A phone booth-sized spacecraft is on its way to take on a feat that hasn’t been tried by a vehicle launched from the United States in more than 50 years: travelling hundreds of thousands of miles beyond Earth.The lunar lander Intuitive Machines, based in Houston, built Odysseus, also known as IM-1, is hurtling towards the moon. The robotic explorer is trying to slow down by roughly 4,026 miles per hour (1,800 metres per second) in order to gently land on the moon’s surface. It is bracing itself for the terrible seconds of uncertainty.
After an initial estimate of 5:49 p.m. ET, the spacecraft is now expected to land close to the lunar south pole on Thursday around 5:30 p.m. ET.Success is not guaranteed. If it fails, Odysseus would become the third lunar lander to meet a fiery demise on the moon in less than a year. Russia’s first lunar lander mission in 47 years, Luna 25, failed in August 2023 when it crash-landed. Hakuto-R, a lander developed by Japan-based company Ispace, met a similar fate last April. Overall, more than half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure — tough odds for a feat humanity first pulled off nearly 60 years ago.
The Soviet Union’s Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to make a controlled, or “soft,” landing in February 1966. The United States followed shortly after when its robotic Surveyor 1 spacecraft touched down on the moon’s surface just four months later.Since then only three other countries — China, India and Japan — have achieved such a milestone. All three reached the moon with robotic vehicles for the first time in the 21st century. India and Japan each pulled off the monumental feat just within the past six months, long after the US-Soviet space race had petered out. The US remains the only country to have put humans on the lunar surface, most recently in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission.
But the US government hasn’t even tried for a soft landing — with or without astronauts on board — since then. Private space company Astrobotic Technology had hoped its Peregrine lunar lander would make history after its recent January launch, but the company waved off the landing attempt mere hours after liftoff because of a critical fuel leak and brought the spacecraft back to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.We’re learning to do things that we haven’t done in a long time, and what you’re seeing is organizations learning how to fly again,” Pace said. “Going to the moon is not a matter of just a brave or brilliant astronaut.
It’s a matter of entire organizations that are organized, trained, and equipped to go out there. What we’re doing now is essentially rebuilding some of the expertise that we had during Apollo but lost over the last 50 years.” Technical know-how, however, is only part of the equation when it comes to landing on the moon. Most of the hurdles are financial.
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