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On Thursday ( Feb. 22 ) , a phone cubicle - sized spacecraft call Odysseus made chronicle . Landing at the moon ’s Dixieland poleat 6:23 p.m. ET , Odysseus — built by the Houston - base company Intuitive Machines — became the first U.S. lander to affect down on the moonshine in more than 50 years , and the first private lander to ever reach the lunar surface .
But this successful landing was far from flawless . Several days after touchdown , it became clear that Odysseus broke one of its six legs upon landing place , and had terminate up tumble on its side . With limited power reaching the lander ’s solar cellular telephone , engineers power it down , potentially for adept , on Feb. 29.Odysseus ' challenge impart to a trend of troubled lunar landing , with five of the previous nine seek lunar month landing place ending poorly for various land and private fellowship .
Japan’s Hakuto-R lander snapped this stunning picture of Earth and the lunar horizon days before it crashed onto the lunar surface in April 2023.
Weeks earlier , on Jan. 19 , Japan ’s Smart Lander for enquire the Moon ( SLIM ) spacecraft successfully completed the country’sfirst Sun Myung Moon landing place — albeit ending upupside down on the lunar surfacedue to an engine malfunction during descent . The lopsided lander ’s solar cells faced the wrong steering and failed to power its instruments and communication , forcing engineers to keep out it down in fright of barrage discharge . Just 10 days prior to SLIM ’s landing , a private U.S. moon lander named Peregrine encounter many anomalies after launch , include a propellant leak that prevented the spacecraft from down on the moon . It was ultimatelyrerouted to gate-crash into Earth ’s atmosphere . Other lunar landing place attempts made byJapanandRussiain 2023 similarly ended in catastrophic crash , this time on the lunation itself .
authorities - fund distance agencies of only five countries have successfully equal down on the moon : the United States , the former Soviet Union , China , Indiaand Japan . Just one secret society ( Intuitive Machines ) has succeed so far , and several high - profile missionary post have failed due to technological bug that led to fatal judgement of stop number , altitude and predilection — a stark reminder that even after half a C since the Apollo astronauts walked on the moon , our closelipped celestial neighbor remains a challenging and grave goal .
So , what hold ? Has humanity gotten bad at lunar landings ? Or are we simply grappling with a new earned run average of technological onward motion , just like the team behind the Apollo missions did ?
Japan’s SLIM lander made the most precise landing in lunar history — however, it landed upside down, cutting its battery life down to mere hours.
" We did not get ' dumber ' since the Apollo landings,“Csaba Palotai , a professor of physics and space science at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne , tell Live Science . engineering is significantly better today ; your cellphone has more computational power than computers had in the seventies . " But since the ' seventy there have been no cosmonaut and archetype on the lander to correct what the computers ca n’t or wo n’t , " Palotai added .
Acing the technology (again)
Landing on the moon is hard , with or without human pilots .
A major vault is the moon ’s practical want of atmosphere . The lunar atm is very sparse and varies with clock time , preventing engineers from include parachutes to slow down down space vehicle , Palotai enjoin . or else , missions use fuel - powered actuation system to descend onto the moon ’s surface , making it challenging to slow the spacecraft from a few kilometers per second to a pure halt .
Yet this and other lunar exploration challenge are not new .
When Russia’s Luna 25 probe crashed into the moon on Aug. 19, 2023, it left a 33-foot-wide (10 meters) impact crater seen here by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While the Apollo program was ultimately successful in land humans on the moonlight , it was the culmination of a prominent program that failed many time on its agency to success . Early attempts by the U.S. and the Soviet Union to fly a spacecraft to the moonlight were riddled with failures , including post - launch explosion , malfunction with counselling system , and fatal erroneous belief with solar dialog box deployment . Even the historic Apollo 11 mission , which landed spaceman Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Sun Myung Moon , was worryingly broken on fuel and facedmultiple unexpected alarmsjust before bring on the moon .
" People tend to forget about those missionary work failures as being part of the learning mental process , " saidJack Burns , managing director of theNASA - funded connection for Exploration and Space Science at the University of Colorado Boulder . This existential learning perch is where moon missions , particularly a rise numeral of privately fund ones , currently are . " It ’s still hard to land on the moon , but far from impossible , " he said .
Burns and other expert agree that just about everything has changed since the Apollo program , including the now - antiquated technology that study humans to the moon and back in the ' LX and ' 70 . Engineers with the Apollo program had built thefirst computers of their time , let in sensing element that have since been made more powerful in a fraction of their original size . Much of the software and computer architecture customized for the Apollo programme is effectively useless for space missions today .
A fish-eye camera image of Earth taken by the Odysseus lander as it headed toward the moon in Feb. 2024.
Moreover , " that whole propagation is out of the industry at this point , and a lot of that noesis has been lost , " say John Thornton , CEO of Pittsburgh - based Astrobotic Technology , which build and operate Peregrine . " We are relearn how to do this , but we ’re also learn it with technology that is novel and different . "
Half a century after humanity last walk on the moon , organizations lowly than NASA — powered by a new generation of engineers — have make on the same challenge that only governance execute in the past times . Palotai , Thornton and Burns view the recent moon commission failure as the rude progression of a new industry .
" in person , I ’m not disquieted , " Burns said . " It ’s just part of the growing pains . "
Paving the way for affordable moon missions
While technical issues influence the outcome of a mission , support determines the extent of the software package and hardware examination done in advance of launch to reduce risk .
" If we had a billion dollar bill to do this foreign mission , our chance of winner would go way up , " Thornton said of the fated Peregrine , whose mission failure investigation is expect to take a month or two . " But we ’re render to do this at a much depleted price , which means you have to examine many more meter before you get to that breakthrough minute of , ' OK , now we lie with exactly how to do it at this price degree . get ’s keep doing it again and again . ' "
Back in the ' 60s and ' 70s , in the heat of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union , the Apollo program was the crux of NASA ’s oeuvre , and the space agency had 10 time its current budget to do the same affair . Between 1960 and 1973 , NASA spent $ 25.8 billion ( $ 257 billion whenadjusted for pompousness ) on the Apollo program and was back by nearly 5 % of the total U.S. Union budget .
Comparatively , NASA now receives less than 0.5 % of the nation ’s overall federal outlay , and that budget also funds missions to destinations beyond the moonlight .
" That shift everything , " Thornton said . Back then , NASA was all right with break something that be tens of billions of dollar . In comparison , today the manufacture is trying to build ballistic capsule for about $ 100 million , an low-priced monetary value that ’s cardinal to mundane flights . This problem is fundamentally unlike from those of the Apollo geological era . " It ’s going to take metre to find out how to do it at that price full point , " Thornton allege .
Lowering delegacy costs also increase the risk of failure , at least to lead off , Martin Barstow , a prof of astrophysics and space skill at the University of Leicester in the U.K. , distinguish Live Science . So " we should n’t be too surprised if some of these things do n’t work , " Barstow added .
The first commercial victory
The Odysseus spacecraft ’s successful landing on Feb. 22 mark a welcome breakthrough for the commercial-grade spacefaring industry .
— February ’s full ' Snow Moon ' rise this weekend . Here ’s why it ’s one - of - a - form .
— Intuitive Machines moon lander beams home arresting photos of Earth from space
— China eyes May 2024 launching for 1st - ever lunar sample - payoff foreign mission to far side of the Sun Myung Moon
The lander ( nicknamed " Odie " ) deliver 12 payloads to the Sun Myung Moon , admit six NASA science instrument . For these , the space agency paid Intuitive Machines $ 118 million through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services platform ( CLPS ) , design to award private company contracts to send experiment to the synodic month rather than NASA doing it itself . ( NASA moonlight missions can cost up to $ 1 billion each . )
