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The CEO of Intuitive Machines says a safety switch in the lander’s navigation was accidentally left on.
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That oversight made the historic moon lander Odysseus a “spicy” nail-biter.
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A “space cowboy” saved the mission to replace disabled lasers with experimental NASA technology.
Two lucky breaks and a stroke of genius saved Intuitive Machines’ moon landing mission on Thursday.
After a serendipitous moment, a NASA experiment, and frantic, innovative software engineering, the company’s Odysseus lander survived a potentially catastrophic error—a switch that wasn’t flipped before launch.
That simple mistake disabled the lasers designed to guide the spacecraft to a safe flat spot for landing, Intuitive Machines co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus told reporters Friday.
“It was an oversight on our part,” Altemus said.
But St. Mary Odysseus’ attempt to reach the surface of the moon succeeded in one piece – although he probably landed on the side.
It was a “spicy” landing, Altemus said. He called his team of flight operators “real space boys” to quickly solve the problem.
Even to outsiders, the last minute rush to Frankenstein combined with a new navigation system looked amazing.
“That’s real hardcore engineering. That’s good stuff, I have to say it. That’s the kind of thing that every engineer dreams of,” Robert Braun, who worked on landing and team generation for multiple. NASA missions to Mars and now he heads space exploration at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Business Insider said.
The Houston-based company flew Odysseus, its Nova-C model lander, to the moon on a $118 million NASA contract. Its success marks the first ever commercial moon landing and NASA’s first return to the lunar surface since 1972.
He almost didn’t, though. This is what happened.
The laser safety of the lander Odysseus was on
The night before the scheduled moon landing, Intuitive Machines mission operators were solving a different, much smaller problem when they realized their navigation lasers weren’t firing.
They were lucky to get out of the issue at all.
“We probably would have landed five minutes before we knew those lasers weren’t working if we hadn’t had that fortuitous event,” said Tim Crain, co-founder and chief technology officer of Intuitive Machines, in the briefing.
The fortuitous event, according to Altemus’ narrative, was a strange orbit around the moon.
As mission operators prepared for the landing sequence, they noticed that the spacecraft was passing too close to the lunar south pole – the landing site region. They thought they might need more distance for a proper landing. No problem; all they had to do was command the spacecraft to move a little.
To double-check the spacecraft’s position above the moon, they asked her to activate the laser range finders in its navigation system and ping the surface of the moon.
But the lasers didn’t turn on.
Soon the operations team was working feverishly,” said Altemus.
They discovered that a safety switch – a physical switch in the hardware designed for safety during ground testing – was still on. He disabled the laser range finders.
“It’s like having a safety on a firearm,” Altemus explained.
It should have been turned off before it was sent, but now it was too late.
Altemus recalled telling Crain’s that they would have had to land without the laser range finders: “His face went completely white, because it was like a punch in the stomach that we were going to lose the mission.”
NASA’s experimental technology to the rescue
Fortunately, one of NASA’s six experiments aboard the lander was a test of a navigation system.
“That’s an amazing, fortuitous stroke of luck,” Braun said.
Rushing down a hall with Altemus, to discuss the matter with more people, Crain had an idea. What if they reprogrammed the lander’s navigation system to use lasers from that experimental NASA technology as their mobile laser range finders?
“It was just a great insight,” Altemus said.
It was dangerous – the NASA lasers were on the lander to test if they worked in space at all – but it was better than nothing.
So controllers moved the spacecraft into another orbit and pushed back the landing by about 45 minutes, buying them enough time to upload a software patch that gave the lander new instructions.
“In normal software development for a spacecraft, this is the kind of thing that would take a month,” Crain’s said. “Our team basically did that in an hour and a half. And it worked. It was one of the best pieces of engineering I’ve ever had the opportunity to be associated with.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
