A private spacecraft called Odysseus is attempting to make history on Thursday by becoming the first moonlander launched from the United States to attempt a lunar landing in over 50 years. The modestly priced robot built by Houston-based startup Intuitive Machines is currently hurtling through space on track to touch down on the lunar surface near the south pole at 5:30 pm EST.
If successful, the pioneering landing could help jumpstart NASA’s Artemis program to return American astronauts to the moon this decade and regain lunar landing knowledge and expertise that have been lost since the last Apollo missions in the early 1970s.
“We’re learning to do things that we haven’t done in a long time, and what you’re seeing is organizations learning how to fly again,” said Scott Pace, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “Going to the moon is not a matter of just a brave or brilliant astronaut. It’s a matter of entire organizations that are organized, trained, and equipped to go out there.”
Odysseus and other modern lunar landers are attempting to accomplish the monumental feat of safely landing on the moon at a fraction of the cost of mid-20th-century missions. Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo program cost over $100 billion. India landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the moon in August for around $72 million. Through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, private companies like Intuitive Machines are providing robotic lander services at competitive prices.
However, the technical challenges of precisely navigating across vast distances and delicately touching down on rugged lunar terrain remain daunting. Without human pilots on board, modern landers rely on sophisticated cameras, sensors and guidance software to find safe landing zones during the perilous final descent. Yet success is not assured, as evidenced by multiple failed moon landing attempts over the past year by Russia, Japan and the U.S. company Astrobotic.
While failures may continue to occur as relative newcomers learn how to master complex moon landings, NASA and its partners are willing to embrace risks and iterate based on lessons learned. The hope is that early setbacks will ultimately lead to reliable pathways for returning humans to the lunar surface under the Artemis program later this decade.
