Odysseus makes it to the moon
A spacecraft by the name of Odysseus landed on the moon at 6:23 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024, making it the first privately owned American spacecraft to successfully complete a lunar landing. Odysseus, built and managed by Intuitive Machines, took flight on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket a week prior and made several laps around the moon before touching down near the lunar South Pole.
The landing wasn’t perfect, per se, with communications and data collection shutting off for several minutes upon a rough touchdown. A few hours after landing, however, the company released a statement, reported by the New York Times that, “after troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data.” At this time, Odysseus is no longer operable, having used up all of its energy reserves, and will remain on the moon’s surface. The spacecraft did not cease transmitting before it could send essential data and exceptional photos back to Earth, though. The mission can be widely praised as a success and the first of many to come as a result of a recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) initiative.
Odysseus’ expedition is a product of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS), which was created in 2018 to encourage private space exploration. While NASA’s space voyages are immeasurably expensive due to their intricacies and meticulous engineering, CLPS expeditions are purposely fundamental in being less financially demanding. The New York Times reports that “Intuitive Machines is one of several small companies that NASA has hired to transport instruments that will perform reconnaissance on the moon’s surface,” prior to NASA’s upcoming project to send astronauts back to the moon in the new Artemis Mission. Specifically, Odysseus’ primary objectives were to collect data regarding how radio waves are impacted by dust disturbances, study landing mechanisms, and store communication technology for future use.
The simpler purpose of Odysseus’ mission allowed it to be significantly less expensive than typical space exploration. NASA funded 118 million dollars out of CLPS’s allotted $2.6 billion through 2028 into the Odysseus mission. Although the Odysseus mission is not of the same magnitude as previous NASA ventures, this is still a remarkable reduction of government funding compared to the $25.8 billion spent on “Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars,” according to The Planetary Society.
The CLPS’s emphasis on a greater quantity of inexpensive trips (comparatively) combined with a higher tolerance for failure encourages and enables private companies to invest in spacecraft and research missions to space, which in turn creates a new competitive market where there was previously only government-run initiatives. This is a notable moment in American history considering that NASA has been the sole force in space travel since its formation in 1958. This new age of private enterprise under CLPS is shifting the possibilities of space exploration, and we can expect to see more frequent flights to space conducted by private organizations.