{"id":47848,"date":"2024-02-15T17:42:56","date_gmt":"2024-02-15T07:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abnews.com.au\/?p=47848"},"modified":"2024-02-15T17:42:56","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T07:42:56","slug":"private-us-spaceship-poised-to-launch-for-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/?p=47848","title":{"rendered":"Private US spaceship poised to launch for the Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

An American spaceship attempting a lunar landing will aim to launch early Thursday, the second private-led effort this year after the first ended in failure.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Intuitive Machines, the Houston company leading mission “IM-1,” hopes to become the first non-government entity to achieve a soft touchdown on the Moon and land the first US robot on the surface since the Apollo missions more than five decades ago.<\/p>\n

Its hexagonal-shaped Nova-C lander named “Odysseus” is set to blast off on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 01:05 am Thursday local time (0605 GMT).<\/p>\n

IM-1 was supposed to blast off on Wednesday, but the launch was postponed after SpaceX discovered abnormal temperatures as it attempted to fuel up the lander.<\/p>\n

The lander has a new type of supercooled liquid methane and oxygen engine giving it the power to reach its destination quickly, avoiding prolonged exposure to a region of high radiation surrounding the Earth known as the Van Allen belt.<\/p>\n

Intuitive Machine’s Trent Martin told reporters this week that the “opportunity to return the United States to the Moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore.”<\/p>\n

Despite the postponement, the craft is still due to reach its landing site Malapert A on February 22, an impact crater 300 kilometers (180 miles) from the south pole.<\/p>\n

NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence and harvest ice there for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship Moon-to-Mars program.<\/p>\n

NASA paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to ship science hardware to better understand and mitigate environmental risks for astronauts, the first of whom are scheduled to land no sooner than 2026.<\/p>\n

There is more colorful cargo aboard as well, including a digital archive of human knowledge and 125 mini-sculptures of the Moon by the artist Jeff Koons.<\/p>\n

After touchdown, the payloads are expected to run for roughly seven days before lunar night sets in on the south pole, rendering Odysseus inoperable.<\/p>\n

IM-1 is the second mission under a NASA initiative called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which the space agency created to delegate trucking services to the private sector to achieve savings and to stimulate a wider lunar economy.<\/p>\n

The first, by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, launched in January, but its Peregrine spacecraft experienced an engine anomaly that caused a fuel leak and was eventually brought back to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Soft landing a robot on the Moon is challenging because it has to navigate treacherous terrain amid a lag of several seconds in communications with Earth, and use its thrusters for a controlled descent in the absence of an atmosphere that would support parachutes.<\/p>\n

Apart from Astrobotic’s failed attempt, two other private initiatives got close: Beresheet, operated by an Israeli nonprofit, crash-landed in 2019, while Japanese company ispace also had a “hard landing” last year.<\/p>\n

BSS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An American spaceship attempting a lunar landing will aim to launch early Thursday, the second private-led effort this year after the first ended in failure. Intuitive Machines, the Houston company leading mission “IM-1,” hopes to become the first non-government entity to achieve a soft touchdown on the Moon and land the first US robot on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[496],"class_list":["post-47848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","tag-private-us-spaceship-poised-to-launch-for-the-moon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aglowmedia.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}