The Tartan

By Eshaan Joshi

There’s a legend of a man who sailed off to fight against a walled city, who explored a world hitherto unexplored, fought fantastical monsters, and made it all the way home. It was a home he’d spent years away from, a home he’d given everything to return.

It’s apt that the United States returned to the moon with our own Odysseus, nearly half a decade after we’d explored it first. It’s our home, to some extent — an American flag will always fly high over the Surveyor Crater, a testament to the heights humanity achieved so long ago. 

And a sign, a herald to a return realized in the 21st century, as the combined efforts of SpaceX — which built and tested the rocket and delivery platform — Intuitive Machines built the first American lander to reach the moon in decades.

It’s a great achievement, one made even more important by the fact that both SpaceX and Intuitive Machines are private companies, making this the first privately-funded venture to land on the moon. It’s a huge step forward from the slow progress in moon exploration that has plagued NASA since Apollo 17, but it also represents new actors taking center stage in what will soon become the once-again frontier of exploration. The moon has long since been our goal, a return to the glory days of the Space Race, and significant efforts from various companies are starting to put those glory days back in reach.

As to Odysseus’ landing, it was a huge step forward for Intuitive Machines. Every part was meticulously tested, as even a small issue could lead to disaster, like the Peregrine project that was destroyed in the atmosphere recently after faulty devices prevented it from escaping Earth’s orbit. Odysseus also end a streak of failed landings from private companies, another huge step forward in the new Space Race. Intuitive Machine’s efforts were supported by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) project, which has helped fund attempts to land a commercial object on the moon. The public-private partnership is a significant change from the partnership that funded the first space flight — at that time, NASA engineers told the defense contractor Grumman to make something that worked to spec, and Grumman obliged. Now, NASA hands out money, and companies do their best to take that and turn it into something actionable.

Most importantly, this represents a foundational approval of the tests that Intuitive Machines and SpaceX have been running. This could be positive for future manned commercial flights, but those might come after the NASA Artemis missions aiming to put a person back on the moon by the end of the decade. While Artemis is currently facing a serious slowdown due to work and delays, it’s still the closest manned mission to the moon.

The lander, as part of its agreement with CLPS, also had a few important tools for Artemis and future efforts to go to the lunar surface, including a laser retro-reflector array to make it easier to calibrate readings and a lunar radio navigation beacon to assist Artemis in a few years. Both of these technologies also represent Odysseus’ ability to become part of a system to ferry resources to the moon for future scientific and commercial endeavors.

In summer 1962, Jack Kennedy claimed that we would go to the moon and “do the other things.” The moon has become a part of the great American myth — a part Odysseus revisited and, in the memory of Kennedy and the people who served this country during the old space program, we’ll visit it again.