, while spending less money,” he told CNN. “So it really lowered the cost of accessing the Moon from the get-go, so that it could be done…cheaper than what was done historically in the Apollo days.”
As a result, Intuitive Machines could receive up to $118 million from NASA for this mission.
The stable of the moon landers
NASA’s CLPS program doesn’t rely on every mission making a safe landing, but these initial landing attempts could set the tone and pace for the space agency’s renewed efforts to explore the moon robotically before trying to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade.
Founded in 2013, Intuitive Machines will be the second CLPS program participant to attempt a moon landing, after Astrobotic. (Two additional CLPS missions are planned for late 2024.)
Among the four companies planning to send a lander to the Moon under the CLPS program, Intuitive Machines is the company with the most orders from NASA; The three-month mission is also on the books.
what’s on board
The Odysseus lander is a model called Nova-C, which Intuitive Machines describes as roughly the size of a British telephone booth with legs attached.
The company aims to land the spacecraft near the south pole of the Moon, where the space race attracts great interest. This region is suspected to be home to water ice that could one day be turned into drinking water for astronauts and even rocket fuel.
The South Pole is also the lunar region where NASA plans to land astronauts later this decade.
The lander will be equipped with six NASA payloads, a set of scientific instruments designed to test new technology or evaluate the lunar environment, such as a study of how the lunar soil behaves during landing.
The ship will also carry commemorative objects, including a statue representing the phases of the moon designed in consultation with Jeff Koons, and technology from private sector companies, including Columbia Sportswear, which developed insulation material for the lander.
If all goes as planned, Odysseus will operate seven days on the moon while the lunar lander basks in the sun. However, as the landing site moves into the Earth’s shadow, lunar night will occur and the spacecraft will go into sleep mode.
chance of success
The past year has seen several successful Moon landings by India and Japan, as well as brutal setbacks such as Russia and the US losing spacecraft in recent attempts.
Altemus estimates that the Intuitive Machines have about an 80% chance of landing Odysseus safely on the moon.
“We stand on the shoulders of everyone who tried before us,” he said, adding that Intuitive Machines worked to analyze the thrust problem that plagued the Peregrine lander last month and ensured the same problem did not arise during Odysseus’ mission.
“We have a fundamentally different architecture,” Altemus added.
But a successful initiative would only be a starting point, he said.
“This is definitely not a one-time operation,” Altemus said. “We created a lunar program with the aim of flying regularly to the Moon.”
In the vision laid out by NASA and its team, creating programs capable of regular robotic trips to the moon could facilitate a future in which lunar travel is widespread, inexpensive, and feeds into larger projects such as a functioning lunar base where astronauts live and work. partners.
CNN’s Kristin Fisher contributed to this report.
For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at CNN.com