CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — China and India scored moon landings, while Russia, Japan and Israel ended up in the lunar junk pile.
Now two private companies are trying to get the U.S. back into the game, more than five decades after the Apollo program ended.
It’s part of a NASA-backed effort to kick-start commercial lunar deliveries as the space agency focuses on returning astronauts to the moon.
“They are explorers going to the moon before us,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology is on top with a planned lander launch Monday aboard a brand new rocket, United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. Houston’s Intuitive Machines plans to launch a lander in mid-February that will fly with SpaceX.
Then there is Japan, which will try to land in two weeks. The Japanese Space Agency’s lander carrying two toy-sized rovers had a big head start, sharing a September launch with an X-ray telescope left in orbit.
If successful, Japan will become the fifth country to conduct a moon landing. Russia and the US did this repeatedly in the 1960s and 1970s. China has landed three times in the past decade – including on the far side of the moon – and will return to the far side later this year to bring back lunar samples. And last summer, India did it. Only the US has put astronauts on the moon.
Landing without destroying is not an easy task. There is hardly any atmosphere to slow down spacecraft, and parachutes clearly won’t work. That means a lander must descend using thrusters while navigating treacherous cliffs and craters.
A Japanese millionaire’s company, ispace, saw its lander crash into the moon last April, followed by the Russian emergency landing in August. India was victorious near the Antarctic a few days later; it was the country’s second attempt after the 2019 crash. An Israeli nonprofit also crashed into the moon in 2019.
The United States has not attempted a moon landing since Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17, the last of twelve moon walkers, explored the gray, dusty surface in December 1972. Mars beckoned and the moon disappeared into NASA’s rearview mirror as the space race between the US and the Soviet Union came to an end. The US followed with a handful or two of lunar satellites, but no controlled landers so far.
Astrobotic and intuitive machines are not only trying to end the drought of US moon landings, they are also vying for bragging rights as the first private entity to land – gently – on the moon.
Despite the later start, Intuitive Machines has a faster, more direct shot and should land within a week of launch. It will take Astrobotic two weeks to reach the moon and another month in lunar orbit before attempting a landing on February 23.
If there are missile delays that have already stalled both missions, either company could get there first.
“It’s going to be a wild, wild ride,” Astrobotic CEO John Thornton promised.
His counterpart at Intuitive Machines, Steve Altemus, said the space race is “more about geopolitics, where China is going, where the rest of the world is going.” That said, “We would certainly like to be the first.”
The two companies have been at odds since they each received nearly $80 million in 2019 under a NASA program to develop lunar delivery services. Fourteen companies are now under contract with NASA.
Astrobotic’s four-legged, 1.9-meter lander, named Peregrine after the fastest bird, a falcon, will carry 20 research packages to the moon for seven countries, including five for NASA and a rover-sized shoebox for Carnegie Mellon University . Peregrine Falcon will target the Sinus Viscositatis, or Bay of Stickiness, in the mid-latitudes, named for the long-ago silica magma that formed the nearby Gruithuisen Domes.
Intuitive Machines’ six-legged, 4-meter-tall lander, Nova-C, will target the moon’s south polar region and will also carry five experiments for NASA that will last about two weeks. The company is targeting 80 degrees south latitude for landing. That would be well within Earth’s Antarctica, Altemus noted, and 10 degrees closer to the pole than India landed last summer.
Scientists believe the permanently shadowed craters of the South Pole hold billions of pounds (kilograms) of frozen water that could be used to drink and make rocket fuel. That’s why the first moonwalkers from NASA’s Artemis program – named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology – will land there. NASA still has 2025 on the books for that launch, but the General Accountability Office suspects it will be closer to 2027.
Astrobotic will fly to the South Pole on its second flight, with NASA’s water-seeking Viper rover on board. And Intuitive Machines will return there for its second mission, delivering an ice drill for NASA.
Landing near the moon’s south pole is particularly risky.
“It’s so rocky and steep and full of craters at the south pole and mountainous, that it’s very difficult to find an illuminated area where you can land safely,” Altemus said. it in exactly the right place.”
While Houston has long been associated with space travel, Pittsburgh is a newcomer. To commemorate the Steel City, Astrobotic’s lander will carry a Kennywood amusement park token, the winner of a public vote that defeated the Steelers’ Terrible Towel waving at football games, dirt from Moon Township’s Moon Park and a Heinz pickle pin.
The lander also carries the ashes or DNA of 70 people, including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Another 265 people will be represented on the rocket’s upper stage, which will orbit the sun once it separates from the lander. They include three original Star Trek cast members, as well as locks of hair from three U.S. presidents: George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
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