In the years following the COVID pandemic, China, Japan, and India have successfully landed on the Moon, while other countries like South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel have flown past the Moon or entered lunar orbit. Recently, the American company Intuitive Machines, in collaboration with NASA, achieved a successful landing of its Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon, marking the first time a US-built spacecraft has landed on the Moon in over 50 years. What sets this mission apart is that it is the first time a private company has successfully delivered cargo to the Moon’s surface.
NASA has been focusing on destinations beyond the Earth-Moon system, such as Mars, but it has also funded US private industry through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to develop Moon landing concepts. This program aims to reduce the delivery costs of lunar payloads and allow NASA engineers to focus on other challenges.
Intuitive Machines, working with NASA, selected a landing site about 300 kilometers from the lunar south pole. This location presents challenges due to its heavily cratered terrain and long shadows, making it difficult for autonomous landing systems to find a safe spot for touchdown. NASA spent approximately $118 million to land six scientific payloads on Odysseus, which is relatively inexpensive. This low-cost lunar lander provides NASA with an efficient way to test new space hardware for future missions.
One of the technology tests conducted on the Odysseus lander was NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment (NDL), which proved crucial to the mission’s success. As the lander approached the surface, a navigation systems issue arose, but engineers managed to find a solution by utilizing data from NDL. After ten minutes of silence, a weak signal was detected from Odysseus, leading to celebrations in the mission control room.
Although the lander is not perfectly upright and likely partially toppled over upon landing, it is generating sufficient power, and the team is receiving the first images from the surface. The science payload, located on the side of the lander facing upwards, is expected to be deployed successfully. However, a privately contributed artwork connected to NFTs, located on the side facing downwards, may have been affected.
NASA’s commercial approach to low-cost payload services acknowledges that failures are part of the process. The goal is to eventually have multiple commercial launch and landing providers emerge from the program. The accumulated knowledge from operating hardware in space is just as important as the hardware itself.
The market for commercial lunar payloads remains uncertain, and funding may decrease once the novelty wears off. However, civil space agencies and taxpayers will continue to support space exploration for shared science goals. Ideally, commercial providers will offer NASA an efficient method for testing key technologies needed for future missions. Australia could also benefit from these lower-cost payload providers to develop its own scientific space program and space technologies.
However, Australia’s limited resources and lower spending on scientific research pose challenges. To support planetary science and space exploration, Australians must decide whether to allocate resources to compete with NASA and US private industry or leverage these providers to develop their own space program with associated benefits to the knowledge economy, education, and national security.
