Lighting up the deep sky overnight, a Falcon 9 rocket roared away from Florida early Thursday, supporting a commercially built robotic lander flying to the moon. If successful, it will be the first American spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in more than 50 years.
It was SpaceX’s second flight in less than eight hours, following the launch of six of the U.S. Space Force’s missile detection and tracking satellites earlier in the day, and its third launch into worldwide orbit, which also included a Russian space station cargo ship taking off from Kazakhstan.
The launch of another Falcon 9 carrying 22 Starlink groups (this time at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California) was canceled without explanation.
But the Florida moonshot brought a spectacular end to a busy day in space with a perfect liftoff at 1:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, five weeks after another commercial lander built by Pittsburg-based Astrobotic suffered an end-of-mission failure.
Thursday’s launch went off without a hitch, and Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander was released to fly on its own 48 minutes after liftoff. If all goes well, the spacecraft will enter orbit around the moon and touch down on the surface next Thursday, landing about 300 kilometers from the moon’s south pole.
The flight, funded in part by NASA, is a precursor to the agency’s Artemis program, which plans to send astronauts to the moon’s south polar region within the next few years. NASA instruments aboard Odysseus will examine the lunar environment and test technologies needed for downstream missions.
To reach the landing site, Odysseus will rely on a high-power 3D-printed main engine that burns liquid oxygen and methane propellants, a first for a deep space mission. Problems loading properly cooled methane onto the lander forced SpaceX to decide on a 24-hour launch delay, but there were no known problems as of Thursday.
Odysseus carries six NASA instruments and six commercial payloads, including sculptures, proof-of-concept cloud storage technology, isolation blankets provided by Columbia Sportswear, and a student-built camera suite that will drop to the surface in front of the lander and photograph the final version. landing.
NASA experiments include a device to study the charged particle environment on the lunar surface, a device to test navigation technologies and downward-looking stereo cameras designed to photograph how the lander’s engine exhaust disrupts the soil at the landing site.
Also on board: an innovative sensor that will use radio waves to accurately determine how much cryogenic propellant is left in a tank in the weightlessness of space; The technology is expected to be useful for future moon missions and other deep space journeys.
Odysseus and his experiments are expected to operate on the lunar surface for about a week before the sun sets on the landing site and solar energy is cut off. The spacecraft is not designed to withstand the extremely low temperatures of the two-week lunar night.
Only the United States, Russia, China, India and Japan have successfully landed on the moon’s surface, and Japan’s membership in this exclusive club comes with an asterisk: The “SLIM” lander rolled over during landing on January 19 and failed. Achieve all objectives of the mission.
Between 2019 and last January, three privately funded lunar landers were launched, including one from an Israeli nonprofit, one from a Japanese company, and Astrobotic’s ill-fated Peregrine. All three failed.
Peregrine and Odysseus were both funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS (pronounced CLIPS), designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that NASA could then use to deliver payloads to the Moon .
The agency’s goal is to help kick-start the development of new technologies and collect data that will be needed by Artemis astronauts who plan to land near the moon’s south pole later this decade.
The agency spent approximately $108 million for the Peregrine mission and $129 million for the Odysseus instruments and transportation to the moon.
“These are not NASA missions, they are commercial missions,” said Susan Lederer, CLPS project scientist at Johnson Space Center. “These commercial companies will bring our vehicles along for the journey and facilitate our research by providing us with power, data and (communications).
“With the commercial industry comes a competitive environment, which means our upfront investment ultimately achieves much more for much less cost. So instead of one mission per decade, it allows for up to 10 commercial missions to the Moon per decade.”
The launch of the Intuitive Machines capped off a busy day for SpaceX.
At 5:30 p.m., a Falcon 9 rocket launched from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying four missile tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency and two hypersonic threat detection satellites for the Missile Defense Agency.
The two MDA satellites are designed to continuously track ultra-high-speed missiles or other threats and relay them to other satellites or ground systems for targeting. They will operate in the same orbit as SDA monitoring satellites to help planners evaluate how threats can be managed at multiple levels.
The four SDA tracking satellites were the final members of a 27-satellite constellation named by SDA in “trade 0” of its “replicated fighter space architecture.” Additional satellites will be launched over the next few years to populate additional slices or constellations of increasingly capable spacecraft.
The $4.5 billion U.S. Space Force program aims to deploy hundreds of small laser-linked tracking and data relay satellites distributed across multiple constellations and orbital planes to provide global coverage that is less vulnerable to attack.
As the Space Force flight departed safely, SpaceX engineers on the West Coast attempted to launch 22 Starlink internet satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base northwest of Los Angeles. However, SpaceX canceled this flight at the end of the launch window.
On the other side of the planet, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Russian engineers launched the Progress MS-26/67P cargo ship at 10:25 PM EST, beginning a two-day flight to the International Space Station.
Progress is loaded with 5,500 pounds of cargo, including 3,258 pounds of dry goose, 1,279 pounds of space station propellant, and 926 pounds of water. The station’s docking with the Zvezda module is expected at 1:26 a.m. EST on Saturday.
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