Ars takes a close-up look at the first US lunar lander in half a century

HOUSTON—It has been 18,558 days since the United States landed a spacecraft on the Moon.

And counting.

NASA has not sent a spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. Since that time, the Soviet Union, China, and India have successfully landed there, but the United States has gone elsewhere. There are various reasons for this, including a sharp focus by NASA on exploration of Mars. But now that is finally about to change.

I am standing in a gleaming facility in Houston, a few kilometers from the storied Johnson Space Center, in a facility formally known as the Lunar Production and Operations Center. It is where a small company called Intuitive Machines builds machines designed to land on the Moon. And standing before me, 4.3 meters tall, is a real-life lunar lander.

Like, seriously. This sucker will be launched within a month or two on a Falcon 9 rocket. And one way or another, it is going to the Moon. Maybe it will crash. Maybe it will make its desired soft landing. But one way or another, the United States is finally getting back into the Moon game.

It has been far too long.

The Moon is a harsh mistress

NASA and the United States are part of a global rush back to the Moon. Broadly, there are two large programs—Artemis, led by NASA with dozens of international partners, and a Chinese effort—to land astronauts near the south pole of the Moon and establish something approaching a sustained or even permanent presence there.

But in the interim, there are several nations and private companies that have, or will soon, attempted to land on the Moon. In the last four years, small Israeli, Russian, and Indian landers have all crashed into the Moon; a commercially developed Japanese lander also met an unhappy fate, and most recently in August, India's second lunar lander succeeded in making a soft touchdown in the southern hemisphere.

Steve Altemus, the co-founder of Intuitive Machines and the company's chief executive, has watched all these efforts closely. "What we're trying to do is really difficult" he acknowledged on Tuesday, as we talked a few meters from the company's Nova-C lander.

Although NASA plans to send humans to the Moon later this decade, it is starting smaller, with commercially led missions like the Nova-C lander. In 2018, the space agency created a program called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) to purchase lunar missions from the private sector. At the end of May 2019, NASA announced that Astrobotic had won a fixed-price contract worth $79.5 million and that Intuitive Machines won a contract worth $77 million. These were fixed-price awards to land some of NASA's science payloads on the lunar surface.

Finally ready to go

For Altemus and Intuitive Machines, it has been a long four years working through the financing issues of growing a small space company, the technical challenges, including exploding propellant tanks, and more. But now the lander is complete.

"It's been a real challenge, but we've finally got it ready to go," he said of the lander. "It's ready to get buttoned up and ship."

Intuitive Machines has a tentative launch date of November 16, when a six-day window opens for its spacecraft to reach the Moon. However, there are concerns about whether a Falcon 9 rocket will be available at that time. The mission will lift off from SpaceX's Launch Complex 39A pad, and there are a handful of missions ahead of it, including the Psyche asteroid mission, a cargo supply mission for NASA, and potentially the USSF-52 mission.

"We're in line with a whole bunch of others," Altemus said. "Our strategy is being there and being ready to go."

The company has another six-day window that opens in December, and an additional one in early January. It will take five to seven days to reach the Moon, and then after arriving there, the spacecraft will spend a day lining up with the plane at the landing site at 80 degrees south, near the pole, before making a landing attempt.

A lunar space race

Although officially it's not a race, Intuitive Machines is racing against Astrobotic and its Peregrine lander. That company has also completed its lander and is awaiting a launch vehicle. However, Astrobotic will space on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, which is making its debut flight. Nominally, that rocket could fly in December, but it will require a lot of things to go right.

All told, NASA has awarded nine CLPS missions to several different providers as it seeks to ramp up the scientific exploration of the Moon. Intuitive Machines has won three of these contracts, and its second mission will carry a drill combined with a mass spectrometer that will attempt to harvest ice from below the surface of the south pole.

Through the preliminary investigations of the CLPS missions, NASA hopes to establish a good lay of the land before sending astronauts to the south pole during the second half of this decade. It may have been 51 years since NASA sent something to the Moon, but it now appears set to make up for lost time, with at least a dozen missions planned for the remainder of the 2020s.