Intuitive lunar landing: Why it took 50 years for America to get back to the moon

At 6.23 p.m. New York time Thursday, Intuitive Machines landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon, the first private firm to place a vehicle intact on the lunar surface.

NASA, which paid nearly $118 million for this mission, posted congratulations on the X social media platform: “Your order was delivered … to the Moon!” Intuitive Machines will eventually send two additional landers to the moon in partnership with NASA. 

Firms have raced to claim the title of landing the first private craft in one piece on the moon. An Israeli nonprofit, SpaceIL, tried in 2019, but its craft came in too fast and crashed on the surface. Last year, Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. lost contact with its lander. And in January, Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s lander suffered engine failure just after reaching space. 

Since the US successfully put people on the moon half a century ago, why did it prove so difficult for companies to do it again?

The moon is a harsh environment. It’s difficult to design spacecraft that can navigate its surface and it’s almost impossible to recreate those situations on Earth for testing. And private companies’ resources pale in comparison to what NASA had in the 1960s: a war chest that once ballooned to roughly 4% of the overall US federal budget.

The biggest hurdle may have been engineers and companies with little or no moonshot experience. It has been more than 50 years since people have designed and sent landers to the moon, so firms were starting from almost scratch and working with novel technologies.

The moon is roughly a quarter the width of our planet, with much less gravity overall, making it hard to maneuver into orbit. Its rough terrain, craters and other factors spreads the gravity unevenly.

Robotic landers often rely on information collected by the vehicle’s sensors, as well as imagery of their landing target collected ahead of time, which is often not very high resolution. Complicating things is the moon’s distance from Earth. There’s usually a few seconds of delay when sending commands to these spacecraft.

“You have to do this all autonomously,” Addie Dove, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida working on a moon landing mission, told Bloomberg. 

“There’s no way for a human to correct things in real time just because of how quickly it all happens.”

An added layer of difficulty for Intuitive Machines was its assigned target. Originally, the company hoped to land near the moon’s relatively flat equator, which is where all the Apollo missions landed. But NASA asked the company to change its landing site to the moon’s south pole region — a spot that numerous countries have been eyeing and that India neared with the landing of its Chandrayaan-3 last August after a Russian attempt failed.

Data collected by robotic spacecraft visiting the moon has confirmed that many of the south pole’s craters may contain pockets of water in the form of ice. NASA and others are potentially interested in mining this ice, which could be used for drinking water or crops. If broken apart into its elemental components — hydrogen and oxygen — the water could also become future propellants for rockets.