This feat was already achieved on Sunday by another Texan company, Firefly Aerospace, testifying to the current acceleration of space exploration, against a backdrop of increasing recourse to private industry.
It made history in 2024, becoming the first private company to land a machine on the Moon. The American company Intuitive Machines hopes to repeat its feat on Thursday, March 5, just a few days after the successful moon landing of another American robot. Its Athena probe will attempt to land gently on the lunar surface.
A feat achieved Sunday by another Texas company, Firefly Aerospace, testifying to the current acceleration of space exploration, against a backdrop of increasing recourse to private industry. Before Intuitive Machines managed in February 2024 to land its Odysseus robot on the moon, only a handful of countries, starting with the Soviet Union in 1966, had succeeded in doing so.
Odysseus had crashed during the moon landing, however, due to a failure of its navigation system that led it to approach the Moon too quickly. After a series of adjustments, the company aims to achieve this time a controlled moon landing near the South Pole of the Moon, the object of many desires, because there is water in the form of ice there. If it succeeds, it would be the first to approach it so closely.
The size of an adult giraffe
“This mission looks like it came out of one of our favorite science fiction movies,” NASA official Nicky Fox said at the probe’s launch a week ago. The U.S. space agency opted several years ago to have the private sector send hardware and technology to the moon in order to lower the cost of missions and speed up their pace.
More than four metres tall, about the size of an adult giraffe, the Athena probe is loaded with several scientific instruments designed in particular to drill into the ground in search of water and other resources.
It also carries a small robot named Grace in honor of the American mathematician Grace Hopper, capable of jumping and thus exploring hard-to-reach areas. Another machine on board Athena must test the installation of a 4G cellular network. All these experiments are intended to deepen scientific knowledge and prepare the ground for future human missions, as part of Artemis, NASA’s flagship program.
