A private company has successfully delivered cargo to the Moon’s surface for the first time. Here’s what that means for future space exploration.
In the few short years since the COVID pandemic changed our world, China, Japan and India have all successfully landed on the Moon.
Back to the Moon The recent Odysseus landing stands out for two reasons. For starters, this is the first time a US-built spacecraft has landed – not crashed – on the Moon for over 50 years. Working with NASA, Intuitive Machines selected a landing site about 300 kilometres from the lunar south pole. Among other challenges, landing here requires entering a polar orbit around the Moon, which consumes additional fuel.
As the lander neared the surface, the company realised its navigation systems had a problem. NASA’s NDL experiment is serendipitously designed to test precision landing techniques for future missions. It seems that at the last second, engineers bodged together a solution that involved feeding necessary data from NDL to the lander.
The lander is now likely to survive for at least a week before the Sun sets on the landing site and a dark, frigid lunar night turns it into another museum piece of human technology frozen in the lunar regolith. The market for commercial lunar payloads remains unclear. Possibly, once the novelty wears off and brands are no longer able to generate buzz by, for example, sending a piece of outdoor clothing to the Moon, this source of funding may dwindle.