NASA astronaut Sunita Williams gets ready to board the Boeing’s Starliner capsule atop an Atlas V rocket for a mission to the International Space Station at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on May 6, 2024. The launch was called off.
| Photo Credit: AP

The target date for the next attempt to launch Boeing Co’s Starliner space capsule on its first crewed test flight featuring Indian-American Sunita Williams has been pushed back to no earlier than May 17, to replace a pressure valve on its booster rocket, NASA said on Tuesday.

The CST-100 Starliner’s debut voyage carrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) has been highly anticipated and much-delayed as Boeing scrambles to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a greater share of lucrative NASA business.

The test flight was called off on Monday night with less than two hours left in the countdown after a pressure regulation valve malfunctioned on the upper-stage liquid oxygen tank of the Atlas V rocket that was to launch the new capsule into orbit.

The two-member crew — NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore, 61, and Sunita Williams, 58 — had been strapped into their seats aboard the spacecraft for about an hour before launch activities were suspended.

The rocket, a separate component from the Starliner capsule, was furnished for the mission by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture.

After Monday night’s aborted launch attempt, NASA, Boeing and ULA announced that they would seek to try again as early as Friday, May 10.

But in an update posted Tuesday evening, NASA said more time was needed after ULA “decided to remove and replace” the faulty pressure valve. That will require the rocket to be rolled back to its hangar on Wednesday for repairs, leak checks and other reviews ahead of a second launch attempt, NASA said.

Those operations pushed the potential launch date back another week, NASA said.

The long-awaited first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was called off for at least 24 hours over a technical glitch with the Atlas V rocket that was being readied to launch the new astronaut capsule to orbit on Monday night.

The CST-100 Starliner’s inaugural voyage carrying astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) has been highly anticipated and much-delayed as Boeing scrambles to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a greater share of lucrative NASA business.

ALSO READ | Significance of Boeing Starliner’s first crewed test flight on May 7 | Explained

It comes two years after the gumdrop-shaped capsule completed its first test flight to the orbital laboratory without humans aboard. The Starliner’s first uncrewed flight to the ISS in 2019 ended in failure.

Its latest flight was scrubbed with less than two hours left in the countdown as the capsule stood poised for blastoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop an Atlas V rocket furnished by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture.

The postponement, attributed to an issue with a valve in the Atlas rocket’s second stage, was announced during a live NASA webcast.

It was not immediately clear how long the issue would take to address, but the next available launch windows for the mission are Tuesday, Thursday and Friday nights.

The two-member crew — NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore, 61, and Sunita Williams, 58 — had been strapped into their seats aboard the spacecraft for about an hour before launch activities were suspended.

They were subsequently assisted safely out of the capsule by technicians and whisked away from the launch complex in a van to await a second flight attempt once the issue has been resolved.

It is not uncommon in the space industry for countdowns to be halted at the 11th hour and for launches to be postponed for days or weeks, even when seemingly minor malfunctions or unusual sensor readings are detected, especially in new spacecraft flying humans for the first time.

Boeing faces intense public scrutiny of all its activities after its commercial airplane operations have been staggered by several crises, including the mid-air blowout of a plane door plug in January. The company has been eager to get its Starliner space venture off the ground to show signs of success and redeem a program years behind schedule with more than $1.5 billion in cost overruns.

While Boeing has struggled, SpaceX has become a dependable taxi to orbit for NASA, which is backing a new generation of privately built spacecraft that can ferry its astronauts and other customers to the ISS and, under the space agency’s more ambitious Artemis program, to the moon and eventually Mars.

Though Boeing has been relatively mute about its plans to sell commercial Starliner flights, the spacecraft would compete head-to-head with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which since 2020 has been NASA’s only vehicle for sending ISS crew to orbit from U.S. soil.

Seasoned test flight crew

Selected to ride aboard Starliner for its first crewed flight were two NASA veterans who have logged a combined 500 days in space over the course of two previous missions each to the space station. Mr. Wilmore is the designated commander for Monday’s flight, with Ms. Williams in the pilot seat.

Although Starliner is designed to fly autonomously, the astronauts can assume control of the spacecraft if necessary. The test flight calls for Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams to practice maneuvering the vehicle manually while en route to the ISS.

Ironically, the flight would mark the first crewed voyage to space using an Atlas rocket since the storied series of launch vehicles first sent astronauts, including John Glenn, on orbital flights for NASA’s Mercury program in the 1960s.

Once launched, the capsule will arrive at the space station after a flight of about 26 hours and dock with the orbiting research outpost some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. A resident ISS crew, currently comprising four U.S. astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts, will be there to greet them.

Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams are expected to remain at the space station for about a week before riding the Starliner back to Earth for a parachute and airbag-assisted landing in the U.S. Desert Southwest – the first time such a system has been used for crewed NASA missions.

The test flight comes at an especially critical moment for Boeing. Its airplane business is dealing with fallout from a midair blowout of a cabin panel door plug on a nearly new 737 MAX 9 in January, as well as previous deadly crashes of two 737 MAX jets.

Getting Starliner to this point has been a fraught process for Boeing, beset by years of development setbacks and more than $1.5 billion in charges for the aerospace giant on a $4.2 billion fixed-priced contract with NASA.

The space agency wants the redundancy of having two different U.S. rides to the ISS, which is expected to retire around 2030. NASA is encouraging private development of new space stations that could replace the ISS after its retirement, potentially giving Starliner new destinations.

Depending on the outcome of the forthcoming flight test, Starliner is booked to fly at least six more crewed missions to the space station for NASA.

Collision with NASA spacecraft altered shape of asteroid Dimorphos.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

When NASA sent its DART spacecraft to slam into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, the U.S. space agency demonstrated that it was possible to change a celestial object’s trajectory, if needed, to protect Earth. It turns out that this collision changed not only the asteroid’s path but its shape as well.

The asteroid, which before the DART encounter looked like a ball that was a bit plump in the waist, now appears to be shaped more like a watermelon – or, technically, a triaxial ellipsoid, scientists said on Tuesday.

“The prevailing understanding is that Dimorphos is a loosely packed agglomeration of debris ranging from dust to gravel to boulders. Thus, its global strength is quite low, allowing deformation much more easily than for a solid monolithic body,” said Steve Chesley, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and a co-author of the study published in the Planetary Science Journal.

“The shape change was so dramatic because of its rubble-pile composition,” said JPL navigation engineer and study lead author Shantanu Naidu. “By measuring the pre- and post-impact orbit of Dimorphos, we were able to deduce the change in the shape of Dimorphos due to the DART impact.”

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Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, which is defined as a near-Earth asteroid. The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission was a proof-of-principle mission using a spacecraft to apply kinetic force to nudge a celestial object that otherwise might be on a collision course with Earth. Dimorphos and Didymos do not pose an actual threat to Earth.

The spacecraft collided on Sept. 26, 2022, at about 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kph) into Dimorphos, an asteroid that was about 560 feet (170 meters) wide, roughly 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. Didymos has a diameter of about a half mile (780 meters).

DART’s collision, which sent rocky debris from the asteroid flying into space, also changed the orbital path that Dimorphos takes around Didymos – making it elliptical instead of circular – and its orbital period, the time it takes to complete a single orbit, the scientists said. It now takes Dimorphos 11 hours, 22 minutes and 3 seconds to complete an orbit, 33 minutes and 15 seconds less than before the impact, they found.

Scientists had previously disclosed that the asteroid’s orbit had changed, with the new study offering the most precise readings yet on that.

Chesley said the asteroid’s orbital period continued to decay slowly in the weeks after the impact.

“We believe that this is due to the fact that loose debris in the system continues to leak out and carries angular momentum with it, thus necessarily contracting the orbit,” Chesley added. Angular momentum refers to how much a rotating object’s mass is distributed around its axis and how quickly it is spinning.

Dimorphos’ average orbital distance from Didymos is now about 3,780 feet (1,152 meters), roughly 120 feet (37 meters) less than before the impact, the study found.

The researchers based their conclusions on the shape and orbit of Dimorphos on observations from ground-based telescopes of how sunlight reflecting off the surfaces of the two asteroids changed over time, data from radio waves bouncing off the asteroids and images DART obtained during its rendezvous.

More information is expected in the near future about the two asteroids. The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is due to launch in October and reach them in late 2026 to check things out.

“We are anxiously awaiting the arrival of ESA’s Hera spacecraft, when we will be able to compare our modeled shape with that obtained from Hera imagery. We will also learn how much the orbit has changed since we last observed it in 2023,” Chesley said.

An astronaut is shown in this handout photo provided by NASA participating in a spacewalk that took place on December 24, 2013, released on December 27, 2013.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Research in the expanding field of space medicine has identified many ways in which a microgravity environment and other factors can meddle with the human body during space missions. A new study has added to the field by showing that astronauts are more likely to experience headaches in space than previously known.

The study involved 24 astronauts from the U.S., European and Japanese space agencies who traveled aboard the International Space Station for up to 26 weeks. All but two of them reported experiencing headaches in space.

This was a larger proportion than the researchers had expected based on prior anecdotal evidence. The headaches – some resembling migraines and others resembling tension headaches – occurred not only during the first couple of weeks in space as the body goes through the process of adapting to microgravity, but also later.

The headaches occurring during the early period often present as migraine-like while those experienced later in space travel present more like a tension headache, the study found.

“We hypothesize that different mechanisms are involved for the early headache episodes – the first one to two weeks in space – versus later headache episodes,” said neurologist WPJ van Oosterhout of Zaans Medical Center and the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Neurology.

“In the first week, the body has to adapt to the lack of gravity, known as space adaptation syndrome. This phenomenon is similar to motion sickness, and can cause nausea, vomiting and dizziness, and headaches,” Van Oosterhout said. “The later headaches could result from an increase in intracranial pressure. Due to microgravity, there is more fluid accumulating in the upper part of the body and head, resulting in higher pressure in the skull.”

Migraines experienced on Earth are often throbbing and pulsating headaches lasting four to seven hours, accompanied by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and hypersensitivity to light and sound, Van Oosterhout said. Tension-type headaches on Earth usually are a more dull pain felt over the entire head without those other symptoms, Van Oosterhout added.

The astronauts – 23 men and one woman, with an average age of about 47 – were aboard the International Space Station for missions that took place from November 2011 to June 2018, with a total of 378 headaches reported by 22 of the 24 astronauts during a total of 3,596 days in orbit. None of the 24 reported headaches in the three months after returning to Earth.

Thirteen of the astronauts were from NASA, six from the European Space Agency, two from Japan’s JAXA and one from the Canadian Space Agency. None had ever been diagnosed with migraines prior to their space missions and none had a history of recurrent headaches.

Various documented effects of space travel include bone and muscle atrophy, changes in the brain, cardiovascular system and immune system, issues with the balance system in the inner ear and a syndrome involving the eyes. Cancer risk from greater radiation exposure in space is another concern.

Experts are unsure of how much of a barrier these effects might be on human space travel over extended periods, for instance for journeys to our neighboring planet Mars or beyond.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know the effects of long-duration space travel – possibly years – on the human body,” Van Oosterhout said. “It is clear that even short-term – days or weeks – to medium-term – weeks or months – duration exposure to microgravity already has some effects, mostly reversible, on the human body. This is a clear task for the field of space medicine.”

Axiom Space chief engineer Jim Stein demonstrates a prototype spacesuit, Wednesday, March 15, 2023, in Houston. NASA selected Axiom Space to design the spacesuits that its moonwalking astronauts will wear when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade.
| Photo Credit: AP

Humans have long dreamed of setting foot on the Moon and other planetary bodies such as Mars. Since the 1960s, space travellers have donned suits designed to protect them from the vacuum of space and stepped out into the unknown.

However, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is to include the first spacewalk organised by a private company, has been delayed. This is due to complications with the design and development of a suitable spacesuit.

Moon suits are also one of the key elements of Nasa’s Artemis lunar programme that have yet to be delivered. A report released in November 2023 said that the contractor making the suits is having to revisit aspects of the design provided by Nasa, which could introduce delays.

Yet the first spacewalk, by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, took place in 1965. Later, 12 Nasa astronauts would walk on the lunar surface, between 1969 and 1972, using technology that would be eclipsed by today’s smartphones. So it’s not unreasonable to ask why it can still be difficult to design and build spacesuits to do the same thing.

Much has changed since the Apollo missions planted flags on the Moon. The geopolitics driving space travel have shifted, and spacesuits are no longer expected to be just a form of protection. Instead, they are a critical way to improve the productivity of astronauts. This involves a rethink of not just the suits themselves, but the technology that supports them.

An array of powerful telecommunications technologies to connect astronauts with space stations and ground control sits alongside multisensory cameras, temperature readers and proximity sensors in present-day spacesuits.

Situational awareness – understanding key elements in the environment, such as the health of an astronaut – is a core tenet for modern spacesuit design and critical for the operator’s safety. The ability of a suit to track heart rate and other vital signs is important in a vacuum, where levels of oxygen need constant monitoring.

Expectations around the risks astronauts take have changed for the better. And the level of investment it takes to produce a spacesuit necessitates that it can be used for future tasks that may include lunar settlement in the next few decades.

The trade off that engineers must make when incorporating wearable technology like those already mentioned is weight. Will greater situational awareness result in a spacesuit that is too heavy to move in effectively?

When Elon Musk first hinted at challenges with the extravehicular activity spacesuit for Polaris Dawn in a presentation to SpaceX employees in January, it was not difficulties with connected technology that he discussed, but of redesigning “the suit so that you actually move around in it”.

Situational awareness

However, when talking about mobility in a spacesuit, you need to consider the tasks that you want that mobility to support.

Before the advent of modern spacesuits, Apollo astronauts struggled to carry out missions. When drilling into the surface of the Moon with a hand drill to collect samples, astronauts found it difficult to provide enough downwards force to counteract the Moon’s weaker gravity. It was not until the invention of a zero-gravity drill, decades later, that this problem would be addressed.

The current exploration of pneumatic exoskeletons, providing the support necessary for movement in low gravity could be part of a solution. However, newer spacesuits may also need to interface with hardware, like robotic drills that exist outside the suit. This will also necessitate more mobility in spacesuits.

Working with robots

Offloading tasks, previously carried out by humans, to robots will be part of the future of space exploration. It’s a primary way that engineers will also be able to enhance the mobility of astronauts in spacesuits.

For example, when an astronaut goes on a spacewalk to inspect the condition of part of a space station and make any possible repairs, they are supported by a robotic arm that ensures they don’t float off into space. While jointed, this arm is rigid and can limit an astronaut’s movement.

An approach currently being explored to extend this range of movement is a climbing robot, that is attached to both the astronaut and the space station, that an individual can control through their spacesuit. This would allow the astronaut to move around the space station faster and with a greater range of movement than before, allowing them to reach and repair hard-to-access areas like corners.

While the eventual hope is that robots themselves can assess any damage to the space station and repair it, due to possible disruptions in normal operations, humans must be ready to step in. Possible disruptions could be natural, like a small meteor shower damaging the robot, or human-made, like hacking carried by a hostile group or state.

For the types of activities we want to accomplish in the future, this human-robot collaboration will be instrumental. Building a base on the Moon, as both the US and China plan to do, will involve construction work and drilling, which humans will not be able to accomplish alone. Modern spacesuits will need to provide an interface to work with this new technology, and we can expect the suits to evolve in step with robotics.

The relationship between humans and robots is changing. It will go beyond spacewalks and robots’ previous uses as limited tools, to a situation where they are cooperative partners in space. The objectives of ten or 20 years from now, like building lunar settlements, exploring mineral deposits on the Moon and efficiently repairing space station modules can only be achieved using robotics.

Modern spacesuits will be a key foundation of this collaborative relationship, forming the interface where astronauts and robots can work together to achieve shared goals. So when we do once again leave our footprints on other worlds, we will no longer be alone.

Private US moon lander still working after breaking leg and falling.
| Photo Credit: AP

The first private U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon broke a leg at touchdown before falling over, according to company officials who said Wednesday it was on the verge of losing power.

Intuitive Machines, the company that built the lander, released new photos Wednesday, six days after the landing, that showed at least one broken leg on the six-legged spacecraft. The lander came in too fast, skidded and tumbled over as it touched down near the moon’s south pole last Thursday, hampering communications and power. It was supposed to operate for at least a week.

CEO Steve Altemus said the lander, named Odysseus, was still alive and generating solar power but expected to go silent soon. Late Wednesday night, the company said the lander might linger into Thursday.

When the end comes, Altemus said, flight controllers would “tuck Odie in for the cold night of the moon” so in two to three weeks, once lunar night lifts, they can try to regain contact.

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Mission director Tim Crain said it’s uncertain if Odysseus will wake up. The extreme cold of the lunar night could crack the electronics and kill the batteries.

“Lunar night is no joke,” Crain said on X, formerly Twitter. “Imagine leaving your favorite electronics outside for 14 nights in Antarctica!”

The mission was the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years and only the second under NASA’s commercial program for lunar deliveries. But it far outpaced a rival’s failed effort last month; that lander had a fuel leak and came crashing back to Earth.

Because of a last-minute switch from the lander’s inactive navigation system to NASA’s experimental guidance lasers on board, Odysseus missed its desired flat terrain by 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) and ended up at a higher elevation than anticipated. As a result, it was descending too fast and hit harder than the legs could tolerate, according to Altemus. The 14-foot (4.3-meter) lander momentarily stood upright, its engine firing, before slowly falling onto a slight slope.

Worker error before the flight made the lander’s navigation system unusable.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he considers the Odysseus mission a success, given that all six of the space agency’s experiments on the lander were still working as of Wednesday morning, six days into what should have been eight days of operations. But he noted: “There’s a big difference on landing a crew and landing a bunch of instruments.”

The space agency paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to fly its experiments to the hilly and shadowed south polar region. That’s where NASA plans to land astronauts in another few years as part of its Artemis program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister.

It was the first moon landing of a U.S. spacecraft since the Apollo program. NASA safely landed 12 astronauts on the moon from 1969 through 1972, then withdrew from surface operations until Odysseus’ arrival last Thursday.

Odysseus carried an Apollo-era U.S. flag donated by NASA. The lander also had other customers’ items on board, including new jacket insulating fabric from Columbia Sportswear, mini moon sculptures by Jeff Koons and a set of cameras from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The cameras were belatedly ejected Tuesday in an unsuccessful attempt to photograph the sideways lander.

Intuitive Machines is the first private business to pull off a moon landing, a feat previously achieved by only five countries. Japan was the latest country to score a landing, but its lander also ended up on its side last month. This week, Japan’s space agency said its lander made it through a lunar night.

NASA’s Joel Kearns stressed the U.S. landing represented “a flight test, a first step to get back to the moon,” with more commercial missions ahead.

Private US moon lander still working after breaking leg and falling.
| Photo Credit: AP

The first private U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon broke a leg at touchdown before falling over, according to company officials who said Wednesday it was on the verge of losing power.

Intuitive Machines, the company that built the lander, released new photos Wednesday, six days after the landing, that showed at least one broken leg on the six-legged spacecraft. The lander came in too fast, skidded and tumbled over as it touched down near the moon’s south pole last Thursday, hampering communications and power. It was supposed to operate for at least a week.

CEO Steve Altemus said the lander, named Odysseus, was still alive and generating solar power but expected to go silent soon. Late Wednesday night, the company said the lander might linger into Thursday.

When the end comes, Altemus said, flight controllers would “tuck Odie in for the cold night of the moon” so in two to three weeks, once lunar night lifts, they can try to regain contact.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

Mission director Tim Crain said it’s uncertain if Odysseus will wake up. The extreme cold of the lunar night could crack the electronics and kill the batteries.

“Lunar night is no joke,” Crain said on X, formerly Twitter. “Imagine leaving your favorite electronics outside for 14 nights in Antarctica!”

The mission was the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years and only the second under NASA’s commercial program for lunar deliveries. But it far outpaced a rival’s failed effort last month; that lander had a fuel leak and came crashing back to Earth.

Because of a last-minute switch from the lander’s inactive navigation system to NASA’s experimental guidance lasers on board, Odysseus missed its desired flat terrain by 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) and ended up at a higher elevation than anticipated. As a result, it was descending too fast and hit harder than the legs could tolerate, according to Altemus. The 14-foot (4.3-meter) lander momentarily stood upright, its engine firing, before slowly falling onto a slight slope.

Worker error before the flight made the lander’s navigation system unusable.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he considers the Odysseus mission a success, given that all six of the space agency’s experiments on the lander were still working as of Wednesday morning, six days into what should have been eight days of operations. But he noted: “There’s a big difference on landing a crew and landing a bunch of instruments.”

The space agency paid Intuitive Machines $118 million to fly its experiments to the hilly and shadowed south polar region. That’s where NASA plans to land astronauts in another few years as part of its Artemis program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister.

It was the first moon landing of a U.S. spacecraft since the Apollo program. NASA safely landed 12 astronauts on the moon from 1969 through 1972, then withdrew from surface operations until Odysseus’ arrival last Thursday.

Odysseus carried an Apollo-era U.S. flag donated by NASA. The lander also had other customers’ items on board, including new jacket insulating fabric from Columbia Sportswear, mini moon sculptures by Jeff Koons and a set of cameras from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. The cameras were belatedly ejected Tuesday in an unsuccessful attempt to photograph the sideways lander.

Intuitive Machines is the first private business to pull off a moon landing, a feat previously achieved by only five countries. Japan was the latest country to score a landing, but its lander also ended up on its side last month. This week, Japan’s space agency said its lander made it through a lunar night.

NASA’s Joel Kearns stressed the U.S. landing represented “a flight test, a first step to get back to the moon,” with more commercial missions ahead.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on February 15, 2024. The mission’s goal is to deliver science payloads to the surface of the moon
| Photo Credit: AP

A moon lander built by Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines was launched from Florida early on Thursday on a mission to conduct the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half century and the first by a privately owned spacecraft.

The company’s Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, lifted off shortly after 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket flown by Elon Musk’ SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

A live NASA-SpaceX online video feed showed the two-stage, 25-story rocket roaring off the launch pad and streaking into the dark sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast, trailed by a fiery yellowish plume of exhaust.

About 48 minutes after launch, the six-legged lander was shown being released from Falcon 9’s upper stage about 139 miles above Earth and drifting away on its voyage to the moon.

“IM-1 Odysseus lunar lander separation confirmed,” a mission controller was heard saying.

Moments later, mission operations in Houston received its first radio signals from Odysseus as the lander began an automated process of powering on its systems and orienting itself in space, according to webcast commentators.

Although considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the IM-1 flight is carrying six NASA payloads of instruments designed to gather data about the lunar environment ahead of NASA’s planned return of astronauts to the moon later this decade.

Thursday’s launch came a month after the lunar lander of another private firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on January 8 by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut flight.

The failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which was also flying NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company had been unable to achieve a “soft landing” on the lunar surface, following ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.

Those mishaps illustrated the risks NASA faces in leaning more heavily on the commercial sector than it had in the past to realize its spaceflight goals.

Plans call for Odysseus to reach its destination after a weeklong flight, with a February 22 landing at crater Malapert A near the moon’s south pole.

First since 1972

If successful, the flight would represent the first controlled descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo crewed moon mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.

The feat also would mark the first journey to the lunar surface under NASA’s Artemis moon program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there.

IM-1 is the latest test of NASA’s strategy of paying for the use of spacecraft built and owned by private companies to slash the cost of the Artemis missions, envisioned as precursors to human exploration of Mars.

By contrast, during the Apollo era, NASA bought rockets and other technology from the private sector, but owned and operated them itself.

NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for a first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China has said it was aiming for 2030.

Small landers such as Nova-C are expected to get there first, carrying instruments to closely survey the lunar landscape, its resources and potential hazards. Odysseus will focus on space weather interactions with the moon’s surface, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies and navigation.

Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission is scheduled to land at the lunar south pole in 2024, followed by an IM-3 mission later in the year with several small rovers.

Last month, Japan became the fifth country to place a lander on the moon, with its space agency JAXA achieving an unusually precise “pinpoint” touchdown of its SLIM probe last month. Last year, India became the fourth nation to land on the moon, after Russia failed in an attempt the same month.

The United States, the former Soviet Union and China are the only other countries that have carried out successful soft lunar touchdowns. China scored a world first in 2019 by achieving the first landing on the far side of the moon.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.” Image for Representation.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Humans have always looked at the sky, using the stars as navigation guides or for spiritual storytelling. Every human civilization has looked to the stars and used celestial movements to measure time and find meaning.

This insatiable thirst for knowledge combined with technological advancements have made it possible for us to dream of travelling in space. These dreams became more and more real after the Second World War, the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War and the large-scale exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

Dreams of space travel started small with the launch of Sputnik-1 by the Soviet Union, and escalated with the U.S. Apollo landing on the moon in 1969.

Six decades later, plans are ramping up for space tourism, missions to the moon and Mars, and mining on the moon.

The Lunar Resources Registry, a private business that locates valuable resources on the moon and helps investors conduct the required exploration and extraction operations, notes: “The space race is evolving into space industrialization.”

According to NASA, “the moon holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resources,” including water, helium-3 and rare earth metals used in electronics.

The dawn of the Anthropocene

As a group of academics researching various aspects of environmental sustainability on Earth, we are alarmed at the speed of these developments and the impacts resource exploitation will have on lunar and space environments.

There is a movement among the international geologic scientific community calling for a new epoch — the Anthropocene — reflecting the enormous extent to which human activity has altered the planet since the end of the Second World War.

Stratigraphers — geologists who study the layers of rock and sediment — look for measurable global impact of human activities in the geologic record. According to their research, the starting point for the Anthropocene has been identified as beginning in the 1950s, and the fallout from nuclear testing.

To shock humankind into preventing the extensive destruction in space that we have wrought on Earth, it may be effective to add a “lunar Anthropocene” to the moon’s geologic time scale.

The case for a lunar Anthropocene is interesting. It can be argued that since the first human contact with the moon’s surface, we have seen anthropogenic impact. This impact is likely to increase dramatically. This is presented as justification for a new geologic epoch for the moon.

Damaging the Earth

This new “human epoch” is hotly debated among stratigraphers as well as researchers in other disciplines. For humanities researchers and artists, the importance of the Anthropocene lies in the power the concept has to evoke human responsibility for bringing the Earth’s system to a tipping point.

In The Shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that the new human epoch entails recognizing that technoscientific advances — which have driven socio-political economies relying on extractivism, consumption and waste — have led to the extent of damage we measure on Earth at present.

For millenia, most societies understood the importance of their relationship with the natural world for survival. But industrialization and the endlessly growing economy in developed countries has destroyed this relationship.

For example, trees used to be respected for providing timber, food, shade and more. But our industrial growth changed all that; in the past 100 years, more trees have been cut than had been felled in the preceding 9,000 years.

A lunar Anthropocene

And now the Anthropocene, this age of human impact, is also arriving on the moon.

NASA estimates there are already 227,000 kilos of human garbage littering the moon, mostly from space explorations, including moon buggies and other equipment, excrement, statues, golf balls, human ashes and flags, among other objects.

An increasing number of moon missions and extracting resources from the moon could destroy lunar environments. This mirrors what has happened on our planet: humans have used this collection of “natural resources” and produced enough waste and degradation to bring us to the current sixth mass extinction precipice.

Our throwaway society leads to not only habitat destruction on Earth, but also now on the moon and in space. We must rethink what we really need. Without a fully functional Earth system, including biodiversity and nature’s contribution to life, we will be unable to survive.

If the intent is to issue a word of caution and pre-emptively shock and elicit a feeling of responsibility on the part of those actors likely to impact the moon’s surface, it may very well be the right time to name a lunar Anthropocene. This may help prevent the kind of extensive and careless destruction we have caused and continue to witness on Earth.