Or should that be Moon shot? Either way the IM Odysseus lander came up somewhat short in its mission.
Flight control engineers expect to lose contact with the private US moon lander Odysseus on Tuesday, cutting short the mission five days after its sideways touchdown, the company behind the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said.
It remained to be seen how much scientific data might be lost as a result of the shortened life of Odysseus, which, according to previous estimates from the company and its biggest customer, Nasa, would have otherwise operated on the moon for seven to 10 days.
The company's forecast for a premature end to the mission came as new details emerged about testing shortcuts and human error that led to an in-flight failure of the spacecraft's laser-guided range finders ahead of its landing last Thursday.
That human error was, remarkable. But in a way there's a broader issue:
An Intuitive Machines official said the loss of the range finders stemmed from the company's decision to forego a pre-launch test-firing of the laser system to save time and money during pre-flight checks of Odysseus at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"There were certainly things we could've done to test it and actually fire it. They would've been very time-consuming and very costly," Mike Hansen, the company's head of navigation systems, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday. "So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that risk."
On Friday, Intuitive Machines had disclosed that the laser range finders – designed to feed altitude and forward-velocity readings to Odysseus's autonomous navigation system – were inoperable because company engineers neglected to unlock the lasers' safety switch before launch on 15 February. The safety lock, akin to a firearm's safety switch, can only be disabled by hand.
In fairness all spaceflight is fraught with risk - but one has to wonder at the overall approach. Not that the mission lacked innovative aspects:
Despite its less-than-ideal touchdown, Odysseus became the first US spacecraft to land on the moon since Nasa's last crewed Apollo mission to the lunar surface brought astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt there in 1972.
It was also the first lunar landing ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle, and the first under Nasa's Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite this decade, before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.
Intuitive Machines has said it spent roughly $100m on the lander, and received $118m from Nasa under the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, a low-budget effort to stimulate competitive commercial rides to the moon.
How does that work though?
As often said on this site, space travel is difficult, remarkably difficult. Successfully launching a mission is only the first step. Beyond that is successfully making a journey and then successfully landing. And that's only the start of much of the scientific element of such missions. So much has to go right, so much can go wrong, and it only takes relatively minor errors, as in this instance, to see the functional utility of a mission partially or totally lost.
In some ways the achievement of successfully landing a probe on the Moon in these circumstances is remarkable. But whether this is a model for the future, that remains to be seen. As the Guardian notes: Shares of Intuitive Machines plunged 35% on Monday.
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