Live video from NASA-SpaceX showed the 25-story-tall two-stage rocket roaring past the launch pad.
Florida:
A lunar lander built by Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines launched from Florida early Thursday on a mission to conduct the first U.S. lunar landing in more than half a century and the first for a private spacecraft.
The company’s Nova-C lander, known as Odysseus, flew aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket shortly after 1 a.m. ET (0600 GMT) Launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
Live video from NASA-SpaceX showed the 25-story, two-stage rocket roaring out of the launch pad and streaking into the dark sky above Florida’s Atlantic coast, trailing a plume of fiery red and yellowish exhaust.
IM-1 takes off! pic.twitter.com/Knl3Y1sGo2
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 15, 2024
A launch scheduled for Wednesday morning was delayed 24 hours after abnormal temperatures were detected in the liquid methane used in the lander’s propulsion system. SpaceX said the issue was later resolved.
Although considered an intuitive machine mission, the IM-1 flight carried six NASA instrument payloads designed to collect data on the lunar environment ahead of NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon later this decade.
Thursday’s launch comes a month after another private company’s Astrobotic Technology lunar lander encountered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after it was launched into orbit on Jan. 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket. First flight.
The failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which also carried NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company has failed to achieve a “soft landing” on the lunar surface, following ill-fated efforts by Israeli and Japanese companies.
The accidents illustrate the risks NASA faces as it relies more heavily on the commercial sector than in the past to achieve its space goals.
Plans call for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C vehicle, a hexagonal cylinder with four legs, to arrive at its destination on February 22 after about a week of flight, landing in the Malapot A crater near the moon’s south pole. .
If successful, the flight would be the first controlled landing of a U.S. spacecraft on the lunar surface since the last Apollo manned lunar mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.
The feat also marks the first trip to the lunar surface for NASA’s Artemis lunar program, as the United States races to return astronauts to Earth before China can land its own manned spacecraft on Earth’s natural satellite.
IM-1 is the latest test of NASA’s strategy of paying to use spacecraft built and owned by private companies to cut costs for the Artemis mission, which is envisioned as a precursor to human exploration of Mars.
In contrast, during the Apollo era, NASA purchased rockets and other technology from the private sector but owned and operated them itself.
NASA announced last month that it would push back the target date for the first manned Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it is targeting 2030.
Small landers like Nova-C are expected to get there first, carrying instruments to carefully survey the lunar landscape, resources and potential dangers. Odysseus will focus on space weather interactions with the lunar surface, radio astronomy, precision landing techniques and navigation.
Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission is scheduled to land at the lunar south pole in 2024, followed by the IM-3 mission with several smaller rovers later this year.
Japan became the fifth country to place a lander on the moon last month, after its space agency JAXA achieved an unusually precise “precision” landing of its ultra-thin probe. Last year, India became the fourth country to land on the moon, following Russia’s failed attempt the same month.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and China are the only countries that have successfully achieved a soft landing on the moon. In 2019, China landed on the far side of the moon for the first time, setting a world first.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
