For the first time in half a century, an American-built spacecraft landed on the moon.
The robotic aircraft was the first American vehicle on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, closing the chapter on humanity’s amazing achievement of sending men to the moon and bringing them all back to life. This is a feat that has not been repeated or even attempted since.
The lander, called Odysseus and slightly larger than a telephone booth, reached the moon’s south polar region at 6:23 p.m. eastern time on Thursday.
Landing time came and went quietly as the flight controllers waited to hear confirmation of success. A brief pause in communication was expected, but minutes passed.
Afterwards, Tim Crain, the chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that built Odysseus, reported that a faint signal was detected from the spacecraft.
“It’s faint, but it’s there,” he said. “So stand up, guys. We’ll see what happens here.”
A moment later, he announced: “What we can confirm, without a doubt, is that our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting. So congratulations.”
Later, he added, “Houston, Ulysses has found his new home.”
But with the spacecraft’s ability to properly communicate still unclear, the celebration of applause and high fives at mission control was muted.
Later in the evening, the company reported more promising news.
“After addressing communications issues, flight controllers have confirmed that Ulysses is upright and beginning to send data,” Intuitive Machines said in a statement. “Right now, we are working on reducing the first images from the surface of the Moon.”
While this venture was far more modest than the Apollo missions that led to astronauts walking on the moon, the hope at NASA was that it could help usher in a more revolutionary era: transportation around the solar system that is cost-effective in terms of space flights.
“I think it’s a smart thing that NASA is trying to do,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of BryceTech, a space consulting firm, “which is essentially to create a competitive ecosystem of providers to meet their needs.”
Intuitive Machines is one of several small companies that NASA has hired to carry instruments that will perform reconnaissance on the lunar surface before NASA astronauts return there, scheduled for the end of the decade.
For this mission, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million under a program known as Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, to deliver six instruments to the moon, including a stereo camera aimed at capturing the blasting dust Odysseus as he approached. the surface and a radio receiver to measure the effects of charged particles on radio signals.
There was also cargo from other customers, including a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and an artwork by Jeff Koons. Parts of the spacecraft were wrapped in reflective material made by Columbia Sportswear.
Ulysses left Earth early on February 15 on a SpaceX rocket. It pulled into lunar orbit on Wednesday.
The lead up to landing involved a last minute shuffle.
After the spacecraft entered lunar orbit, Intuitive Machines said it would land on the moon at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. On Thursday morning, the company said the spacecraft had moved to a higher altitude and would touch down at 4:24 p.m.
Then on Thursday afternoon, the landing time was changed again, with the company saying it would take an extra lap around the moon before landing at 6:24 p.m. A company spokesman said a laser instrument on the spacecraft that was supposed to provide data on its altitude and speed was malfunctioning.
The extra orbit provided two hours for changes to the spacecraft’s software to replace a different, experimental laser instrument, which had been provided by NASA.
At 6:11 PM, Ulysses fired its engine to begin its powered descent to the surface. The laser instrument seemed to serve as a suitable filler and everything seemed to work until the spacecraft went silent for several minutes.
The landing site for Ulysses was a flat area near the crater Malapert A, about 185 miles north of the Moon’s south pole. The polar regions of the moon have attracted a lot of interest in recent years because of the frozen water that lurks in the shadows of the craters there.
Getting to the moon has proven to be a difficult feat. Apart from the United States, only the government space programs of the Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan have successfully placed robotic landers on the surface of the Moon. Two companies — Ispace of Japan and Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh — had previously tried and failed, as had an Israeli nonprofit, SpaceIL.
In a pre-launch interview, Steve Altemus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, said he hoped NASA would stick with the moon-on-a-budget mentality even if Ulysses crashed.
“It’s the only way to really move forward,” he said. “That’s what this experiment is supposed to do.”
In the past, NASA would have built its own spacecraft.
Before Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon, NASA sent a series of robotic spacecraft, Surveyor 1 through Surveyor 7, to validate landing techniques and examine the properties of the lunar soil. These robotic landings allayed concerns that astronauts and spacecraft would sink into a thick layer of fine dust on the Moon’s surface.
But when NASA designs and operates spacecraft itself, it generally seeks to maximize its chances of success, and its designs tend to be expensive.
The Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 became an example of a colossal program facing a problem almost impossible to solve with an almost unlimited budget – the proverbial moon – while CLPS sought to exploit the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the fledglings businessmen.
Thomas Zurbuchen, a former NASA top science official who launched the CLPS program in 2018, estimated that a robotic lunar lander designed, built and operated in the traditional NASA way would cost $500 million to $1 billion, or at least five times more than agency paid Intuitive Machines space.
NASA hopes that capitalism and competition—with companies proposing different approaches—will spur innovation and lead to new capabilities at lower costs.
But even if they succeed, these companies face uncertain business prospects by attracting many customers beyond NASA and other space agencies.
“It’s not obvious who those other customers might be,” Ms Christensen said.
Intuitive Machines has contracts for two more CLPS missions, and other companies are expected to make their own shots at the moon. Astrobotic Technology, the Pittsburgh-based company, has a second mission lined up to take a robotic NASA rover to one of the shadowed regions where ice might be present. Firefly Aerospace, near Austin, Texas, has its Blue Ghost lander mostly ready, but has not yet announced a launch date.