A US spaceship attempting a lunar landing lifted off early yesterday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the second such private-led effort this year after the first ended in failure.
Intuitive Machines, the Houston company leading mission “IM-1,” hopes to become the first non-government entity to achieve a soft touchdown on the moon, and to land the first US robot on the surface since the Apollo missions more than five decades ago.
Its hexagonal-shaped Nova-C lander named Odysseus blasted off on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:06am yesterday local time.
Photo: AFP
IM-1 was supposed to blast off on Wednesday, but the launch was postponed after SpaceX discovered abnormal temperatures as it attempted to fuel up the lander.
The lander has a new type of supercooled liquid methane and oxygen engine giving it the power to reach its destination quickly, avoiding prolonged exposure to a region of high radiation surrounding the Earth known as the Van Allen belt.
Intuitive Machine’s Trent Martin this week said that the “opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore.”
Despite the postponement, the craft is still due to reach its landing site Malapert A on Thursday next week, an impact crater 300km from the south pole.
NASA hopes to eventually build a long-term presence and harvest ice there for both drinking water and rocket fuel under Artemis, its flagship moon-to-Mars program. NASA paid Intuitive Machines US$118 million to ship science hardware to better understand and mitigate environmental risks for astronauts, the first of whom are scheduled to land no sooner than 2026.
There is more colorful cargo aboard as well, including a digital archive of human knowledge and 125 mini-sculptures of the moon by the artist Jeff Koons.
After touchdown, the payloads are expected to run for roughly seven days before lunar night sets in on the south pole, rendering Odysseus inoperable.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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