The company said Monday the mission had "no chance of soft landing" – dashing hopes for the first ever successful landing by a non-government mission, and America's first soft touchdown on the Moon since Apollo
SpaceX’s Falcon rocket blasted off in the middle of the night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, dispatching Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander on its way to the moon, 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) away. The lander resembled a stunning six-pointed star jewel — each point a leg ...
“I will be astonished if this happens,” said Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, noting that a lunar lander still needs to be designed, built and tested. “That is a hard challenge on a five year time scale even without political...
EngineeringTechnologyAstrobotic, the firm that launched the Peregrine spacecraft, says it will learn from any missteps and look ahead to its next attempt.doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00038-3Alexandra WitzeMagdalena SkipperNature Publishing Group UKNature...
The Chang'e-5 successfully landed on the near side of moon, China's National Space Administration announced on Tuesday. Now that it has reached the lunar surface, the lander will collect two kilograms of lunar samples to bring back to Earth. Check out The China Report, our new weekly ...
(4-meter-tall) lander, Nova-C, will target the moon's south polar region, also carrying five experiments for NASA that will last about two weeks. The company is targeting 80 degrees south latitude for touchdown. That would be well within Antarctica on Earth, Altemus noted, and...
The APEX 1.0 lunar lander is slated to launch from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon 9 and softly touch down in the Schrödinger Basin on the far side of the Moon. Learn more Future Mission ispace-U.S. is a committed commercial partner in the rapidly expanding and innovative ...
This is because that lander, called Nova-C, is set to take a more direct path to the moon. It plans to launch next month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Nova-C was built by Texas-based space company Intuitive Machines. The company also plans to send the lander to the moon for another...
That probe, the Chang'e-4, and its robot rover are still functioning, transmitting to Earth via an orbiter that passes over the moon's far side. Meanwhile, China's first moon lander, the Chang'e-3, is also still transmitting. China is excluded from the International ...
ULA declared success once the lander was free of the rocket’s upper stage, nearly an hour into the flight and before the spacecraft’s propulsion system malfunctioned and prevented the solar panel from properly pointing toward the sun. Landing on the moon has long been a series of hits an...