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SALT LAKE CITY — Just a month after Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine moon mission failed due to a post-launch fuel leak, another private U.S. space company is headed to the moon. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared off a Cape Canaveral launch pad early Thursday morning, carrying Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lunar lander.
While the first signs of trouble for Peregrine arose shortly after the lander separated from its ride on United Launch Alliance's brand-new Vulcan rocket on Jan. 8, Houston-based Intuitive Machines was reporting an all-systems-go status for Odysseus. It parted ways with SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 about 48 minutes after launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center.
Following the successful separation procedure, Intuitive Machines said Odysseus had achieved "a stable attitude, solar charging and radio communications contact with the company's mission operations center in Houston."
Like the failed Astrobotic mission, Intuitive Machines' IM-1 mission is carrying NASA payloads to the moon and received a portion of its funding through the U.S. space agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.
Per its mission schedule, Odysseus is due to land at the Malapert A crater near the moon's south pole on Feb. 22. The south pole is of particular interest to NASA as an area that has been identified as the most likely to hold frozen reserves of water, an essential element and potential source from which oxygen and hydrogen could be extracted for future missions.
If successful, the IM-1 mission would mark the first return of a U.S. spacecraft to the moon since the 1972 visit by NASA's Apollo 17 crew. Intuitive Machines would also become the first private company to execute a controlled landing on the lunar surface.
'The immense challenges'
Besides Astrobotic's attempt with Peregrine, two other private moon landing tries, one each by companies from Israel and Japan, have met with failure, a factor not lost on Intuitive Machines' co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus.
"We are keenly aware of the immense challenges that lie ahead," Altemus said in a Thursday press statement. "However, it is precisely in facing these challenges head-on that we recognize the magnitude of the opportunity before us: to softly return the United States to the surface of the moon for the first time in 52 years."
NASA says commercial deliveries by companies participating in the Commercial Payload Services program, which has $2.6 billion in funding through 2028, will perform science experiments, test technologies and demonstrate capabilities to help the U.S. space agency explore the moon as it prepares for human missions planned as part of its multiphase Artemis program.
In a move foreshadowed by federal auditors' findings late last year, NASA announced last month it was pushing out the next steps in its multiphase Artemis moonshot program with two crewed mission launch dates, one aiming to orbit the moon and the other hoping to put astronauts on the lunar surface, each bumped out by one year.
NASA officials said further work to ensure mission safety is driving the rescheduling, as well as delays in third-party programs that are developing new spacesuits, orbital refueling systems and lunar landing spacecraft.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced the Artemis II mission, slated to carry astronauts on a journey that will include orbiting the moon, is now scheduled for launch in September 2025. The Artemis III mission, which will return astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years, now has a September 2026 target date.
Nelson noted the success of the Artemis I mission in late 2022 that included the launch of the new, massive Space Launch System rocket and a 25-day journey for the unmanned Orion crew capsule, which splashed down in the Pacific on Dec. 14 that year after traveling nearly 1.4 million miles.
Artemis I was just the first step in a program aiming to not just put astronauts back on the moon, but to establish a base station there and develop systems to use the Earth's sole satellite as a launch site for, ultimately, sending human explorers to Mars.
