Athenaa private probe of the company Intuitive Machines, will try to perch on the moon on the afternoon of Thursday – at 18:32, Spanish peninsular time – and thus become the natural satellite of the earth. Seven days after its launch from Kennedy Space Center, in Florida (USA), the key time for the mission comes IM-2 Destined to mark a geographical milestone in the new space race and also to look for water reserves around its landing place, in the Mons Mouton, located just 160 kilometers from the pole.
For intuitive machines, it will be the second attempt to achieve perfect to the perfect. On February 23, 2024, a robotic landing of the same model as Athena He managed to perch on the lunar surface, becoming the first US ship to do so after the end of the program Apollo of manned flights in 1972. After the jubilation unleashed in the control of the mission and at the headquarters of NASA – which finances these missions and participates in them – for having returned to the moon more than 50 years later ,. That incident limited the scope of the scientific experiments of the probe.
Athena It is the second probe to reach the moon in less than a week, after last Sunday – from another American company, Firefly Aerospace – alunizar with a perfect maneuver and thus became the first private ship to do so. Both probes are part of the Lunar Load Commercial Services Program (CLPS) that NASA has launched together with spaces in the space sector to prepare the land on the return of astronauts to the Moon, still planned before the end of this decade. After various delays and an accumulation of cost overruns, that ambitious manned flight plan of the US space agency – known as a program Artemis– which has commissioned Elon Musk a plan to cut billions of dollars in the spending of the federal administration.
Waiting to know Trump and Musk’s plans regarding the manned missions – which have declared their desire to go directly for a more ambitious goal: Mars – the truth is that the return of robots to the moon, half a century later, is being after the success of China in 2013, becoming the third country to achieve it after the US and the Soviet union, a rosary of failures arrived. In 2019, a probe of the Indian Space Agency and another of the Israeli company Spaceil crashed, while in 2023 the Japanese of the ISPACE company and also the Russian space agency Rosquemos failed. That same year, and in 2024, the first two missions of the NASA CPLS program resulted in a failure in January and a partial success in February with the IM-1 mission of intuitive machines.
