US prestige at stake as Texas company launches for the Moon


By AFP
February 13, 2024

Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company leading mission "IM-1," is aiming to become the first company to achieve a soft touchdown on Earth's celestial sibling, and land the first US robot on the surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. 

- Copyright POOL/AFP ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS

Gianrigo Marletta with Issam Ahmed in Washington

Another month, another Moonshot: An American spaceship attempting a lunar landing is to launch early Wednesday, the second private-led effort this year after the first ended in failure.

Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company leading mission “IM-1,” is aiming to become the first company to achieve a soft touchdown on Earth’s celestial sibling, and land the first US robot on the surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Its golf cart-sized Nova-C lander named “Odysseus” will blast off on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:57 am local time (0557 GMT).

“We understand and welcome the responsibility of our IM-1 and mission as we hope to become the first commercial company to successfully land on the Moon,” the company’s Trent Martin told reporters.

It is due reach its landing site Malapert A on February 22, an impact crater 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the south pole, where NASA hopes to eventually build a long term presence and harvest ice for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.

– Back to the Moon –

NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to ship science hardware to better understand and mitigate environmental risks for astronauts, the first of whom are scheduled to land no sooner than 2026.

The instruments include cameras to document the effect of engine plume on the surface, a device to analyze dust haze that appears during lunar twilight, and precision landing technology that uses pulses of light from a laser.

NASA scientist Susan Lederer said the mission would go further south than any lander has been on the Moon “and will give us an opportunity to test our instruments in this very harsh environment where the Sun is always low on horizon.”

There is also more colorful cargo aboard, including a digital archive of human knowledge and 125 mini-sculptures of the Moon by the artist Jeff Koons.

After touchdown, the payloads are expected to run for roughly seven days before lunar night sets in on the south pole, rendering Odysseus inoperable.

IM-1 is the second mission under a NASA initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which the space agency created to delegate trucking services to the private sector to achieve savings and to stimulate a wider lunar economy.

The first, by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, launched in January, but its Peregrine spacecraft was hit by an onboard explosion that caused a fuel leak, and was eventually brought back to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

– Busy calendar –

Soft landing a robot on the Moon is challenging because a spaceship has to navigate treacherous terrain amid a lag of several seconds in communications with Earth, and use its thrusters for a controlled descent in the absence of an atmosphere that would support parachutes.

Only five nations have succeeded: the Soviet Union was first, then the United States, which is still the only country to also put people on the surface.

In America’s long absence, China has landed three times since 2013, India in 2023, and Japan was the latest, last month — though its robot has struggled to stay powered on after a wonky touchdown left its solar panels pointing the wrong way.

Apart from Astrobotic’s failed attempt, two other private initiatives got close: Beresheet, operated by an Israeli nonprofit, crash landed in 2019, while Japanese company ispace also had a “hard landing” last year.

Intuitive Machines has two more launches scheduled for this year, while another Texas company, Firefly Aerospace has one too. Astrobotic will get another shot in late 2024, carrying a NASA rover to the south pole.

Apollo to Artemis: Why America is betting big on private space

By AFP
February 12, 2024

While NASA's public-private strategy for space has had some success, it also carries the risk of the United States falling behind its principal space rival, China, in achieving major milestones including the next crewed mission to land on the Moon 

- Copyright AFP/File Luis ROBAYO

Issam AHMED

A private Houston-based company is set this week to lead a mission to the Moon which, if successful, will mark America’s first lunar landing since the end of the Apollo era five decades ago.

Reputation will be on the line when Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C spaceship will launch atop a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday, following recent completed touchdowns by China, India and Japan.

So why entrust such tasks to the commercial sector, especially after an attempt by another company with similar goals, Astrobotic, failed just last month?

The answer lies in the way NASA has fundamentally reorganized itself for Artemis, the agency’s flagship Moon-to-Mars program.

During the Cold War, the space agency was handed blank checks and managed industrial contracts down to the last bolt — but the new paradigm bets on America’s mighty market economy to deliver breakthroughs at a fraction of historic costs.

While the current approach has borne some fruit, it also carries the risk of the United States falling behind its principal space rival, China, in achieving major milestones — namely the next crewed mission to the Moon, and getting the first rocks back from Mars.

– SpaceX success –

The focus on fledgling companies under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative builds on the example set by the meteoric rise of SpaceX, which was derided in its startup phase as reckless, but is now arguably the agency’s favorite contractor.

Scott Pace, a former member of the National Space Council, told AFP that NASA had intentionally adopted a policy that prioritized “more shots on goal” at lower costs.

“The reliability that SpaceX has now is as a result of painfully blowing up multiple rockets along the way,” he said.

SpaceX launches are currently the only way astronauts launch from US soil, following the end of the NASA-led space shuttle program in 2011 that left NASA reliant on Russia’s Soyuz rockets.

Elon Musk’s company beat heavily-favored aerospace giant Boeing in certifying its system first, proving for experts the value of competition between companies providing different options.

Each space shuttle launch cost over $2 billion, adjusted for inflation, according to a study in the journal Nature, while the estimated average cost for NASA to buy a seat on a SpaceX flight is around $55 million, according to a government audit.

– On to Artemis –

During the Apollo era, NASA was given more than $300 billion, according to an analysis by Casey Dreier of the nonprofit Planetary Society — far more than the $93 billion to be spent by 2025 on Artemis.

Rather than telling private industry exactly what to build, the agency now purchases services from companies — though this at-times piecemeal approach carries certain drawbacks.

While NASA owns the giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion crew capsule, it has contracted with SpaceX an unconventional and as yet unproven landing system based on the company’s next-generation Starship rocket, to provide the first crewed lunar touchdown.

Starship has yet to complete a flight test without blowing up — and it requires ultra-cold refueling multiple times while in orbit before it travels to the Moon, independently of SLS, to dock with Orion and pick up the astronauts.

Futuristic space fuel depots could be a great way to facilitate long-range missions to Mars — the founding ideal of SpaceX, which Musk pursues with messianic fervor — but getting it right could well delay the return of American boots to the Moon.

NASA has said this could take place by 2026 at the earliest, though that timeline threatens to drag. China, meanwhile, has set a deadline of 2030 for its own crewed landing — and has lately stuck to its promises.

The Chinese “don’t go through all of the shenanigans the US has, which is extreme polarization followed by government shutdown threats, followed by continuing resolutions,” G. Scott Hubbard, a former top NASA official, told AFP.

For better or worse, America is locked into its new public-private paradigm.

Artemis was intentionally designed with an array of international partnerships — Europe, Canada, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and more — in order to prevent it from being scrapped, said Dreier.

Moreover, a previous Moon-to-Mars program called Constellation that was conceived in the 2000s and managed more like Apollo was canceled, largely due to budget constraints, so there is little realistic alternative.