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America is back on the Moon 50 years after the last Apollo mission, which left our natural satellite in 1972. This time the US-made vehicle that touched the lunar soil is a private lander built by the company Intuitive Machine, IM-1 is the acronym, and this is a fundamental point for the new space program of NASA and its over 30 allies, Europe in the lead, who are contributing to the Artemis mission to return to the Moon, in a stable form this time. Everything cost NASA a negligible amount compared to the past, 118 million, and confirmed that the idea of financing many medium-sized private companies to have many different flights to the lunar South Pole, necessary for the NASA program, is good and practicable .
Space, the American IM-1 Odysseus lander traveling to the Moon
The moon landing at 00:20 on Friday
Tonight, around 0.20 am Italian time, the final part of the descent began, obviously followed with anxiety and trepidation, increased by the radio silence of the first 15 minutes after the moon landing. The worst was feared, but then the signals from the probe began to arrive, even if weak. In the next few hours we will understand why and hopefully we will have the first images.
A very important moment therefore, given that it confirms NASA’s program and strategy, delegating a lot to private individuals, and also because in the last year various private probes had failed in the attempt to land on the moon at the South Pole, the region rich in water ice choice for the first human settlements on the Moon in the next decade.
The NASA CLPS program
The NASA program, CLPS, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, involves many trips to that lunar region, all carried out by private individuals to study the region itself and its characteristics, before arriving astronauts. In the case of Intuitive Machine’s IM-1 lander, renamed Odysseus in honor of the great traveler Homeric hero, which arrived on the Moon a few hours ago, there are many scientific instruments, they serve to understand how the landing engine interacts with the dust of the lunar soil, which has always been a problem for astronauts and vehicles, or understanding the precision with which it is possible to position oneself on the ground during the moon landing.
But on the IM-1 Odysseus there is a bit of everything, marketing hits hard in the case of private individuals. We therefore find some insulating material from a well-known brand of sportswear, a sculpture by the famous Jeff Koons, a “time capsule” with the cornerstones of terrestrial culture and knowledge