A moon lander constructed by a private American corporation has been launched by NASA with the intention of visiting the moon the following week. The launch on Thursday followed another private American company’s unsuccessful attempt from the previous month. The lunar lander of Intuitive Machines was launched by SpaceX’s Falcon rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the moon, a distance of 370,000 kilometers. The private mission, which includes six navigation and other technological tests on the lander, is primarily sponsored by the American space agency. After spending a day in lunar orbit, the spacecraft will attempt to land on February 22 if all goes according to plan.
The United States, Russia, China, India, and Japan are the five nations with moon landings under their belts. To date, no private enterprise has been able to accomplish this. There have only been American astronauts on the moon. The final astronauts of the Apollo program to land on the moon were Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17, which launched in December 1972. Before takeoff, Steve Altemus, the CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, remarked, “There have been a lot of sleepless nights getting ready for this.”
The Houston-based business intends to make a landing close to the moon’s south pole with its six-legged, 4.3-meter spacecraft. Although there are many perilous craters and cliffs in the area, there may be a lot of frozen water. In a few years, NASA intends to land humans there as well. The privately held Astrobotic Technologies lunar lander Peregrine malfunctioned last month not long after takeoff. Ten days after launch, the spacecraft—which carried several NASA experiments—broke apart and burned up, partially due to a fuel leak. Several efforts reached the moon but failed to return.
Leave a Reply