Commercial trailers to the Moon contracted by NASA fly from December – 11/26/2023 – Messenger Sideral

Two American companies contracted by NASA to send payloads – in popular words, trailers – to the surface of the Moon are in the final stages of preparation for their inaugural missions. The first to be launched will probably be that of Astrobotic, which, if there are no unforeseen circumstances, should launch between the 24th and 26th of December.

The Pittsburgh company will carry 21 payloads from six countries (USA, Mexico, United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary and Japan) on board its Peregrine lander. It will be propelled into space by United Launch Alliance’s newest launcher, Vulcan, on its maiden flight.

The second will be promoted by Intuitive Machines, a Houston company that developed the Nova-C landing module and will carry 11 American payloads. The launch will take place with a Falcon 9 rocket, from SpaceX, and the expectation is that the departure will take place between January 12th and 16th, if everything goes well.

In both cases, the main customer is NASA, which will have six experiments on PM-1 (Astrobotic’s mission) and five on IM-1 (from Intuitive Machines). But cargo from universities, organizations and companies are also on board. The space agency’s idea with its commercial lunar transport program is this: to encourage companies to develop space transport solutions and services in which NASA is just another customer.

One of these two has a good chance of becoming the first company to carry out a successful landing, since to date all missions that have achieved a lunar landing, manned or unmanned, have been organized by countries’ space agencies. But which? The fight will be good. Peregrine will make a much longer journey, spending a good amount of time in orbit, around a month, before descending to the surface of the Moon, in the Sinus Viscositatis region, with landing scheduled for January 25th.

Nova-C, despite leaving later, will make a direct trip to the Moon, landing between three and five days after launch, on January 19 or 21. Detail: the company aims to land in the South Pole region, with an even higher latitude than the place where the Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission landed in August this year, making India the fourth country to land on the Moon and the first to visit this coveted region of the natural satellite.

With the two new launches, the era of commercial lunar missions may be about to begin. But will it work? Landing on the Moon is not easy, and two other companies have already failed (barely, it’s true) when trying: the Israeli SpaceIL, in 2019, and more recently the Japanese ispace, in 2023. Both promise to try again, and others are also in line to conduct their own trade missions.

NASA itself, the main financier in the case of American missions, recognizes that it is a risky investment, but believes it is worth encouraging space startups to develop low-cost landing modules, even if it loses some payloads along the way. The reward, if successful, will be a brutal increase in access to the Moon for scientific and commercial activities.

This column is published on Mondays in print, in Folha Corrida.

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