2024-02-15 07:03:06
After several failed attempts by various companies, another has set its sights on the first commercial moon landing. The “Nova-C” lander from the US company Intuitive Machines took off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida on Thursday, as live images from the US space agency NASA showed. The means of transport was a “Falcon 9” rocket from technology billionaire Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX.
The start was postponed from Wednesday to Thursday for technical reasons. The temperatures of the methane fuel deviated from the norm, NASA said in a statement.
Despite the launch postponement, Intuitive Machines still hopes for a moon landing on February 22nd. It would be the first – albeit unmanned – US moon landing since the Apollo missions over 50 years ago and the first commercial landing on Earth’s satellite in space history. The experiment is part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program. With this program, the US space agency wants to collect as much knowledge as possible on its own way back to the moon comparatively cheaply and efficiently by awarding contracts for lunar landings to private companies and working with them.
The “Nova-C” lander, nicknamed “Odysseus,” is regarding the size of an old-fashioned British phone booth, has aluminum legs, weighs around 700 kilograms and can carry around 130 kilograms of cargo. NASA has used a large part of it with research equipment and other things, while commercial companies have secured the rest for their projects.
However, moon landings are considered to be technically extremely demanding – and often go wrong. This year alone, two planned landings have turned out differently than hoped.
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