US Spacecraft Attempts Risky Moon Landing, Hopes to Learn from Past Failures
Hundreds of thousands of miles beyond Earth, a phone booth-size spacecraft is en route to take on a challenge no vehicle launched from the United States has attempted in more than 50 years. The lunar lander called Odysseus or IM-1, created by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, is barreling toward the moon. The robotic explorer is preparing for the terrifying moments of uncertainty as it attempts to slow its speed by about 4,026 miles per hour (1,800 meters per second) in order to gently touch down on the moon’s surface. The spacecraft is on track to land at 5:49 p.m. ET Thursday near the lunar south pole.
Coverage of the historic event is expected to stream live starting around 4 p.m. ET on the private company’s website.
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.
Regaining past knowledge and experience is a big part of the challenge for the US, Scott Pace, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told CNN.
“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.
At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA’s budget comprised over 4% of all government spending. Today, the space agency’s budget is one-tenth the size, accounting for only 0.4% of all federal spending, even as it attempts to return American astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program.
“There were literally hundreds of thousands of people working on Apollo. It was a $100 billion program in 1960s numbers. It would be a multi-trillion-dollar program in today’s dollars,” said Greg Autry, director of space leadership at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. “There’s simply nothing that compares to it.”
The lunar landers of the 21st century are attempting to accomplish many of the same goals at a small fraction of the price.
India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander, which became the first spacecraft from the country to safely reach the lunar surface in August 2023, cost about $72 million, according to Jitendra Singh, the Minister of State for Science and Technology.
“The cost of Chandrayaan-3 is merely Rs 600 crore ($72 million USD), whereas a Hollywood film on space and moon costs more than Rs 600 crore,” Singh told The Economic Times, a media outlet in India, in August.
In the US, NASA is attempting to drastically reduce prices by outsourcing the design of small, robotic spacecraft to the private sector through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS.
Astrobotic was the first company to fly under the CLPS initiative, and after
