The Falcon 9 rocket of the US Space Exploration Technology Corporation (SpaceX) lifted off from Florida on the 15th aboard the Nova-C lunar landing craft Odysseus (Odysseus) developed by the private company Ntuitive Machines, which is the first moon landing program in more than half a century since the Apollo lunar mission, and the first attempt by a civilian-developed probe to land on the moon.
Reuters reported that the Odyssey was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center of the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Cape Can**eral, Florida at 1 a.m. EST (2 p.m. Taiwan time on the same day).
In a live webcast by NASA and SpaceX, the two-section, 25-story rocket can be seen rising from the launch pad, dragging a flaming red tail flame across the dark sky along Florida's Atlantic coast.
About 48 minutes after launch, Odyssey began its journey to the moon at an altitude of about 223 kilometers above Earth, detached from the rocket.
The launch was originally scheduled for the morning of the 14th, but the probe propulsion system detected a temperature anomaly and was delayed by 24 hours. SpaceX said the issue has been resolved.
Odysseus is expected to reach its destination after a week's flight and land on Feb. 22 on Malapert A crater, near the moon's south pole. If successful, the flight would be the first controlled landing of a U.S. spacecraft on the lunar surface since the last manned lunar mission of the Apollo program in 1972, and the first time a private business has attempted a successful landing on the moon.
The feat will also be the first time that NASA's lunar exploration program, Artemis, has traveled to the lunar surface. The United States hopes that China will get a head start and return astronauts to the moon before sending astronauts to the moon.
Although the launch is considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the rocket also carried six batches of NASA instruments, with the goal of collecting data on the lunar environment before NASA officially began its mission to return to the moon.
On January 8, the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, developed a large launch vehicle, the Vulcan Centaur, carrying the Peregrine, a lunar lander from private Astrobotic Technology, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. However, the problem of a propulsion system leak occurred not long after entering orbit, and this is already the third time that a private company has failed to make a soft landing on the moon, and it has also been a failure for private companies in Israel and Japan before.
Publish a collection of dragon cards to share millions of cash