Landing on the Moon

Thursday, an American unmanned craft “the size of a British phone booth” according to CNN¹, has landed on the Moon. The ship missionn is executed by a private company, Intuitive Machines, with NASA as a customer shipping 6 payloads, including the NDL experiment, for a 118M$ service contract. Turns out the mission wasn’t as smooth as they’d hoped.

Ars Technica reports A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon:

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?

To land the craft the engineers had to improvise. Once again the public sector, NASA, saved a private business from failing. On the technological standpoint it’s impressive they could do this from 400.000 km away. That’s remote work.

The landing wasn’t 100% either. Odysseus has tripped on a stone and is now horizontal.

Nonetheless this is historically relevant, as the Artemis II mission is due to lauch a crewed mission around the Moon, in 2025 at the earliest.

Also did you notice that the craft has ads visible?