The next phase of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services moon exploration program began on Jan. 15, with the launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost. It continued with the launch of the Intuitive Machines Athena lander on Feb. 26. Since the Blue Ghost also had the iSpace Resilience lander as a rideshare, at one point three spacecraft were headed for the lunar surface.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost landed in the Mare Crisium, northeast of the Sea of Tranquility, in what was described as a clockwork landing with no anomalies in the early morning hours of March 2. Firefly engineers immediately began activating the 10 payloads on the lander for a 14-day campaign of scientific discovery.
Intuitive Machines IM-2 Athena touched down on the moon’s Mons Mouton region of the lunar south pole on Thursday. Its main mission will be to hunt for lunar ice, a crucial resource needed by future moon explorers.
Unfortunately, as with the first Intuitive Machines landing attempt, the Athena proved to be an incomplete success.
“We don’t believe we’re in the correct attitude” on the lunar surface, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said. Later it was found that Athena had landed in a nearby crater and tipped over.
As of this writing, it is uncertain how much science can be returned from the mission. Intuitive Machines reports that given “the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels and extreme cold temperatures in the crater,” it does not expect Athena to recharge. The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.
Athena includes a mini-rover called MAPP, which was designed to collect samples from the vicinity of the lander. MAPP also would take 3-D images and video for transmission to Earth.
The probe also carries a hopper vehicle named Grace, named after Adm. Grace Hopper, a pioneering software engineer. Grace uses thrusters to venture from place to place in the vicinity of the landing site, including inside a permanently shadowed crater that may contain water ice.
The Athena probe comes equipped with several instruments including the Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) and the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations (MSolo).
The probe also contains 4-G cellular equipment developed by Nokia and NASA to provide more bandwidth communications than ever before from the lunar surface.
Along with the unsuccessful Astrobotic Peregrine and the partially successful Intuitive Machines Odysseus missions of early 2024, it looks like the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program still has mixed results, with one unsuccessful attempt, two partially successful attempts and one entirely successful.
The original assumption was that commercial lunar landings would be, to use a basketball term, “shots on goal” with some of them failing. Obviously, the more successful missions there are, the more lunar exploration advances.
The four Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions (so far) do offer proof of the SpaceX effect, how the drastic lowering of launch costs by Elon Musk’s launch company has enabled more commercial missions. The Astrobotic Peregrine was launched by a Vulcan Centaur, but the subsequent three were lofted to the moon by SpaceX Falcon 9s.
Even though Musk regards the moon as a “distraction” to his desire to go to Mars, his launch company has enabled lunar exploration as never before.
The next two Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions, scheduled to occur later this year, the Astrobotic Griffin and Intuitive Machines’ next lander, dubbed Prism, will also launch on SpaceX Falcon rockets. Other Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions are scheduled for the next few years.
Resilience, the Japanese lander that caught a ride on the Blue Ghost launch, is due to land on the moon no earlier than June 2025.
Unless NASA undertakes a Musk-inspired pivot away from the moon and exclusively toward Mars, human beings will follow the Commercial Lunar Payload Services robot explorers, The Artemis II crewed lunar circumnavigation mission is scheduled for 2026.
Artemis III, so long as it is undertaken, will be a world-historic event toward which all of these missions are leading. Currently, the first crewed moon landing in 55 years is scheduled for 2027.
The next crewed moon landing will be the greatest and most followed event (so far) of the 21st century. Just as Apollo 11 provided a balm to all the turmoil and chaos of the 1960s, Artemis III will provide the same service for the current century, which started with the attacks on 9/11 and, in some measure, has only gone downhill since.
And that will only be the beginning if we follow wise policy. A lunar settlement would be a center of commerce, science and technological innovation that would enrich our civilization beyond the power of evaluation.
The conquest of the moon, not to mention Mars and beyond, will help to ensure the rest of the 21st century is much better than the first 25 years have been.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
