US achieves first moon landing in half century with private spacecraft
reuters.com
reuters.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#M...
NASA wholly owned and operated the lunar lander after it was built. Intuitive Machines owns and is operating the machines it built for NASA and can use the technology for other customers.
It’s about as ‘private’ as the F-22.
As a one way trip paid for by NASA, this is simply a NASA mission.
There have been times in my career when my only client was the federal government. That did not make me a public servant. I wasn't at DARPA, I was a private contractor with DARPA. I assure you everyone involved is crystal-clear on the distinction.
This is a day to celebrate. This is a momentous achievement and I can’t wait to see private space scale to its potential — which is ginormous.
Misconceptions like this are precisely why I find it important to call out where the funds are coming from here... because the potential really isn't enormous.
There's a lot of commercial interest in putting satellites in orbit, yes. But there's no commercial interest in private moon landers. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing; I'm happy to see NASA find ways make their scientific endeavors more efficient. But moonshots (heh) like this are never going to be motivated by economics. There's just nothing on the moon to sell.
Also, Intuitive Machines is a public company with non government investors.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/building-apollo
Though notably here, the CEO is a former NASA cadre.
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"And that's why they're everywhere"!
https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1760865713948885120?s...
The point of 'private' is that the company owns the technology and can sell it to whoever else is willing to pay. We've seen this with Dragon for instance, started as NASA funded, has since done completely privately funded free-floating spaceflight, several privately funded spaceflights to the ISS carrying astronauts from other countries (eg skipping the bureaucracy and other bs the country would have to go through to fly through an official seat via ESA), and has led to SpaceX privately working on EVA capability and proposing a Hubble orbit raising mission.
Additionally, being a private product, NASA paid them a fixed sum of money and that's mostly it. They don't care how the company allocates the money, they don't babysit the design. They've 'bought' a lunar landing attempt. So, for example, if IM ran over-budget, they spent their own money on it.
This is different from projects which are closer to public-private partnerships, like SLS. Where the company builds the rocket and is promised as much money as it costs, and in exchange NASA controls everything about the design, as well as owning the rocket once ready to launch and doing all the flight ops etc themselves.
Thanks for clarifying, I guess.
Just look at SpaceX blowing up rockets. You get some news about "Musks toy exploded, he'll never accomplish anything" and that's most of the story.
Now, when NASA's rocket explodes people get drug in front of congress and asked 50,000 questions about why their tax payer dollars are exploding while the science guy tries to explain that's what a prototype does.
It's like arguing that if the government decides it needs more pens and decides to purchase them, causing a pen manufacturer to be able to expand their operation, the public has lost because instead the government should've put the far higher effort required into becoming a pen manufacturer themselves.
Since it apparently wasn't clear, in this model, NASA pays as a customer, everyone tolerates higher risk of failure, company gets to own and sell its product and NASA ideally gets to buy future rides on the product too. This "private" model allows NASA to cause a bunch of companies to develop and attempt to sell competing products, encouraging cost reductions and independent technology development, as is happening in rocketry with SpaceX, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity etc.
In the public-private partnership model, NASA pays much much more money, tolerates zero risk of failure, the company never puts in its own investment and has a guaranteed profit on top of whatever the project costs. On top of that, while the public technically owns the technology, it's ownership without meaning, because it isn't practical to switch to having a different company do manufacturing. Every time NASA wants another unit, they still have to pay the company a large sum of money to build and deliver it. This discourages innovation and encourages cost inflation. It leads to rockets that cost $4B+ per launch, unable to be built at faster than 1 per year, using outdated technology.
https://www.satelliteevolution.com/post/goonhilly-s-key-role...
Intuitive Machines has also been contracted for additional Lunar communications.
https://www.intuitivemachines.com/lunar-data-services
Addendum:
I saw DSN [0] antenna DSS 54 reporting contact with "Lunar Node 1," which is a payload on IM-1. That doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of IM-1's data is going that route.
0. https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html
1. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/nasa-to...
> "The EagleCam will use a Wi-Fi connection to the Odysseus lander to relay its images back to Earth."
It seems a bit iffy to change the mass of the craft like that while landing. The weak signal might be due to the craft having fallen over on its side, but time will tell.
Ok, I consider those images lost.
I've looked at a few articles and it does look like they're actually using Wi-Fi.
(This will no doubt confuse some non-techie people, who use "Wi-Fi" to mean "an Internet connection".)
For the catching mechanism they're going to want a second tower, for which the parts are only just starting to arrive at Starbase, so it'll probably be at least 6 months until that's assembled, and closer to 12 until it's through simpler testing and ready to take on a real catch. So probably a good 4-5 years until they're ready to put any humans onboard, and then another year or two after that to put complete amateurs onboard.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/news/companies/government-b...