by Lighting up the deep sky overnight, a Falcon 9 rocket thundered away from Florida early Thursday, boosting a commercially built robotic lander on a flight to the moon. If successful, it will be the first American spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in more than 50 years.
It was SpaceX’s second flight in less than eight hours, following the launch of six US Space Force missile detection and tracking satellites earlier in the day, and the third launch into orbit around the world counting a Russian space station cargo ship that took off from Kazakhstan.
Another Falcon 9 launch carrying a batch of 22 Starlinks, this one at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, was canceled without explanation.
But the Florida moon brought a busy day in space to a spectacular end with a picture-perfect liftoff at 1:05 am Thursday, five weeks after another commercial lander built by Pittsburg-based Astrobotic suffered a mission-ending malfunction.
Thursday’s launch went off without a hitch, and Intuitive Machines’ lander Odysseus was released to fly on its own 48 minutes after liftoff. If all goes well, the spacecraft will enter lunar orbit and descend to the surface next Thursday, coming within 186 miles of the moon’s south pole.
Partly funded by NASA, the flight is a sort of follow-up to the agency’s Artemis program, which is slated to send astronauts to the moon’s south polar region in the next few years. NASA instruments aboard Odysseus will study the lunar environment and test technologies needed for downstream missions.
To reach its landing site, Odysseus will rely on a high-powered 3D-printed main engine that burns liquid oxygen and methane propellants, a first for a deep space mission. Because of problems loading the lander with properly cooled methane, SpaceX delayed the launch order by 24 hours, but no issues were identified Thursday.
Odysseus carries six NASA instruments and six other commercial payloads, including sculptures, proof-of-concept cloud storage technology, insulating blankets provided by Columbia Sportswear and a student camera package that will descend to the surface ahead of the lander to final photos. descent
NASA’s experiments include an instrument to study the charged particle environment on the moon’s surface, another instrument that will test navigation technologies and face-down stereo cameras designed to photograph how the lander’s engine exhaust affects the soil at the landing site.
Also on board: an innovative sensor that will use radio waves to accurately determine how much cryogenic propellant is left in a tank in the unencumbered environment of space, a technology expected to be useful for future moon missions and other deep space voyages.
Odysseus and his experiments are expected to operate for about a week on the lunar surface before the sun sets at the landing site, cutting off solar power. The spacecraft is not designed to survive the extreme low temperatures of the two-week lunar night.
Only the United States, Russia, China, India and Japan have managed to land on the surface of the moon, and Japan’s membership in that exclusive club has an asterisk: its lander fell “SLIM ” on the January 19 touchdown and failed. achieve each of the mission’s objectives.
Three privately funded lunar landers were launched between 2019 and last January, one from an Israeli non-profit, one from a Japanese company and the infamous Astrobotic Falcon. All three failed.
Both Peregrine and Odysseus were funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS (pronounced CLIPS), which is designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that NASA can then use to transport payloads to the moon.
The agency’s goal is to help start the development of new technologies and collect data that will be needed by the Artemis astronauts who are planning to land near the moon’s south pole later this decade.
The agency spent about $108 million on its part in the Falcon mission and another $129 million on Odysseus instruments and transportation to the moon.
“These are not NASA missions, they are commercial missions,” said Susan Lederer, CLPS project scientist at the Johnson Space Center. “These commercial companies will be bringing our instruments along for the ride, enabling our investigations by providing us with power, data and (communications).
“With the commercial industry comes a competitive environment, which means that our upfront investment becomes much larger in the end. So instead of one mission in ten years, it allows more like with 10 commercial missions to the moon in ten years.”
The launch of Intuitive Machines capped off a busy day for SpaceX.
At 5:30 pm, a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Station carrying four Space Development Agency missile tracking satellites and two hypersonic threat detection satellites for the Missile Defense Agency.
The two MDA satellites are designed to continuously track ultra-high-speed missiles or other threats, and relay them to other satellites or ground systems for targeting. They will operate in the same orbit as the SDA tracking satellites to help planners assess how threats can be managed at different levels.
The four SDA tracking satellites were the final members of a 27-satellite constellation fielded by the SDA in “tranche 0” of its “proliferated warfighter space architecture.” Additional satellites will be launched over the next few years to fill additional slots, or constellations of increasingly capable spacecraft.
The $4.5 billion US Space Force program aims to deploy hundreds of small laser-linked tracking and data relay satellites distributed across multiple constellations and orbital planes to provide global coverage that is less vulnerable to attack.
With the Space Force flight safely on its way, SpaceX engineers on the West Coast attempted to launch 22 Starlink internet satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base northwest of Los Angeles. But SpaceX ended that flight at the end of the launch window.
On the other side of the planet at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Russian engineers launched the Progress MS-26/67P cargo ship at 10:25 pm EST, kicking off a two-day flight to the International Space Station.
The Progress is loaded with 5,500 pounds of cargo, including 3,258 pounds of dry gas, 1,279 pounds of space station propellants and 926 pounds of water. It is expected to enter the station’s Zvezda module at 1:26 am on Saturday.
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