First moon-landing by private company: What it means for lunar exploration

Your order was delivered… to the Moon! 📦@Int_Machines‘ uncrewed lunar lander landed at 6:23pm ET (2323 UTC), bringing NASA science to the Moon’s surface. These instruments will prepare us for future human exploration of the Moon under #Artemis. pic.twitter.com/sS0poiWxrU

— NASA (@NASA) February 22, 2024

This is the third moon-landing event within a year, after Chandrayaan-3 and Japans’ SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon).

New Beginnings

The landing of Odysseus marks a new beginning in the exploration of the Moon aimed at creating infrastructure and technology ecosystem capable of supporting long-term human presence. This is very different from the moon landings of the 1960s and 1970s by the US and the then Soviet Union, including the human landings by Apollo Missions. Those were landmark scientific events in themselves, but could not be immediately built upon, in the form of exploitation of lunar resources for example, because the associated technologies were yet to be developed.

To put it in perspective, the first moon landing, by Luna 9 of the Soviet Union, happened in 1966 just nine years after the beginning of the space age in 1957 with the launch of Sputnik 1 that was the first spacecraft to reach an orbit around the Earth. The first human landing on the Moon, through the Apollo 11 mission, took place just 12 years after the dawn of space age. The technology ecosystem that could utilise these historic successes for a longer-term exploration and resource utilisation had not been built.

The latest landing is part of the US resolve to return to the Moon in a big way through the Artemis programme. It is not just about landing spacecraft or human beings on the Moon, but about creating the infrastructure and the economy that will lead to more meaningful exploration of the Moon, even allowing for its use to go much further into space.

The Artemis programme depends heavily on the support of private and commercial space agencies. It has a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative through which NASA is working with such private companies to deliver equipment and technology to the Moon, and create a sustainable economy around lunar journeys. This enables quicker sorties, technology dispersion, capacity building and larger pool of people working on lunar projects.

Troubled start

The first launch as part of the CLPS initiative was by a company called Astrobotic last month, but it developed problems shortly after launch and could not reach the Moon. Like Odysseus, both the spacecraft as well as the rocket on that mission came from private companies.

Odysseus is the first success of the CLPS initiative. NASA has already contracted 14 space companies for such missions. At least six more lunar landings by these companies are scheduled by 2026, the year NASA plans to land the first human beings after the Apollo Missions, including one more from Intuitive Machines later this year.