The private company is set to land on the moon

Launching the Nova-C Dysseus Lunar Lander on the Moon with the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines

It is the first private company to land a spaceship on the moon. Following its launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last Thursday, the robotic Nova-C “Odysseus” lander built by Intuitive Machines has now touched down — also making it the first US spacecraft to successfully land on the Moon since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

The spacecraft was built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines. It took off from Florida last week aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The IM-1 mission is one of several that NASA has purchased from private companies as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

The $100 million price tag for the space agency’s first mission is a bargain when it comes to space exploration. On board are several NASA experiments that will be used to study the environment around the lander and to develop some new technologies for future landings.

Malapert, the Moon’s “Intuitive Machines,” says Cynthia Stott, President and CEO of Lonestar Data Holdings

Malapert is a large crater that lies near the moon’s south pole. That location offers several advantages, says Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Landing sites near the south pole experience near-continuous sunlight, which can power a spacecraft’s solar cells for longer; and some of south pole’s dark craters are believed to be home to water in the form of ice.

She says that water has hydrogen and oxygen in it, so you can breathe in it. Two elements can also be used for rocket fuel.

NASA hopes the CLPS program will help build a network of private suppliers that will allow the United States to once again land astronauts on the lunar surface. Commercial companies should be scouting out locations, land instruments and rovers to pave the way for human exploration.

“They wanted to facilitate the commercial sector, and you can see that in action on this Intuitive Machines flight,” says Chris Quilty, the co-CEO of Quilty Space, which analyzes the space business.

Among the commercial products on board is a space-age fabric from the sportswear manufacturer Columbia, a few pieces of private art and a small test of a system to securely back up data on the moon.

Data “is the most precious asset that we have as a technological civilization,” says Chris Stott, founder and CEO of Lonestar Data Holdings, a Florida-based company that wants to build data centers on the lunar surface. “Do we keep it down here where we’ve got the wars, storms, weather, network intrusion issues … or do we put it somewhere where there is no climate change? There is no atmosphere in this location?

Stott says his company has already successfully stored and retrieved a digital copy of the Declaration of Independence from the lander. The state of Florida wants to store a lot of data on the moon in a future mission.

But before NASA can realize its ambitions and before your pictures can be backed up on a lunar hard drive, Odysseus has to stick the landing. And that’s not a given. Privately funded lunar missions from Israel and Japan have both crashed in recent years, and another NASA-backed mission from the company Astrobotic fell back to Earth in January after suffering a fuel leak.

Accurately landing on the moon in the 1960’s and 1970s are not always easy, according to an astronomer with theSmithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

There’s no air at the surface, so Robotic missions can’t use parachutes. McDowell says Odysseus could very well crash, like many landers before it, but he says companies are learning from each mistake.

Source: Private company Intuitive Machines is set to land on the moon. Here’s what to know

EagleCam: The First Privately Owned Spacecraft to Land on the Moon after the Astrobotic Peregrine Experiment

They aren’t failing ignominiously even when they fail. “With a certain amount of iteration and a few more tries, I’m confident that they can succeed.”

This is the first privately owned spacecraft to achieve its goal after the Astrobotic Peregrine lander, launched by United Launch Alliance last month, failed to reach the Moon.

After 14 Earth days Odysseus will cease to function because the incoming lunar night is not designed to protect it. The “EagleCam” CubeSat camera system is built by students at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, and an art project by Jeff Koons contains 125 miniature Moon sculptures.

Some selfies with the earth were taken by Odysseus on the way to the Moon. One image taken by the lander’s Terrain Relative Navigation camera shows the Moon from approximately 100,000 kilometers (around 62,137 miles), later followed by a close-up shot of the Bel’kovich K crater.

It has a laser retroreflector array to help other spacecraft make precision landings and a radio navigation beacon to provide geolocation data to landers, rovers, and eventually astronauts.