SpaceX launch tonight to send ice hunters to the moon

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — A SpaceX launch Wednesday night looks to send both a lander and an orbiter to the moon, both on the hunt for ice.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Intuitive Machines Nova-C lunar lander Athena on the IM-2 mission and the Lockheed Martin-built Lunar Trailblazer satellite for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are set to lift off from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A targeting 7:17 p.m. Eastern time, but with backup opportunities through Saturday.

Space Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron forecasts better than 95% chance for good launch conditions.

Athena’s main payload is NASA’s PRIME-1 drill, which stands for Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment 1 . It will burrow into the lunar south pole, pulling up lunar regolith from as deep as 3 feet, and analyze it for volatiles, which are substances that can evaporate such as carbon dioxide or frozen water.

Meanwhile, the Lunar Trailblazer is geared up to orbit the moon’s north and south poles for about 20 months taking closer looks at previously detected ice deposits.

“We’re looking for water and other volatiles,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “As we are preparing to send our astronauts back to the lunar surface and to have a sustained presence there, and then eventually on to humanity’s next frontier, which is Mars.”

She said before any humans arrive, it’s NASA’s job to catalog all of the resources on site “and enact the lessons learned from the Apollo era to ensure safety and also to advance our scientific discoveries and technological innovation.”

Also along for the ride, and headed out beyond the moon is commercial company AstroForge’s Odin spacecraft, which is headed for a a near-Earth asteroid named 2022 OB5.

Athena is the second lunar lander for Houston-based Intuitive Machines. The first named Odysseus managed the first commercial landing in history in 2024 on the IM-1 mission, although it tipped partially after one of its landing legs was damaged as it hit the surface.

Both IM-1 and IM-2 have been partially funded with funds from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Services Program (CLPS). The program looks to make NASA a customer of what it hopes will be a sustainable lunar economy. It paid Intuitive Machines $62.5 million to carry up the PRIME-1 drill and several other NASA experiments, while the company was able to line up other companies for more payloads to offset costs.

The companies have to line up a launch provider, build the lander and run all the mission communication.

If Athena launches either Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, the landing attempt will come on March 6, only four days after another CLPS mission, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, attempts its landing, which is targeting early Sunday morning.

Athena will be withing five degrees from the lunar south pole.

“It is a scientifically strategic location that will return exciting data because of its origin,” Fox said, noting it’s 20,000 feet higher than neighboring features and one that has been untouched by lunar impacts for billions of years.

She said the space had a huge ring of craters around the base and cliff-like edges that descend into areas of permanent darkness. It also is a hilltop with smaller rocks and craters frequently blankets in freezing, shifting shadows.

“We hope that that’s going to provide opportunities for extraordinary science in extraordinary places,” she said.

A third lander from ispace Japan, not affiliated with NASA, is also on its way to the moon, but not arriving for several more months.

For Intuitive Machines, the company embraces the complexity of what it hopes will be a second landing, and one without tipping, said CEO Stephen Altemus.

“We want to repeat a successful launch and soft landing on the moon,” he said. “We can do that two times in a row a year apart, says something in a fixed-price contract environment.”

To offset costs, the lander in addition to the PRIME-1 drill and six other NASA CLPS payloads, it also has payloads from Lonestar Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear, Nokia, Lunar Outpost, Puli Space, Dymon Co. Ltd., and the German Aerospace Center.

Some of those mark vanguard industry moments as well, he said.

“Once we touch down, we deploy a rover that tests cellular signals. We have a hopper that blasts off the side of the lander and hops into a permanently shadowed crater, which has never been done before,” he said.

The complexity of the mission will also be the first at the south pole.

“It’s really exciting all of it, to be able to say the first objective from the first mission was, really, can you get to the moon? Can you really do this at this such a low cost in such a short amount of time?” he said. “Then what we did was we made such a complicated mission for the second one. Take on more objectives. Try harder, try to do something more amazing, right? And, you know, to be here at the pad ready to go, it’s just feels great.”

The Athena lander will be active until the lunar sunset on March 16 and the lander loses communication with the Earth and Athena won’t be able to endure the cold of the lunar night.

While Athena is busy on the surface, Lunar Trailblazer will be right behind, but take several months to set up its orbital mission, which was chosen in 2019 under NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program.

While managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft on which NASA’s imaging spectrometer and thermal mapper will be getting to work.

Lockheed’s Tim Priser, the chief engineer for the company’s commercial line of business, said the mission is one of the stepping stones for a bigger lunar exploration campaign, including trying to put a power grid on the moon.

“Before we can go put things like infrastructure on the moon, it’s going to be very important to understand where the water is, not just for life support for humans, but also in-situ manufacturing of whatever you can imagine,” he said. “But primarily, I think rocket fuel.”

To that end, Lunar Trailblazer’s job is to “go figure out where all that water is, how much of it is there, what the form of the water is, so that we can enable those future missions and start to build that infrastructure.”

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