US launches second lunar lander this year

If successful, this will be the first US moon landing in more than five decades.

The lunar lander, named Odysseus, or Odie for short, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 12:57 a.m. ET on February 14 (12:57 a.m. on February 15, Vietnam time).

The rocket will propel the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit of up to 380,000 kilometers (230,000 miles) around Earth. It will be like “a high-energy fastball thrown toward the Moon,” according to Stephen Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, the company that developed Odysseus.

Once in Earth orbit, the lunar lander will separate from the rocket and begin its own adventure, using onboard engines to propel itself on a direct trajectory toward the lunar surface.

Odysseus is expected to fly freely in space for more than a week and touch down on the lunar surface on February 22.

If successful, Odysseus would become the first US spacecraft to soft land on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The launch of the lunar lander comes a month after Peregrine, a vehicle developed by Astrobotic Technology with funding from NASA, failed on its mission. The Pittsburgh-based company said the mission failed just hours after Peregrine launched on January 8 due to a fuel leak. The spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere as it re-entered Earth 10 days later.

NASA has funded the creation of a small fleet of privately developed lunar landers as part of a program the space agency calls CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services.

The program's goal was to develop lunar landers under relatively cheap, fixed-price contracts, with the hope of using the spacecraft to give the United States a presence on the Moon as the new international space race heated up.

China, India, and Japan are the only countries with soft-landing vehicles on the Moon in the 21st century. And while NASA remains confident that the US will be the first country to return humans to the lunar surface, the global craze to build robotic lunar spacecraft is reaching fever pitch.

What sets NASA's approach apart from others is how it has embraced commercialization — the idea that more spacecraft can be developed more cheaply and quickly when private industry competes for contracts than if the space agency were to develop them itself.