Despite the imperfect landing, NASA and company officials said they considered the mission — the first American spacecraft to land on the moon in more than 50 years — a success. It is also the first commercial vehicle ever to touch down on the lunar surface.
“Yes, it is a success from NASA’s point of view,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wednesday in response to a question at a news conference.
The fact that the lander ended up somewhat sideways did not matter, Nelson said, especially since there were no people on board. “There’s a big difference on landing a crew and landing a bunch of instruments,” he said.
The spacecraft landed in the south pole region of the moon, a largely unexplored area, where there is thought to be water in the form of ice and where NASA wants to eventually send astronauts as part of its Artemis program.
The Nova-C spacecraft, called Odysseus, was expected to generate power until early Wednesday evening, some six days after the Thursday landing. Once the sun reappears on the horizon and shines on the spacecraft’s solar panels in a couple of weeks, the company will try to wake it and communicate with it, officials said.
While officials said they were able to communicate with all of the scientific and technological instruments on board the vehicle, one of them, a system that was designed to study how the spacecraft’s engines kicked up lunar dust, failed to do that because it was not working during the landing, officials told a news conference.
Another instrument, a camera system called EagleCam that was designed by students and faculty at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, did not deploy as expected during the landing to take photos of the descent. Ground controllers were able to power it up Wednesday morning and eject it to about 13 feet from the lander. But it still has not sent back any photos.
Steve Altemus, Intuitive Machines’ CEO, said during the news conference that “something might not be working correctly,” either in the camera or in the WiFi signal back to the lander. “The Embry-Riddle team is working on that and wrestling with that to see if there’s anything they can do,” he said.
The spacecraft ended up skidding across the surface, he said, after engineers realized that its laser guidance system was not working because an enable switch had not been flipped before the flight.
“That was an oversight, and we missed it,” Altemus said. He characterized it, however, as a part of a series of “minor things that are easily corrected.” The spacecraft was able to switch to a NASA-designed navigation system, which was on board the spacecraft as a test instrument.
Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer, said that had the laser system been working, “we would have nailed the landing.”
The mission was performed under a $118 million contract with NASA as part of the agency’s $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which seeks to send a fleet of robotic spacecraft to the moon. The goal is to get better at landing on the moon and to do so with some frequency, so that NASA can ultimately build a base there.
In many ways, the mission was a test flight, the first to the moon by Intuitive Machines to see whether it could send a spacecraft there with a relatively small budget. It intends to send other landers to the moon, perhaps as early as this year.
“This mission was intended as a scout and a pilot mission to go land on the surface, collect the data, and then the cold of night was going to take the lander,” Altemus said. “We accomplished that.”
The landing portended something bigger, he said, for the commercial space sector that NASA is increasingly relying on to accomplish its exploration goals.
“We’ve fundamentally changed the economics of landing on the moon,” he said. “And we’ve kicked open the door for a robust, thriving lunar economy in the future. That’s compelling.”
