Odysseus, the first SU-built spacecraft that land on the moon in more than 50 years, could exceed expectations and still return important scientific data weeks after its initial planned period of seven to 10 days, mission managers said Wednesday.
The lander, carry Nasa equipment that analyzes the lunar surface will be put into sleep mode in the coming hours when its solar panels stop receiving sunlight at the start of a weeks-long “moon night”, they said at an afternoon press conference in Houston.
Wednesday or Thursday was expected to see the final broadcast of the Nova-C lander, which was designed and built by Houston-based commercial aerospace company Intuitive Machines.
But Intuitive Machines co-founder and CEO Steve Altemus told reporters there are plans to try to reawaken the spacecraft in a few weeks when sunlight returns. If successful, it would be a remarkable resurrection of a mission plunged into uncertainty when Odysseus fell over on its side during the landing last week.
“What an amazing job that rugged, tough lander did, all the way to the moon and then onto the surface to deliver so much data and information and science back to Nasa and our commercial companies,” he said.
“It’s just an incredible testament to how robust and, as someone said, lovable that little spacecraft is.”
Altemus said the revival effort could come when sunlight illuminates its solar panels again “in the next two to three weeks.”
“Can we, will we, get a signal back from this lander? We are excited about it,” he said.
The 14-foot (4.3-meter) hexagonal, six-legged craft made history last Thursday when it became the first private spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon, and the first US mission to do so since the last manned Apollo mission in 1972.
Odie, as the lander has become affectionately known to Intuitive Machines employees, landed in the rocky and cratered lunar surface near the moon’s south pole that Nasa is targeting for its next manned landing mission, Artemis III, planned for late 2026.
There were fears that its payload, a suite of Nasa equipment designed to collect data on the lunar environment, including analyzing potential water sources that would help sustain a future lunar base, was compromised by the botched landing.
But Altemus said the data received proved it had been “a very successful mission up to this point”.
He said: “What we have done in the process of this mission is that we have fundamentally changed the economics of landing on the moon.
“We have opened the door to a strong thriving cisluar economy in the future. This is truly a point in history that we should celebrate as we move forward to subsequent missions around the moon.”
The IM-1 mission was carried out as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, in which the agency pays “seed money” to private companies to develop hardware and software that can be used for Artemis missions.
Nasa paid $118 million to get it off the ground, with Intuitive Machines funding a further $130 million before its February 15 launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
At a separate press conference at Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, two days before SpaceX Crew 8 astronauts are scheduled to fly to the International Space Station aboard another Falcon rocket, Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson praised the CLPS program .
“We are taking advantage of the few small nickels we have by getting the commercial industry to pay some of the bill. They produce a lunar economy as they continue to grow and experiment and invent,” he said.
“A great example of how we’re sharing the cost of the entire exploration program as we go back to the moon, not just with commercial partners, and that’s certainly true in the Artemis program, but with international partners.
“There’s significant international investment in each of the steps as we go back to the moon, so it’s all taking advantage of what we can get out of Congress and doing all the more with.”
However, even with the extra funding, the Artemis program is still billions of dollars over budget and several years behind schedule. The space agency announced last month that Artemis II, a 10-day expedition to send a crew around the moon and back to test life support systems, would not launch until September 2025.
Artemis III, meanwhile, to land four astronauts, including the first woman, near the lunar south pole will be delayed another year to September 2026.
However, Nelson remained optimistic.
“These CLPS missions, before Artemis III ever touches down, are going to be extraordinarily valuable. Each of these [Odysseus] NASA instruments are all part of getting additional data that we need,” he said.
Two more launches of Intuitive Machines are scheduled for later this year, including an ice drill to extract ingredients for rocket fuel, and another Nova-C lander carrying a small NASA rover and four small robots that will explore surface conditions.
