ANALYSIS – In America's race to land humans on the moon (again) before China does, a robotic spacecraft built by Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines has made the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half century.
It is also the first lunar landing by any privately owned spacecraft.
The landmark flight is the first controlled landing on the moon by a U.S. spacecraft since the final manned Apollo mission in 1972.
Apollo 17 launched on December 7 of that year, successfully concluded on December 19, 1972. It was the final flight of the Apollo program, and American astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were the last humans to walk on the moon.
Now, 52 years later, American boots are back on the moon – or at least American robots.
It took some 10 minutes for controllers to establish that the company's Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, was down, but eventually a signal was received.
“Houston, Odysseus has found its new home,” Stephen Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, said shortly after the landing at 5:23 p.m. CST.
Odysseus, named for the Greek hero of Homer's epic poem “The Odyssey,” the Odysseus lander lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket flown by SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, on February 15.
The lander is a 14-foot-tall hexagonal cylinder with six legs that the space company has operated from a mission control center in Houston.
Odysseus didn't deploy its camera during its historic descent. “However, both the Intuitive Machines and EagleCam teams still plan to deploy EagleCam and capture images of the lander on the lunar surface as the mission continues.”
The spacecraft, which touched down about 190 miles from the moon's south pole, is carrying a range of scientific instruments, designed to gather data about the lunar environment ahead of NASA's planned return of human astronauts to the moon later this decade.
Its arrival also marks the first soft landing of a spacecraft under NASA's Artemis lunar program. This, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to the moon before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
USA Today reported:
NASA had intended to launch its Artemis II astronauts into orbit by the end of the year on a 10-day trip circumnavigating the moon ahead of a moon landing itself a year later for Artemis III. But the Artemis program missions have since been delayed by at least a year after NASA encountered a slew of issues, including a battery flaw on the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the moon.
Once NASA is back on track in the years ahead, the agency intends to send a crew to the moon's south polar region, where it will lay the groundwork for NASA to establish a permanent human presence on and around the moon ahead of future missions to Mars.
The Intuitive Machines' lunar mission is also part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
USA Today explained:
The U.S. space agency has a budget of $2.6 billion in contracts available through 2028 to pay private companies to place scientific payloads on private robotic landers like Odysseus bound for the lunar surface. The success of Intuitive Machines in putting a lander on the moon will now pave the way for NASA to work with more commercial entities on future space endeavors.
The outlet added that while Odysseus may be the first privately built spacecraft to reach the moon, it's not the first to try.
“In January, Pittsburgh-based aerospace company Astrobotic sent its Peregrine lander on a doomed mission to the moon that ended with the spacecraft burning up in Earth's atmosphere days later.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
READ NEXT: Trump Endorses Plan Sure To Shock Republican Donors
