(CNN) — Millions of miles beyond Earth, a spacecraft the size of a phone booth is on its way to take on a challenge no vehicle launched from the United States has attempted in more than 50 years.
A lunar lander called Odysseus, or IM-1, made by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is on its way to the moon. The rover is bracing for some terrifying moments of uncertainty as it tries to slow down to about 1,800 meters per second for a gentle landing on the lunar surface. The spacecraft is on track to land near the moon's south pole at 3 p.m. Thursday.
Coverage of the historic event is expected Live broadcasting On the website of the private company.
Success is not guaranteed. If it fails, Odysseus will become the third lunar lander to go missing on a natural satellite in less than a year. First Russian moon landing in 47 years Luna 25, It failed when it crashed in August 2023. Hakuto-R, developed by Japanese firm IceSpace, suffered a similar fate last April.
In total, more than half of all attempts to land on the moon have ended in failure—long odds for a feat first accomplished by mankind nearly 60 years ago.
The Soviet Union's Luna became the first spacecraft to make a controlled or “soft” landing on 9 February 1966. America followed with its robotic spaceship. Surveyor 1 Four months later it landed on the moon.
Since then, only three other countries (China, India and Japan) have reached such a milestone. All three were the first to reach the moon with robotic vehicles in the 21st century. India and Japan have achieved this monumental feat in the last six months, long after the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. The United States was the last country to send humans to the surface of the Moon in 1972. Apollo 17.
But since then, the US government hasn't even attempted a soft landing (with or without astronauts on board). Private space company Astrobotic Technology hoped to make history after its Peregrine lunar lander was launched in January, but a critical fuel leak forced the company to abandon the landing attempt hours later and burn up in Earth's atmosphere. .
Reclaiming knowledge and experience from the past is a big part of the challenge for the United States, Scott Pace, director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, told CNN.
“We're learning to do things we haven't done in a long time, and we're seeing companies learn to fly again,” Pace said. “Going to the moon is not just a matter of a brave or brilliant astronaut. It's about whole organizations that are organized, trained and able to get there. “We're now doing some of the experiences we had during Apollo, but we're also recreating some of the experiences we've lost over the last 50 years.”
However, technical know-how is only part of the equation when it comes to landing on the moon. Most of the barriers are financial.
A new model
At the height of the Apollo program, NASA's budget was more than 4% of all government spending. Today, the space agency's budget is about one-tenth that and only 0.4% of federal spending, even if it is trying to return American astronauts to the moon. Project Artemis.
“Hundreds of thousands of people worked on Apollo. It was a $100 billion project in the 1960s. In today's dollars it would be a multi-billion dollar project,” said Greg Autry, director of aerospace at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management. “There's nothing that compares to this.”
21st century lunar landing modules attempt to achieve many of the same goals for a fraction of the cost.
Vol Chandrayaan-3 India's first spacecraft to reach the lunar surface safely by August 2023 will cost around $72 million, said Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh.
An Indian Space Research Organization rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander lifts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh on July 14, 2023. R. Satish Baby/AFP/Getty Images
“Chandrayaan-3 barely cost Rs 600 million ($72 million), a Hollywood film about space and the moon costs more than Rs 600 million,” Singh said. Economic TimesAn Indian media, in August.
In the United States, NASA is trying to lower costs by outsourcing the design of small robotic spacecraft to the private sector through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
Astrobotic was the first company to fly under the CLPS initiative, and after its launch in January, Intuitive engines took the torch, aiming to smooth Odysseus near the moon's south pole on Thursday.
“We're going a thousand times farther than the International Space Station,” Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, told CNN. “And then, on top of that, the goal is: To do this for $100 million, it's been done for billions of dollars in the past.”
Why can't we repeat the Apollo thing?
It is also unrealistic to expect that NASA or one of its allies could simply pull out plans for a lunar lander from the 1960s and recreate it from scratch. Most of the technologies used in those tasks have long been retired, sidelined by enormous advances in computing power and materials science over the past half century.
Every piece of lunar lander hardware would have to come from modern supply chains (which look very different from the 20th century) or be designed and manufactured from scratch. Every sensor and electronic component on the spacecraft must be built to withstand the harsh environment of space, a process the industry calls “hardening.”
The Eagle landing module, carrying the first men to reach the moon, touched down on July 20, 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission. It is a film with two separate scenes. Space Frontiers/archive photos/stock images
It is known that there were Apollo missions Controlled by less powerful computers than smartphones Modern. But space travel is so complex and dangerous that computer advances cannot be directly translated into easy, cheap lunar missions.
“Landing on the moon is very different from programming a game. The thing about the iPhone in your pocket is that there are millions and millions of these things. Whereas with space launches, there might be only a few of them,” Pace said. “The iPhone, of course, has hundreds, if not thousands, of It's an amazing invention with innovation in it, but it also benefits from raw numbers. We never really did anything like that again when we landed on the moon.
A dangerous descent
Although technology has advanced over the past five decades, the fundamental challenges of landing on the moon remain the same. First, there's the sheer distance: it's a quarter of a million miles (402,000 kilometers) from Earth to the Moon. If you could drive a car to the moon at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour), it would take more than five months.
“Some people have compared it to hitting a golf ball in New York and getting it into a certain hole in Los Angeles. It's incredibly difficult to achieve that kind of accuracy over long distances,” Pace said.
And then there's the complex lunar landscape. The moon is covered in dead volcanoes and deep craters, making it difficult to find flat landing zones.
During the aborted Apollo 13 lunar mission on April 15, 1970, flight controllers gather to see NASA flight director Glynn Lunney (seated, foreground) in the control room at what is now Johnson Space Center in Houston. Space Frontiers/archive photos/stock images
“If Apollo 11 had landed where it did in the first place it would have crashed and been destroyed,” Audrey said. “Neil (Armstrong) was looking out the window. He maneuvered the lander over rocks and a large crater to find a safe place to land with enough fuel. “If it wasn't for an expert pilot who could control it, the lander would surely have torn apart.”
Without the aid of human eyes inside the spacecraft, modern robotic lunar landers use cameras, computers and sensors equipped with software and artificial intelligence to safely locate their landing site (and avoid rocks and craters) during descent. Not even humans in mission control rooms on Earth can assist the spacecraft in those final, critical seconds before landing.
“It takes time for a signal to go up and back, about three seconds total round trip,” Pace said. “A lot of things can go wrong in that time. “So when the vehicle actually lands on the moon, it practically does it automatically.”
Failure is an option
In the early days of the 20th century space race, more spacecraft crashed on the moon than landed safely. The companies and governments that shoot for the moon today, seeking cheaper costs by implementing modern technology, recognize that legacy.
And NASA's commercial partners may be more willing to take risks on their missions to the moon.
“(Businesses) came up with an iterative, quick-fail model. Take the product out, let it explode, figure out what you did wrong, fix it and start over,” Audrey said. “That's not the way the U.S. government works. Because if your plan dies, your government career is ruined.
The Soviet Union's Luna 9 lander was the first unmanned spacecraft to land gently on the Moon. Luna 9's mirror and antenna are seen in this image of the lunar surface taken by the probe on February 7, 1966. AP
For its part, even NASA recognizes that a 100% success rate is not guaranteed to its partners.
“We always look at these initial CLPS deliveries as a learning experience,” Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Science Mission Directorate, said during the Feb. 13 briefing. “We knew going into this … we didn't believe victory was certain.”
However, the hope is that initial failures will lead to repeated successes in the future. It is already clear that many of the participants in the modern moon race are ready to recover from their early defeats.
Both Ispace (a Japanese company that suffered a software problem that ended its mission last year) and Astrobotic, which lost its Peregrine lunar lander due to propulsion problems, are already on second attempts.
“All those who participated in those tasks were newcomers. These people are doing it for the first time and there is no substitute for that experience. “It's like taking your first solo flight,” Pace said. “Yes, they will fail, some companies will close. But if they learn from that defeat and bounce back, they will be a stronger team now. “It's really about educating a new generation.”
