HOUSTON – NASA and Intuitive Machines held a news conference Wednesday afternoon to discuss the Odysseus lunar lander, framing its mission as an incredible success in a pathfinder sense and glowing with optimism for what’s now planned.
The IM-1 Mission landed Feb. 22, marking the first U.S. soft landing on the moon in more than 50 years. It was Intuitive Machines’ first mission, seeking to bring six NASA science instruments to the lunar south pole as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and Artemis campaign.
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Odysseus landed sideways, however. After Intuitive Machines stated Monday that flight controllers would only be able to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday due in part to how the lander’s solar panels were expected to lose sunlight given sub-optimal Earth and moon positioning, the company’s social media was updated several times since with messaging that flight controllers were able to continue communicating with the lander.
The latest such update ahead of Wednesday’s news conference came down Tuesday morning as Intuitive Machines shared several images showing what it said are the closest observations of any spaceflight to the moon’s south pole region.
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Wednesday, Intuitive Machines CEO and co-founder Steve Altemus said that Odysseus would go on to complete its mission and gather as much data as possible after going to sleep for two to three weeks, attempting to make it through a lunar night for its batteries to grab solar power at the next available opportunity.
“What we’ve gotten in terms of data on the vehicle is a tremendous amount of the guidance navigation control data, all the propulsion data, all the performance data for the vehicle that will allow us to completely reconstruct the mission and tell you all of the idiosyncrasies that went on throughout the mission, and we’ll do a mission reconstruction and then evaluation on how the performance of this mission will play itself forward to missions two and three and subsequent missions,” Altemus said. “...What we’ve done in the process of this mission, though, is we’ve fundamentally changed the economics of landing on the moon and we’ve kicked open the door for a robust, thriving cislunar economy in the future. That’s compelling, and so I think this CLPS experiment, this first landing, the success on the moon, first time in 52 years, is really a point in history that we should celebrate as we move forward to subsequent missions around the moon.”
Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for Exploration and the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, said that IM-1 could be thought of as a flight test, a pathfinder mission collecting data to bolster both robotic science flights and future human exploration.
“This also provides evidence for the first time that the Commercial Lunar Payload Services model — that is that NASA can go out and purchase as a service taking equipment to the surface of the moon and getting data back from the surface of the moon — can work, and it’s the first time that we now have that evidence,” Kearns said.
Watch the news conference again in the media player below:
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