The US firm Intuitive Machines will quickly try to grow to be the primary personal agency to land a spacecraft on the moon. Three earlier efforts by different firms have failed, highlighting the treacherous path forward for Intuitive Machines’s Nova-C lander.

The spacecraft, nicknamed Odysseus, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 14 February. It’ll journey atop a Falcon 9 rocket manufactured by SpaceX. If the mission, known as IM-1, goes properly, Odysseus ought to land close to the south pole of the moon on 22 February.

The purpose of the IM-1 mission, except for proving {that a} personal firm can land on the moon, is to hold six NASA payloads and 5 business payloads to the lunar floor. The NASA devices embody instruments to review how the touchdown itself produces plumes of moon mud, a number of units to assist the craft land safely and a tool to measure radio waves and the way they have an effect on the lunar floor. The business payloads embody a digital camera that will probably be tossed off the lander earlier than it touches all the way down to take images of the touchdown, 125 tiny sculptures by artist Jeff Koons and a chip designed to ascertain an archive of human data on the moon.

IM-1 is a part of NASA’s Industrial Lunar Payload Providers (CLPS) initiative, which awards authorities contracts to non-public firms with the purpose of accelerating exploration and growing a lunar financial system. That is the second CLPS mission – the primary, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, suffered a gasoline leak shortly after its January launch that prevented it from reaching the moon.

There have been two different makes an attempt by personal firms to land on the moon – SpaceIL’s Beresheet craft and ispace’s Hakuto-R – however each crash-landed and had been destroyed. If Odysseus succeeds the place the others failed, Intuitive Machines’s subsequent step is to ship one other Nova-C lander, geared up with a drill to reap underground ice, to the moon’s south pole. That mission is deliberate for March 2024.