Second US lander ready to fly to the Moon

The lander, named Odysseus or Odie, will take off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:57 p.m. on February 14, Hanoi time.

The Nova-C lander, also known as Odysseus, was developed by Intuitive Machines. Photo: Intuitive Machines — The Nova-C lander, also known as Odysseus, was developed by Intuitive Machines. Photo: *Intuitive Machines*

After last month's failed moon landing mission, NASA is pinning its hopes on a second spacecraft developed by another company to make the first American lunar landing in more than five decades. The rocket will send the Odysseus spacecraft into an oval orbit 380,000 kilometers (240,000 miles) wide around Earth, said Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that developed the Odysseus. Once in Earth orbit, the lunar lander will separate from the rocket and begin its own journey, using its onboard engines to accelerate on a direct flight to the lunar surface, CNN reported.

Odysseus is expected to spend more than a week flying freely in space and attempt to land on the Moon's surface on February 22.

A month earlier, Peregrine, a vehicle developed by private company Astrobotic Technology with funding from NASA, failed on a similar mission. The Pittsburgh company reported a fuel leak just hours after Peregrine launched on January 8. The spacecraft fell back to Earth 10 days later and burned up in the atmosphere.

NASA is funding private companies to develop a small fleet of lunar landers under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. The goal of the program is to develop landers under relatively low fixed-cost contracts that will help the United States return to the Moon as the international space race heats up.

China, India, and Japan are among the few countries to have landed soft on the Moon in the 21st century. While NASA is confident that the US will be the first country to return humans to the lunar surface, the global race to land autonomous spacecraft there is hotter than ever. What makes NASA’s approach different is its reliance on commercialization, whereby many rapidly developing, low-cost private spacecraft compete for contracts instead of NASA developing its own vehicles. Intuitive Machines could receive up to $118 million from NASA for the mission.

Founded in 2013, Intuitive Machines will be the second company in the CLPS program to attempt a lunar landing after Astrobotic. Two more CLPS missions are scheduled for late 2024. Of the four companies sending lunar landers under the CLPS program, Intuitive Machines has the most orders from NASA, with three missions.

The Odysseus lander is a prototype called Nova-C, which Intuitive Machines describes as the size of a British phone booth with legs. The company aims to land the lander near the Moon’s south pole, a region that has attracted much interest in the space race. The region is thought to contain water ice, which could provide drinking water and even rocket fuel for future astronauts. The south pole is also where NASA is looking to send astronauts by the end of the decade.

The lander will be equipped with six NASA payloads, including a range of scientific instruments designed to test new technologies or assess the lunar environment, such as how the soil reacts during landing. The craft will also carry a variety of memorabilia, including sculptures depicting the phases of the moon and technology from private companies, including Columbia Sportswear, which developed insulation for the lander.

If all goes according to plan, Odysseus will spend seven days operating on the Moon. But as the landing site gradually moves into the Earth's shadow, the spacecraft will be put to sleep during the lunar night.

An Khang (According to CNN )

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