A SpaceX rocket lifted off the spacecraft, which was built by Intuitive Machines of Houston to carry supplies for NASA and other customers to the lunar surface.
Another month, another attempt at the moon.
A robotic lunar lander launched into space on Thursday morning. If all goes well, it will be the first American spacecraft since Apollo 17 landed on the moon on February 22, 1972.
It will also become the first individual attempt to reach the surface of the moon in one piece. Three previous attempts by an American company, a Japanese company and an Israeli non-profit have failed
The company in charge of this mission, Houston's Intuitive Machine, is optimistic.
"I feel fairly confident that we will be successful in soft-touching the moon," Stephen Altemas, Intuitive Machine's president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We have done the tests. We tested and tested and tested. We can test as much as we can."
If private companies can pull off this feat, at a much lower cost than a traditional NASA mission, it will open the door to broader exploration of the Moon by NASA and commercial efforts.
"We're trying to create a marketplace in a place where it didn't exist," Joel Kearns, an official with NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference Tuesday. "But to do that, we have to do it in a cost-conscious manner."
NASA, the mission's primary customer, paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to carry its payloads, which include a stereo camera to monitor dust particles during landing and a radio receiver to measure the effect of charged particles on radio signals. surface of the moon There's also cargo from customers other than NASA, such as a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and an art project by Jeff Koons.
But if this private effort continues to crash, NASA won't get its money's worth.
The mission got off to a smooth, auspicious start.
At 1:05 a.m. ET, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the lander launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a direct trajectory toward the moon. Intuitive instruments reported less than an hour later that the spacecraft had separated from the rocket's second stage and launched itself successfully.
The spacecraft can point itself in the right direction, its solar panels are generating power, and it's in radio communication with the intuitive machine's mission control in Houston, the company said later Thursday morning.
"We are keenly aware of the enormous challenges ahead," Mr Altemus said in a statement. "However, it is only in meeting this challenge that we recognize the magnitude of the opportunity before us: to gently return the United States to the surface of the Moon for the first time in 52 years."
Intuitive Machines' spacecraft design is called the Nova-C. It is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs, about 14 feet long and 5 feet wide. Intuitive Machines notes that the lander's body is roughly the size of an old British police telephone booth — that is, like the Tardis in the "Doctor Who" science fiction television show.
At launch, with a full load of propellant, the lander weighed about 4,200 pounds.
This particular spacecraft was named Odysseus after a competition between intuitive machine workers. Mario Romero, the engineer who proposed the name, said the journey of the hero of the ancient Greek epic "Odyssey" provided an apt analogy for the lunar mission.
"This journey has taken a long time due to many challenges, setbacks and delays," Mr Romero said in Intuitive Machine's press kit for the mission. "Sad, wine-dark sea voyages repeatedly test his mettle, yet in the end, Odysseus proves worthy and returns home after 10 years."
After a week of traveling away from Earth, Odysseus will enter lunar orbit about 62 miles above Earth's surface. Then, 24 hours later, it will start its engine for the final descent. An hour later, it sank near a crater called Malapart A, about 185 miles from the South Pole. The landing site is relatively flat, a location that is easy to land a spacecraft.
The South Pole region, especially the crater which is permanently in shadow, has become an area of interest because of the presence of water ice. Previous American moon missions have landed in the equatorial region.
After landing, Odysseus must work for seven days until sunset. The solar-powered lander was not designed to survive the freezing cold of the lunar night.
The launch of the Intuitive Machines mission comes just a month after another Pittsburgh-based American company, Astrobotic Technologies, attempted to send its lander, Peregrine, to the moon. But a malfunction in its propulsion system shortly after launch precluded any chance of landing. Ten days later, it burned up in the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean as Peregrine returned to Earth.
Both Odysseus and Peregrine are part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Service program, or CLPS. The purpose of the program is to use commercial companies to send experiments to the Moon instead of NASA building and operating its own lunar lander.
The space agency hopes the approach will be much cheaper, allowing it to send more frequent missions as part of the Artemis program prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
Thomas Zurbuchen, the former associate administrator for science at NASA who started the CLPS program in 2018, said the space agency expected half of CLPS missions to fail, and he has repeatedly told Congress, scientists and agencies to expect that. "That's how it was sold," he said in an interview.
But even if half of these commercial missions fail, NASA will still come out ahead because a traditional mission costs $500 million to $1 billion, Dr. Zurbuchen said, adding that on a CLPS mission, NASA is paying a company about $100 million to fly its payloads. .
Even a 50 percent success rate may be too optimistic. "Even if you're an advocate for it, you have to see if that strategy is working," Dr. Zurbuchen said.
Mr. Altemus, who spent six years as director of engineering at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said the cost-cutting drive has accelerated innovation at a much faster pace than was previously possible at NASA.
"Innovation that wouldn't have happened if we had more money and more time," he said. "If you look at all the milestones leading up to the moon landing, all the technological breakthroughs that we've been able to do for that little money, it's just amazing."
The hardest part of the mission - the landing - still lies ahead.
Mr. Altemus acknowledged that they need to make decisions that minimize costs but increase risk.
"Now, have we gone too cheap?" Mr. Altemas Dr. "Perhaps."
If so, CLPS companies may need to raise prices for future missions, although they will still be cheaper than what NASA has traditionally received. Mr. Altemus said that if the probes fail this time, NASA and Congress should not give up on the moon-on-a-budget idea.
"It's really the only way forward," Mr Altemus said.
