Houston-based Intuitive Machines has successfully landed a spacecraft on the moon. It is the first private company to land on the Moon and the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the Moon in 50 years.
NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a $118 million contract as part of its $2.8 billion private sector program to create a fleet of robotic moon landers known as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS.
The unmanned mission, as with the Apollo missions of the 1970s, was fraught with tense moments. After a flawless takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, an uneventful week-long trip to the Moon got real quick. The Lunar lander Odysseus experienced severe difficulties on the way to the surface.
“What we can confirm without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon,” Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer, said shortly after the landing. “And we are transmitting. So congratulations.”
The spacecraft’s lasers, designed to measure precise speed and distance to the lunar surface, failed to work. Ordinarily, without those lasers, the mission would have been aborted.
But a demonstration version of a NASA Doppler Lidar system was on board, and with a successful software patch, the landing was back on.
“We weren’t planning to use it in line with the actual mission coming down to the landing, but now we are,” said Prasun Desai, the deputy associate administrator for NASA’s space technology mission directorate. “So basically it is now the primary system to help provide the velocity and altitude information so that the lander can land safely on the surface.”
That’s the old NASA “do or die” ethic that got the U.S. to the Moon. Good to see that it’s alive and well in the private sector space industry.
When it first announced its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program several years ago, NASA’s leaders acknowledged the risk it was taking in relying so heavily on the private sector, which had never before sent a vehicle to the moon. But NASA has continued to insist that even if some of the missions failed, there would be others that succeeded, and that the often risk-averse agency would be happy to continue to “take shots on goal,” as they said.
Indeed, NASA is entering a new phase of space travel where not only will it be taking more risks but also consequently pushing through failure to emerge stronger on the other side.
“This is a really significant shift in how we do business,” Lori Glaze, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, said in an interview with the Washington Post before the landing. “The fact that NASA is not actually building or responsible directly for these missions or their launches is an opportunity to invest in the commercial industry to build a new capability. NASA can then purchase the delivery service, and the intent hopefully being that we can increase the frequency of deliveries and reduce the cost to NASA of doing science.”
We’ll believe it when we see it, of course. NASA is a government agency and is loathe to give up power and control over anything. What’s needed is a president who sees the future of the private sector in space and can keep NASA on track to achieve the goal of combining the public and private sectors to lower the cost of space travel and make progress toward exploring and exploiting the great unknowns of the universe.