The Apollo 17 mission landed on the Moon on December 11, in 1972. From that point on, literally for decades, NASA and the United States did not go back to the surface of our nearest planetary body.<\/p>\n
It was not until February 22, 2024, that another American-built spacecraft made a soft landing on the Moon. This was the Nova-C Odysseus<\/em> lander built by Intuitive Machines. It landed, toppled over, but still completed most of its scientific experiments.<\/p>\n This first successful landing on the Moon by the first privately built spacecraft ended a 51-year gap, or 18,700 days. It was a long freaking time.<\/p>\n Then, it happened again. Last weekend another privately built vehicle, Firefly\u2019s Blue Ghost, landed on the Moon. Blue Ghost stuck its landing, remaining upright. That was two landings in slightly more than a year. And now, it could happen again on Thursday afternoon. Intuitive Machines is back with its second Nova-C lander, Athena<\/em>. If it is successful, that would be three US landers in 377 days.<\/p>\n Interest in the Moon has steadily been growing over the last 15 or 20 years, especially with the potential for water (in the form of ice) to exist in permanently shadowed craters at the poles. In 2018, because of this, as well as a burgeoning commercial space industry, NASA created the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Essentially, it hired private companies to deliver science payloads to the surface of the Moon. The space agency paid less for these missions, typically about $100 million, in return for accepting a greater chance of failure.<\/p>\n Although the program has not been without some hiccups\u2014there have been delays, dropouts, and mission failures\u2014the seeds of a program planted seven years ago are now starting to bear some fruit. NASA now has two companies in which it has some confidence to land on the Moon: Intuitive Machines and Firefly; and two more efforts, by Astrobotic Technology and Draper Laboratory (in collaboration with ispace) that may eventually become successful. Essentially, then, NASA is laying down the paving stones of a highway to the Moon.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n Because the space agency now has some expectation that Intuitive Machines will be fully successful with its second landing attempt, it has put some valuable experiments on board. Principal among them is the PRIME-1 experiment, which has an ice drill to sample any ice that lies below the surface. Drill, baby, drill.<\/p>\n The Athena<\/em> lander also is carrying a NASA-funded \u201chopper\u201d that will fire small hydrazine rockets to bounce around the Moon and explore lunar craters near the South Pole. It might even fly into a lava tube. If this happens it will be insanely cool.<\/p>\n Because this is a commercial program, NASA has encouraged the delivery companies to find additional, private payloads. Athena<\/em> has some nifty ones, including a small rover from Lunar Outpost, a data center from Lonestar Data Holdings, and a 4G cellular network from Nokia. So there\u2019s a lot riding on Athena<\/em>\u2018s success.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, everybody\u2019s wondering, are we gonna land upright?\u201d Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines\u2019 chief technology officer, told Ars. \u201cSo, I can tell you our laser test plan is much more comprehensive than those last time.\u201d<\/p>\n During the first landing about a year ago, Odysseus<\/em>\u2018 laser-based system for measuring altitude failed during the descent. Because Odysseus<\/em> did not have access to altitude data, the spacecraft touched down faster, and on a 12-degree slope, which exceeded the 10-degree limit. As a result, the lander skidded across the surface, and one of its six legs broke, causing it to fall over.<\/p>\n Crain said about 10 major changes were made to the spacecraft and its software for the second mission. On top of that, about 30 smaller things, such as more efficient file management, were updated on the new vehicle.<\/p>\n In theory, everything should work this time. Intuitive Machines has the benefit of all of its learnings from the last time, and nearly everything worked right during this first attempt. But the acid test comes on Thursday.<\/p>\n The company and NASA will provide live coverage of the attempt beginning at 11:30 am ET (16:30 UTC) on NASA+, with landing set for just about one hour later. The Moon may be a harsh mistress, but hopefully not too harsh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Apollo 17 mission landed on the Moon on December 11, in 1972. From that point on, literally for decades, NASA and the United States did not go back to the surface of our nearest planetary body. It was not until February 22, 2024, that another American-built spacecraft made a soft landing on the Moon. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44416,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[322,503,625,190,21],"class_list":["post-44414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-clps","tag-intuitive-machines","tag-moon","tag-nasa","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44414"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}So what\u2019s going on?<\/h2>\n
So will it be a success?<\/h2>\n