Intuitive Machines Faces Another Setback After Second Lunar Lander Topples, Prematurely Dies
Last February, NASA praised Intuitive Machines for successfully landing a commercial craft on the Moon — marking the US’s first soft landing on the lunar surface since Apollo 17. However, their “success” came with a big asterisk. While the enterprise’s IM-1 lander arrived in one piece, it came in too hot and toppled over, making it more of a crash landing. Still, the proof of concept was compelling enough — spurring a $4.82B contract from America’s space agency for the still-unproven space company. But a year later, it might ultimately regret that.
- Last week, Intuitive’s second Moon lander arrived on the Moon much in the same fashion its first lander arrived — arriving off target, too hot, and falling over.
- With the lander on its side, it was unable to receive solar power, causing it to prematurely die on Friday, marking the second untimely demise for an Intuitive lander.
Mission gone sideways: IM-2 was expected to operate for 10 days, with NASA paying $62M to the organization to get its three missions to the Moon — including PRIME-1, a payload intended to drill into the lunar surface to look for signs of water. The mission’s other payloads were intended to put down a data center on the Moon, delivering 4G/LTE to the lunar surface, while other missions aimed to measure the Moon’s radiation field, take photos, and deploy a commercial lunar rover. Unfortunately, while some collected isolated data, many of them were unable to deploy. As a result, Intuitive says they might delay next year’s planned IM-3 launch to a later time, with the company hoping a new communications satellite can help prevent a third incident. fell 22% on Monday.
