To put this in perspective, here is a list of lunar missions ever attempted [1]. Intuitive Machines is tied with JAXA, the ESA and ISRO in terms of successful landings [2], eclipsed only by the U.S., China and former Soviet Union (though not current Russia [3]).
Fun facts: Kazakhstan was the last to leave the Soviet Union and Baikonur is still rented to Russia until 2050. Let's hope renting it doesn't go sour like it did with the naval facilities in Ukraine's Crimea...
Clarification to the title: the spacecraft was developed by a private company, but it was publicly funded by way of NASA, as part of their Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program: https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar-payload-services/
> how is that different to Grumman building the Apollo moon lander?
NASA wholly owned and operated the lunar lander after it was built. Intuitive Machines owns and is operating the machines it built for NASA and can use the technology for other customers.
Grumman wasn’t operating their own Mission Control — NASA did. But NASA isn’t operating this mission, similar to how they don’t operate SpaceX missions even if they are funding them.
Sure, but when you pay a contractor to build a house it’s your house not theirs. IMO, saying something is private makes sense when the system is reusable and therefore the government is effectively renting a device for a specific mission. Similarly, if it’s software like Excel sold to companies and governments it’s private.
As a one way trip paid for by NASA, this is simply a NASA mission.
I get that this particular detail matters to you, but the title is accurate and in need of no 'clarification' at all.
There have been times in my career when my only client was the federal government. That did not make me a public servant. I wasn't at DARPA, I was a private contractor with DARPA. I assure you everyone involved is crystal-clear on the distinction.
I don’t think people realize that Government contracting doesn’t make you a Government entity. As far as anyone is concerned day-to-day, they’re just an important client.
This is a day to celebrate. This is a momentous achievement and I can’t wait to see private space scale to its potential — which is ginormous.
> I can’t wait to see private space scale to its potential — which is ginormous.
Misconceptions like this are precisely why I find it important to call out where the funds are coming from here... because the potential really isn't enormous.
There's a lot of commercial interest in putting satellites in orbit, yes. But there's no commercial interest in private moon landers. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing; I'm happy to see NASA find ways make their scientific endeavors more efficient. But moonshots (heh) like this are never going to be motivated by economics. There's just nothing on the moon to sell.
Wait does this mean that private corporations from the United States will compete against national governments in space? If so it’s history repeating itself and the private corporations will probably win again. Great news and proof that it’s working bravo!
Looks like, the race is on , to start harvesting minerals from the moon.There are still big challenges like sourcing water and setting up base camps to start with but if we can deploy mining machines, this could be a gamechanger.
I see that one of the instruments on board is supposed to measure space weather interactions with the moon. They landed just in time to catch data from an X6.7 flare that popped this afternoon and should arrive there before the lander goes dark.
The source of the funding is not important when it comes to the 'private' distinction.
The point of 'private' is that the company owns the technology and can sell it to whoever else is willing to pay. We've seen this with Dragon for instance, started as NASA funded, has since done completely privately funded free-floating spaceflight, several privately funded spaceflights to the ISS carrying astronauts from other countries (eg skipping the bureaucracy and other bs the country would have to go through to fly through an official seat via ESA), and has led to SpaceX privately working on EVA capability and proposing a Hubble orbit raising mission.
Additionally, being a private product, NASA paid them a fixed sum of money and that's mostly it. They don't care how the company allocates the money, they don't babysit the design. They've 'bought' a lunar landing attempt. So, for example, if IM ran over-budget, they spent their own money on it.
This is different from projects which are closer to public-private partnerships, like SLS. Where the company builds the rocket and is promised as much money as it costs, and in exchange NASA controls everything about the design, as well as owning the rocket once ready to launch and doing all the flight ops etc themselves.
You'd think it's worse, but at the end of the day it's not.
Just look at SpaceX blowing up rockets. You get some news about "Musks toy exploded, he'll never accomplish anything" and that's most of the story.
Now, when NASA's rocket explodes people get drug in front of congress and asked 50,000 questions about why their tax payer dollars are exploding while the science guy tries to explain that's what a prototype does.
It's not worse, that can only be a bad faith interpretation of what I described.
It's like arguing that if the government decides it needs more pens and decides to purchase them, causing a pen manufacturer to be able to expand their operation, the public has lost because instead the government should've put the far higher effort required into becoming a pen manufacturer themselves.
Since it apparently wasn't clear, in this model, NASA pays as a customer, everyone tolerates higher risk of failure, company gets to own and sell its product and NASA ideally gets to buy future rides on the product too. This "private" model allows NASA to cause a bunch of companies to develop and attempt to sell competing products, encouraging cost reductions and independent technology development, as is happening in rocketry with SpaceX, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity etc.
In the public-private partnership model, NASA pays much much more money, tolerates zero risk of failure, the company never puts in its own investment and has a guaranteed profit on top of whatever the project costs. On top of that, while the public technically owns the technology, it's ownership without meaning, because it isn't practical to switch to having a different company do manufacturing. Every time NASA wants another unit, they still have to pay the company a large sum of money to build and deliver it. This discourages innovation and encourages cost inflation. It leads to rockets that cost $4B+ per launch, unable to be built at faster than 1 per year, using outdated technology.
The advancement of spaceflight technology per taxpayer dollar has been orders of magnitude more with SpaceX than with Boeing or Lockheed Martin, to the benefit of everyone.
Goonhilly plays a crucial role in Intuitive Machines' "Lunar Tracking, Telemetry & Command Network", consisting of nine large antennas strategically positioned across seven global locations. These antennas facilitate the seamless exchange of information with the spacecraft as it becomes visible and are essential to the overall success of the mission.
I saw DSN [0] antenna DSS 54 reporting contact with "Lunar Node 1," which is a payload on IM-1. That doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of IM-1's data is going that route.
It has this EagleCam device which is supposed to have been ejected from the craft when it was 30m off the surface to capture images of the landing, see Wiki:
> "The EagleCam will use a Wi-Fi connection to the Odysseus lander to relay its images back to Earth."
It seems a bit iffy to change the mass of the craft like that while landing. The weak signal might be due to the craft having fallen over on its side, but time will tell.
They're still working on getting Starship to orbit, reentry and demonstrating cryogenic fuel transfer in space (there seems to be a decent chance of the first happening next month which would also allow for an attempt at the second, and maybe being able to demonstrate the third within the same ship too). Still a few steps to go before they can put a crew on-board and fly it out past the Moon. They've got to demonstrate reentry, the catching mechanism, orbital docking and refueling and life support.
For the catching mechanism they're going to want a second tower, for which the parts are only just starting to arrive at Starbase, so it'll probably be at least 6 months until that's assembled, and closer to 12 until it's through simpler testing and ready to take on a real catch. So probably a good 4-5 years until they're ready to put any humans onboard, and then another year or two after that to put complete amateurs onboard.
Their contract with NASA also requires them to demonstrate an unmanned moon landing, and I suspect that would come before dear moon unless they really want to piss the agency off.
You mean Yusaku Maezawa's art project where applicants were literally chosen based on the number of Twitter followers they had? It's still on but will likely be closer to 2033 now than the planned 2023.
That landing is as much a "US landing" as the profits of a private company, LOL. You live under capitalism, the only thing that gets socialized are the losses of big banks, everything else is priavte.
