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On Thursday (February 22), a phone booth-sized spacecraft named Odysseus made history. Landing on the moon’s south pole At 6:23 p.m. ET, Odysseus, built by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, became the first U.S. lander to land on the moon in more than 50 years and the first commercial lander to reach the moon’s surface. It became.
The success was a welcome break for various countries and private companies from a series of lunar failures that saw five of the previous nine lunar landing missions fail.
A few weeks ago, on January 19, Japan’s Smart Lander for Lunar Exploration (SLIM) probe successfully surveyed Japan’s lunar surface. first moon landing — Even if it’s over upside down on the moon Engine trouble occurred during descent. The tilted lander’s solar cells were facing in the wrong direction, unable to power equipment and communications, and engineers were forced to shut down, fearing the batteries would discharge. (Engineers temporarily restored power to the lander after 10 days, but her SLIM science observations were curtailed due to the impending lunar night.) just a few hours before going offline again. )
Just 10 days before SLIM’s landing, the U.S. civilian lunar lander Peregrine encountered a number of post-launch anomalies, including a propellant leak that prevented it from landing on the moon.it is ultimately Changes route and collides with Earth’s atmosphere.Other moon landing attempts Japan and Russia 2023 ended similarly, this time with a catastrophic crash on the moon.
Government-funded space agencies have successfully landed on the moon: the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, India And Japan. Only one private company (Intuitive Machines) has succeeded so far, and several high-profile missions have failed due to technical flaws that led to fatal judgments of speed, altitude, and heading. This is still a stark reminder, half a century after the Apollo astronauts. Despite walking on the moon, our closest celestial neighbor remains a difficult and dangerous destination.
So what is given? Did the moon landing make humanity worse? Or, like the teams behind the Apollo program, are we simply grappling with a new era of technological advancement?
“We haven’t been ‘stupid’ since the Apollo landings.” Chava ParothaiProfessor of Physics and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne told Live Science. Today, technology has advanced significantly. Mobile phones have more computing power than computers in the 1970s. “But since the ’70s, there hasn’t been an astronaut or lander pilot to fix what a computer can’t or won’t do,” Palotai added.
Advances in technology (again)
Don’t get me wrong. Landing on the moon is difficult, with or without a human pilot.
The big hurdle is that the moon has virtually no atmosphere. Palotai said the moon’s atmosphere is so thin and changes over time that engineers cannot install parachutes to slow the spacecraft. Instead, the mission will use a fuel-powered propulsion system to descend to the lunar surface, making it difficult to slow the spacecraft from a few kilometers per second to a complete stop.
But this and other lunar exploration challenges are not new.
Although the Apollo program ultimately succeeded in landing humans on the moon, it was the culmination of a large-scale program that had many failures before reaching success. Early attempts by the United States and Soviet Union to fly spacecraft to the moon were fraught with failures, including post-launch explosions, guidance system failures, and fatal errors in deploying solar panels. Even the historic Apollo 11 mission, which landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, ran into difficulties with a worrying lack of fuel. Multiple unexpected alarms Just before landing on the moon.
“People tend to forget mission failures as part of the learning process.” jack burns, director of the NASA-funded Exploration and Space Science Network at the University of Colorado Boulder. This experiential learning perch is currently home to a growing number of lunar exploration missions, especially privately funded ones. “Landing on the moon remains difficult, but not impossible,” he said.
Burns and other experts agree that almost everything has changed since the Apollo missions, including the now outdated technology that took humans to the moon and back in the ’60s and ’70s. . Engineers who participated in the Apollo program built the first computers of the time. That includes a sensor that has since become even more powerful at a fraction of its original size. Much of the software and architecture customized for the Apollo program is virtually useless for today’s space missions.
Additionally, “that whole generation has retired from the industry at this point, and a lot of that knowledge has been lost,” said John Thornton of Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology, which built and operated Peregrine. said the CEO. “We’re relearning how to do this, and we’re doing it with new and different technology.”
It’s been half a century since humans last walked on the moon, and a smaller organization than NASA, with a new generation of engineers, is tackling the same challenges that only governments have accomplished in the past. Palotai, Thornton and Burns see the recent failure of the moon mission as the natural development of a new industry.
“Personally, I’m not worried,” Burns said. “It’s just some of the growing pains.”
Paving the way to affordable lunar exploration
Technical issues will affect mission outcomes, but funding will determine how much software and hardware testing will be done before launch to reduce risk.
“If we had $1 billion to complete this mission, we would have a much better chance of success,” Thornton said of the Peregrine, where the investigation into the mission failure is expected to take one to two months. “But we’re trying to do this at a much lower cost. So by the time we get to that breakthrough moment where we say, ‘Okay, we know exactly how to do it at this price point.’ It means you have to try more times.” Repeat it over and over again. ”
In the ’60s and ’70s, when the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was heating up, the Apollo program was the core of NASA’s work, and the space agency had a budget ten times larger than it does today to do the same thing. I was there. Between 1960 and 1973, NASA spent his $25.8 billion (at the time he spent $257 billion) adjusted for inflation) was associated with the Apollo program and was supported by nearly 5% of the total US federal budget.
In comparison, NASA currently receives less than 0.5% of all federal spending, and its budget also funds missions to destinations beyond the moon.
“It changes everything,” Thornton said. At the time, NASA was happily carrying out developments that cost tens of billions of dollars. By comparison, the industry is currently trying to build spacecraft for about $100 million, an affordability that is key to regular flights. This problem is fundamentally different from the Apollo-era problem. “It’s going to take time to learn how to do that at that price point,” Thornton said.
Lowering the cost of a mission also increases the risk of failure, at least initially. Martin BarstowProfessor of Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of Leicester, UK, told Live Science. So “it shouldn’t be too surprising that some of these things don’t work,” Barstow added.
first commercial victory
The successful landing of the Odysseus spacecraft on February 22 was a welcome development for the commercial spaceflight industry.
The lander (nicknamed “Odi”) delivered 12 payloads to the moon, including six NASA scientific instruments. For these, the space agency paid Intuitive Machines $118 million through the Commercial Lunar Payload Service Program (CLPS). The program is designed to award contracts to private companies to send experiments to the moon, rather than NASA conducting the experiments itself. (NASA’s moon missions can cost him up to $1 billion each.)
As part of the same CLPS program, Astrobotic plans to launch its second robotic lunar lander, Griffin, and an underwater exploration rover in November of this year.
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