SpaceX Postpones Launch of Intuitive Machines Nova-C Moon Lander

One other month, one other attempt on the moon — however not on Wednesday.

SpaceX introduced the postponement on Tuesday night time of the scheduled launch of a personal robotic lunar lander.

The spacecraft, constructed by Intuitive Machines of Houston, is on prime the rocket on the launchpad. Climate circumstances had been favorable however a technical challenge led to the delay of its flight by a minimum of a day. The subsequent try might be Thursday at 1:05 a.m. Japanese time.

If all goes nicely then, it is going to arrange the primary American spacecraft to land softly on the moon’s floor for the reason that Apollo 17 moon touchdown in 1972. It should even be the most recent non-public effort to ship a spacecraft to the moon.

Why was the launch postponed?

The Intuitive Machines lander, named Odysseus, was scheduled to launch at 12:57 a.m. Japanese on Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy House Heart in Florida.

In a post late on Tuesday on the web site X, SpaceX mentioned the temperature of methane gasoline for the lander was “off-nominal.”

If the technical downside is mounted, forecasts name for favorable climate through the subsequent launch alternative on Thursday. There’s one other backup launch alternative on Friday.

When and the place is the touchdown?

If the launch happens this week, the touchdown might be on Feb. 22 close to a crater named Malapert A. (Malapert A is a satellite tv for pc crater of the bigger Malapert crater, which is called after Charles Malapert, a Seventeenth-century Belgian astronomer.)

Odysseus will enter orbit across the moon about 24 hours earlier than the touchdown try.

The touchdown website, about 185 miles from the south pole on the close to aspect of the moon, is comparatively flat, a neater location for a spacecraft to land. No American spacecraft has ever landed on the lunar south pole, which is a spotlight of many house businesses and firms as a result of it might be wealthy in frozen water.

How huge is the spacecraft?

Intuitive Machines calls its spacecraft design Nova-C and named this specific lander Odysseus. It’s a hexagonal cylinder with six touchdown legs, about 14 ft tall and 5 ft huge. Intuitive Machines factors out that the physique of the lander is roughly the scale of an outdated British telephone sales space — that’s, just like the Tardis within the “Physician Who” science fiction tv present.

At launch, with a full load of propellant, the lander weighs about 4,200 kilos.

What’s going to the moon?

NASA is the primary buyer for the Intuitive Machines flight; it’s paying the corporate $118 million to ship its payloads. NASA additionally spent an extra $11 million to develop and construct the six devices on the flight:

• A laser retroreflector array to bounce again laser beams fired from Earth.

• A LIDAR instrument to exactly measure the spacecraft’s altitude and velocity because it descends to the lunar floor.

• A stereo digicam to seize video of the plume of mud kicked up by the lander’s engines throughout touchdown.

• A low-frequency radio receiver to measure the results of charged particles close to the lunar floor on radio indicators.

• A beacon, Lunar Node-1, to reveal an autonomous navigation system.

• An instrument within the propellant tank that’s to make use of radio waves to measure how a lot gasoline stays within the tank.

The lander can be carrying a couple of different payloads, together with a digicam constructed by college students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical College in Daytona Seaside, Florida; a precursor instrument for a future moon telescope; and an artwork venture by Jeff Koons.

Wasn’t there simply one other American spacecraft headed to the moon?

On Jan. 8, Astrobotic Expertise despatched its Peregrine lander towards the moon. However a malfunction with its propulsion system shortly after launch prevented any risk of touchdown. Ten days later, as Peregrine swung again towards Earth, it burned up within the environment above the Pacific Ocean.

Each Odysseus and Peregrine are a part of NASA’s Business Lunar Payload Providers program, or CLPS. The item of this system is to make use of business firms to ship experiments to the moon moderately than NASA constructing and working its personal moon landers.

“We’ve at all times seen these preliminary CLPS deliveries as being sort of a studying expertise,” Joel Kearns, the deputy affiliate administrator for exploration in NASA’s science mission directorate, mentioned throughout a information convention on Tuesday.

The house company hopes this method might be less expensive, permitting it to ship extra missions extra ceaselessly because it prepares to ship astronauts again to the moon as a part of its Artemis program.