After a failed lunar landing mission last month, NASA is pinning its hopes on a second spacecraft — developed by a separate company — to make the first moon landing by the United States in more than five decades.
The lunar module, nicknamed Odysseus, or Odie for short, is scheduled to take off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:57 pm (Brasília time) this Wednesday (14).
The rocket will propel the spacecraft into an oval-shaped orbit that extends up to 380,000 kilometers around Earth. This will translate into “a rapid, high-energy shot toward the Moon,” as Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, described it. His company, based in Houston, developed the Odysseus.
Once in Earth orbit, the lunar module will separate from the rocket and begin venturing out on its own, using an onboard engine to propel itself on a direct trajectory toward the lunar surface.
Odysseus is expected to spend a little more than a week flying freely through space, with a landing attempt on the lunar surface scheduled for February 22.
If successful, Odysseus will become the first US spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Why the Odysseus quest is important
The launch of this lunar module comes a month after Peregrine, a spacecraft that Astrobotic Technology developed with funding from NASA, failed in its mission. The Pittsburgh-based company revealed a record-breaking fuel leak hours after Peregrine's Jan. 8 launch. The spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere while returning to Earth 10 days later.
But NASA sponsored the creation of a small fleet of privately developed lunar landers as part of a program the space agency calls CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
“In CLPS, American companies utilized their own engineering and manufacturing practices rather than adhering to NASA's formal, traditional procedures and NASA oversight,” explained Joel Kearns, the space agency's deputy associate administrator for exploration in the Mission Directorate. NASA scientist. “CLPS is a test of that philosophy.”
The goal of the program is to develop lunar landers under relatively cheap, fixed-price contracts, hoping to use the spacecraft to give the U.S. a presence on the Moon as a new international space race intensifies.
China, India and Japan are the only nations to have landed vehicles on the moon in the 21st century. And while NASA remains confident that the US will be the first country to return humans to the lunar surface, the global race to plant robotic spacecraft on the moon is on. reaching a boiling point.
What sets NASA's approach apart from others is the way it has embraced commercialization — the idea that multiple spacecraft can be developed more cheaply and quickly with private industry competing for contracts than if the space agency developed its own. .
Altemus of Intuitive Machines calls this strategy “forced innovation.”
“Companies have had to think of ways to balance risk (and) think of ways to work around technical problems in a quick period of time with fewer dollars to spend,” he told CNN . “So it really reduced – from the beginning – the cost of lunar access, so it can be done…cheaper than what was done historically in the Apollo days.”
In total, Intuitive Machines could receive up to US$118 million from NASA for this mission.
A stable of lunar modules
NASA's CLPS program is not dependent on every mission making a safe landing, but these first landing attempts could set the tone and pace for the space agency's renewed efforts to explore the moon robotically before attempting to return astronauts to the lunar surface later. this decade.
Founded in 2013, Intuitive Machines will be the second participant in the CLPS program – after Astrobotic – to attempt a moon landing. (Two additional CLPS missions are planned for later in 2024.)
Of the four companies scheduled to deliver lunar modules to the moon under the CLPS program, Intuitive Machines has the most orders from NASA – with three lunar missions scheduled.
The Odysseus lunar lander is a model called Nova-C, which Intuitive Machines describes as being about the size of a British phone booth with legs attached.
The company aims to land the spacecraft near the moon's south pole, an area of great interest in the space race. This region is suspected to be home to water ice that could one day be converted into drinking water for astronauts or even rocket fuel.
The south pole is also the same lunar region where NASA plans to land astronauts later this decade.
The lunar module will be equipped with six NASA payloads — a variety of scientific instruments designed to test new technologies or assess the lunar environment, such as a study of how lunar soil behaves during landing.
Also on board will be commemorative objects — including a sculpture depicting the phases of the moon designed in consultation with Jeff Koons — and technology from private sector companies, including Columbia Sportswear, which developed insulating material for the lunar module.
If all goes according to plan, Odysseus will spend seven days operating on the moon while the lunar module bathes in the sun. But as the landing zone enters Earth's shadow, experiencing the lunar night, the spacecraft will be put to sleep.
The past year has brought some successful lunar landings — carried out by India and Japan — as well as brutal setbacks, with Russia and the United States losing spacecraft in recent attempts.
Altemus estimates that Intuitive Machines has about an 80% chance of safely landing Odysseus on the moon.
“We stand on the shoulders of everyone who tried before us,” he said, adding that Intuitive Machines tried to analyze the propulsion problem that plagued the Peregrine module last month and ensured that the same problem would not arise during the Peregrine mission. Odysseus.
“We simply have a fundamentally different architecture,” Altemus added.
But a successful attempt would only mark a starting point, he said.
“It’s not a one-and-done operation,” Altemus said. “We built a lunar program for the purpose of regularly flying to the moon.”
Establishing programs that can make regular robotic trips to the moon could facilitate a future in which lunar travel is common, inexpensive, and fuels grander projects, such as a functioning lunar base with astronauts living and working there, in line with the vision set out by NASA and its partners.
*CNN's Kristin Fisher contributed to this report.
Source: CNN Brasil
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