Just a few weeks ago, a private space company’s attempt to land on the moon failed miserably. A delivery from Deutsche Post DHL was also lost: For the first time, a delivery from Deutsche Post DHL burned up in space – $460 in postage per customer was lost. Tonight another private space company is making its next attempt at the first commercial/private moon landing.
The private US space company is called Intuitive Machines and comes from Texas. Their lunar lander is called Nova-C; the vehicle is also known as the Odysseus. Nova-C is the size of a telephone booth and weighs around 700 kilograms. Among other things, there are measuring devices from NASA on board. Odysseus is expected to touch down in the southern region of the Moon in a crater called “Malapert A.” If everything goes smoothly, it would be operational for around seven days.
How to follow the landing live
You can watch the landing on the moon in the following live stream from 10 p.m. The actual landing should take place around 11:30 p.m. or a little later.
Live stream: Follow Nova-C’s moon landing here tonight from 10 p.m.
Nova-C aka Odysseus is unmanned, so people won’t be harmed even if it fails. The lunar lander took off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida on February 15, 2024 aboard a “Falcon 9” rocket from Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX, then decoupled from the carrier rocket after 50 minutes and flew on to the moon. The Nova-C lunar lander will land on the moon tonight, assuming all goes well.
These are the peculiarities of this landing
If Nova-C succeeds in landing on Earth’s satellite, it would be the first US moon landing since the end of the Apollo missions (Apollo 11: First moon landing on July 20, 1969 – all facts, films, photos and tragedies) – in difference to Apollo, however, unmanned. This would also be the first successful moon landing by a private/commercial company.
However, NASA is still involved in the landing through its “Commercial Lunar Payload Services” project. The US space agency wants to collect as much current knowledge about moon landings as cheaply as possible. NASA is paying Intuitive Machines $77 million for this, as the Tagesschau reports.
