SpaceX readied a Falcon 9 rocket for launch early Wednesday to send a commercially built robotic lander to the moon, the first targeted landing near the moon's south pole where NASA's Artemis astronauts plan to orbit in a few years .
The flight comes just five weeks after another American company's attempt to land a privately built spacecraft on the moon ended in failure, the third commercial setback in a row.
The fourth such mission will depart from the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday at 12:57 p.m. EST.
If all goes well, the Odysseus lander, nicknamed 'Odie', will land about 300 kilometers from the moon's south pole on February 22 using a powerful 3D-printed main engine that burns liquid oxygen and methane as propellants, a first for a deep space mission.
SpaceX made extensive modifications to cool and direct the cryogenic propellants to the Falcon 9's nose fairing and then to the lander's tanks during the rocket's countdown. Dress rehearsals took place at the end of last week to check whether the system would work properly.
"SpaceX is extremely proud to be part of this historic private mission to the moon," said Bill Gerstenmaier, a former NASA executive who now works for SpaceX. "Loading liquid oxygen and liquid methane into the vehicle is not trivial. We have modified Falcon's second stage to accommodate that. ... The Falcon 9 rocket is ready to fly."
The flight follows the ill-fated Jan. 8 launch of another commercial lunar lander - Peregrine - built by Pittsburg-based Astrobotic. drive system defective shortly after takeoff. The accident derailed what would have been the first U.S. moon landing since the final flight of the Apollo program more than 50 years ago.
Odysseus builder Intuitive Machines from Houston now hopes to claim that honor.
"It's a deeply humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines," said Trent Martin, the company's vice president of aerospace systems. "The ability to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that requires an appetite for research."
"We are not overlooking the challenges that lie ahead," Martin added. "Any venture into uncharted territory comes with risks, but this willingness to embrace risk and go beyond our comfort zones propels us forward and fuels innovation. ... Now let's start making history."
Odysseus is carrying six NASA instruments and another six commercial payloads, including sculptures, proof-of-concept cloud storage technology, an astronomical telescope and a student-built camera package that will drop to the surface ahead of the lander to photograph its final descent.
Among NASA's experiments is an instrument to study the environment of charged particles on the moon's surface, another instrument that will test navigation technologies and downward-facing stereo cameras designed to photograph how the lander's engine exhaust hits the ground at the landing site disrupts.
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 weightless environment of space, technology that is expected to prove useful for downstream lunar missions and other deep space travel.
The Falcon 9 is expected to release the lander on a trajectory to the moon. But getting into lunar orbit and reaching the surface is up to Odysseus and the Intuitive Machines flight control team in Houston.
A major milestone is expected 18 hours after launch, when the lander's main engine is tested or commissioned to help controllers calibrate performance in space. Afterwards, up to three trajectory correction maneuvers are planned to fine-tune the course to the moon.
It will take Odysseus eight days to achieve his goal. Flying behind the moon and out of contact with flight controllers, the lander's main engine will have to fire "in the blind" for seven minutes to launch the spacecraft into a circular orbit 100 kilometers high and tilt it at an angle of 80 degrees over the landing site. south latitude.
During twelve trips around the moon, flight controllers will check the lander's systems before beginning its final descent into relatively flat terrain near a crater known as Malapert A. To ensure a safe landing, the main engine will increase the speed of have to lower the spacecraft at some speed. 4,000 km/h.
The descent begins with a small rocket fired 75 minutes before landing to lower the runway's nadir to an altitude of about 6 miles (9.5 km). The spacecraft will then coast for about an hour before the engine reignites and begins the powered descent to the surface.
As he descends a height of about 30 km, Odysseus will tilt from a horizontal to a vertical orientation, at a speed of just under 6 km/h. As the spacecraft descends below 100 feet, the "EagleCam" imaging system, built by Embry-Riddle University students, will drop away and attempt to photograph the lander's final descent from the side.
By the time Odysseus reaches 10 meters above the surface, the main engine will have slowed to the planned landing speed of just 3.5 km/h - walking speed for seniors.
Intuitive Machines says it takes flight controllers about 15 seconds to verify the landing. Data captured during the descent, including photos from the lander's plume-observing cameras and the deployed EagleCam, will be returned to Earth later.
Odysseus and his experiments are expected to last about a week before the sun sets on the landing site, cutting off solar energy. The spacecraft is not designed to survive the extremely low temperatures of the two-week lunar night.
"Landing on the moon is really hard to do," said Joel Kearns, NASA's deputy assistant administrator for exploration. "I think people have seen several attempts at that in the last year, and it's really tough. There's no air on the moon, you can't use parachutes, you have to use rockets (to slow down) all the way down."
"Intuitive Machines have picked out some really innovative techniques that they (use) in their propulsion system," Kearns said. "They have really fun things that they're going to demonstrate. That means they're doing a lot of things for the first time."
Only the US, Russia, China, India and Japan have successfully placed landers on the moon's surface, and Japan's membership in that exclusive club comes with an asterisk: the 'SLIM' lander tilted upon landing on January 19 and failed in all mission objectives.
Between 2019 and last January, three privately funded lunar landers were launched, one from an Israeli nonprofit, one from a Japanese company and Astrobotic's Peregrine. All three failed.
Peregrine and Odysseus were both funded in part by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS (pronounced "clips"), designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation options that NASA can then use to transport payloads to the moon.
The agency's goal is to boost the development of new technologies and collect data that Artemis astronauts will need planning to land near the moon's south pole later this decade.
The agency spent about $108 million for its part in the Peregrine mission and another $129 million for the Odysseus instruments and transport 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 take our instruments and make our research possible by supplying power, data and... [communications] to us.
"The commercial sector brings with it a competitive environment, which means that our investments ultimately yield much more for much less. So instead of one mission in ten years, ten commercial missions to the moon in ten years are possible."
But the lower costs of the CLPS mission come with higher risks. Lessons learned from Peregrine will be used to develop the company's next lander, set to launch late this year, and other CLPS missions.
"We will learn from what doesn't work, testing many technologies, conducting experiments at a lower cost and significantly faster than the traditional NASA mission," Lederer said. "This will allow us to prepare for Artemis more efficiently."
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