A lunar lander built by an American company successfully launched from Florida early Thursday, the latest entry in a wildly expensive and perilous race to become the first privately-owned spacecraft to touch down on the moon.
The lander named Odysseus from Houston-based aerospace business Intuitive Machines was atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that blasted off into the skies over Cape Canaveral just after 1 a.m. local time. If the lander succeeds in making a “soft landing” on the moon, it will be the first U.S. spacecraft to do so since the Apollo 17 landing in 1972.
The IM-1 flight is also carrying six NASA payloads of equipment designed to collect data about the moon before the space agency begins its planned missions to return astronauts to the lunar surface later in the decade. Odysseus is scheduled to land on Feb. 22 close to the moon’s south pole.
ADVERTISEMENT
That is easier said than done, however, with three previous attempts from private companies hoping to become the first to land on the moon all ending in catastrophic failure.
Astrobotic Technology, of Pittsburgh, saw its spacecraft, Peregrine, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere last month after it suffered a malfunction soon after being placed in orbit. A software snafu caused a Japanese company’s lunar lander to crash into the surface of the moon last year—the same fate that an Israeli nonprofit’s effort met in 2019.
