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The United States tries again more than half a century after leaving the Moon.
The
Odysseus
module is already traveling towards the Earth's natural satellite after a successful launch at 1:05 (7:05 in the morning, Spanish peninsular time) from the US base of Cape Canaveral, in Florida, aboard a Falcon 9 from the company SpaceX .
Odysseus
is a new lander model called Nova-C, from the company Intuitive Machines, which aspires to land on the Moon next Thursday (February 22), after just over a week of space adventure.
The device carries six devices that NASA wants to place safely on the gray dust.
If achieved,
Odysseus
will become the first US spacecraft to land on the satellite successfully since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. It will also be the first private module to do so, after a few eventful months for other competitors in the space race. .
'Odysseus', with its six legs, separates from the SpaceX rocket heading to the Moon, a small dot to the left.SpaceX
Three quarters of an hour after the launch, the SpaceX rocket cameras made it possible to witness the moment when
Odysseus
set off, now alone, heading towards the Moon, in a path so direct towards the satellite that its faint glow could be seen on it. flat (although like a small white dot).
The success rate for lunar landers is still below 50% and recent years have not helped improve the statistic.
Specifically, private projects have always crashed: Israel's
Beresheet
in 2019,
Japan's
Hakuto-R in 2023, and Astrobotic's
Peregrino
in January 2024 have all ended in failure.
This last American attempt, promoted by NASA, led to the loss of the Peregrino
ship
, which suffered a propulsion failure and ended up deliberately disintegrating against the Earth's atmosphere.
In 2023, Russia's Luna-25
spacecraft also crashed , but
India's
Vikram
landed successfully .
Japan's SLIM
probe
also achieved it in January of this year, although it landed on its side.
The launch had an added component of innovation given that SpaceX's Falcon 9 was powered for the first time with methane, a fuel that China had already managed to use successfully.
This forced a new way to fill the rocket's tanks to be devised and, in addition, caused the launch to be delayed before the first attempt, on Tuesday, due to a problem in the temperature of the methane.
Illustration of the Nova-C lunar lander.Intuitive Machines
Odysseus
carries 12 payloads, half of the US space agency, which uses these collaborations with private companies to advance little by little, without much expense, in its Artemis program to return to the Moon.
It also carries six commercial artifacts, such as an urn with lunar sculptures by renowned artist Jeff Koons.
This mission is IM-1, which seeks to land near the Malapert A crater, 260 kilometers from the lunar south pole, the coveted icy region.
There, near where India has already successfully landed, it is intended to exploit the gigantic resource of water ice for future space exploration.
Intuitives Machines, which claims to have learned from previous failures, aims to launch the IM-2 mission later this year and IM-3 in 2025.
NASA science is nestled aboard @Int_Machines's Nova-C lander, set to launch to the Moon on a @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Landing near the Malapert A crater will help us learn more about the lunar South Pole, a big step in our #Artemis campaign.
https://t.co/oT7m0a8PwX
— NASA (@NASA) February 15, 2024
All of these missions are carried out in the context of NASA's CLPS initiative, which seeks to accelerate lunar exploration through contracts with private companies: it does not launch the rockets, just buy a ticket on board.
In this case, it has paid 118 million dollars to the public capital company to carry its instruments.
The US agency has had to postpone its plans to return people to the Moon precisely due to the accumulation of technical problems with several of the companies involved.
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