Third Lunar Lander This Year Headed to the Moon, Plus an Orbiter

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket this evening with a commercial lunar lander and a NASA lunar orbiter among other payloads. The Athena lander, the second built by Intuitive Machines (IM-2), carries a total of 10 payloads for NASA and commercial customers including NASA’s PRIME-1 drill, IM’s Grace “hopper,” and Lunar Outpost’s MAPP micro-rover. IM-2 joins two other commercial landers, one American and the other Japanese, already enroute to Moon. Also onboard the rocket was NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer that will not land, but instead go into orbit and map water on the lunar surface.

Liftoff at 7:16 pm ET from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39-A went perfectly.

Liftoff of IM-2! pic.twitter.com/iJ3BCekqJs

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 27, 2025

Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Athena lander was the main payload on this Falcon 9. Part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, it was built by IM and is the company’s second lunar lander. The first, IM-1, landed last year and is considered a success even though it broke a leg on landing and tipped over.

IM-2 separated from the second stage 43 minutes after launch. A bit of tension ensued when Acquisition of Signal by ground stations didn’t occur on the first try, but it did soon thereafter.

Deployment of @Int_Machines IM-2 confirmed pic.twitter.com/67DVvpoZSS

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 27, 2025

Three small spacecraft, including Lunar Trailblazer, that shared the ride on Falcon 9 deployed about three minutes later, 20 seconds apart. First was Astroforge’s cubesat Odin, then Lunar Trailblazer, and finally EPIC Aerospace’s Chimera GEO 1. Odin is headed beyond the Moon to fly by and image asteroid 2022 OB5. Chimera is an Orbital Transfer Vehicle that can move spacecraft from one place to another.

Lunar Trailblazer was developed as part of NASA’s Small, Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEX) program. The 200 kilogram (440 pound) spacecraft will spend two years in lunar orbit mapping water on the surface. Built by Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft carries two science instruments, one from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and the other from the University of Oxford in the U.K. and funded by the U.K. Space Agency. The goal is to determine how much water is on the surface, where, and how its distribution changes over time and temperature.

Spacecraft can take a variety of paths to the Moon depending on how much fuel they have and if they need to utilize the gravity of the Sun, Earth and Moon to help them along. Lunar Trailblazer does and will take several months to get there. The two commercial lunar landers launched on January 15 also are on relatively long trajectories. Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, another CLPS mission, will land very early Sunday morning Eastern Standard Time after six-and-a-half weeks in flight. Japan’s ispace launched its SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon lander/rover on the same rocket as Firefly, but it will not arrive until the end of May or early June.

By contrast, IM-2 is on a fast track, with only eight days between launch and landing. The 2,120 kg (4,673 pound) lander, 4.2 meters (14 feet) tall and 4.6 meters (15 feet) wide will arrive on the surface on March 6, just four days after Firefly’s Blue Ghost.

Like many of today’s lunar landers, IM-2 is not designed to survive the lunar night and will operate only for 10 days. All parts of the Moon experience 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of darkness except for the permanently shadowed regions at the poles.  More capable landers and rovers launched by the United States and Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s and today by China have radioisotope power sources that keep them warm through the bitter cold lunar nights. These small commercial landers from the U.S, Japan and other countries use solar panels, however, and it’s rare for their batteries and other electronics to survive (but not impossible as Japan’s SLIM proved).

Those 10 days will be busy.

IM-2 will land at Mons Mouton, 5 degrees (100 miles/160 km) from the lunar South Pole, closer than any other spacecraft. NASA plans to land astronauts near the South Pole because data from previous missions indicate water, deposited over the eons by comets, may exist in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) that are never exposed to sunlight.

One of the experiments on IM-2 is a Micro Rover Hopper named Grace, after Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer. Built by IM in cooperation with NASA through a Tipping Point contract, it will hop off the lander to the surface and then make four more hops over to and down into — and hopefully back out of — one of the craters. A “hopping drone” as some call it.  Rovers typically are used to move across the surface, but they can’t go down into craters.

The Hopper has three instruments: a camera, the Puli Lunar Water Snooper neutron spectrometer provided by Hungary to determine if water is present, and a Lunar Radiometer from DLR, Germany’s space agency, to measure temperatures.

The Hopper will communicate back to the lander via a 4G/LTE Lunar Surface Communications System provided by Nokia, also through a Tipping Point partnership with NASA. The same communications system will be used for Lunar Outpost’s Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) rover for their Lunar Voyager-1 (LV1) mission.  MAPP is a “micro rover” that is 45 x 38 x 40 centimeters (17.7 x 15 x 15.7 inches) in size.

NASA created the CLPS initiative specifically to facilitate commercial activity on the Moon by purchasing services from companies like Intuitive Machines. The companies design, build and launch the spacecraft and are expected to find non-NASA customers to close the business case.

For IM-2, NASA paid Intuitive Machines $62.5 million for the services contract. Adding in the cost to NASA for payload developmen, the total is $145 million.

NASA’s two main payloads are a Lunar Retroreflector Array (LRA) and the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1,  PRIME-1, consisting of the TRIDENT drill and MSOLO mass spectrometer. Attached to the lander, TRIDENT will drill one meter (3 feet) down and bring up samples that will be analyzed on-site by MSOLO.  NASA also helped fund NOKIA’s communications system and IM’s Hopper through Tipping Point contracts from the Space Technology Mission Directorate.

In total, there are 10 payloads on Athena:

• PRIME-1 drill: NASA
• Lunar Retroreflector Array: NASA
• Nokia Lunar Surface Communications System: Nokia/NASA
• Micro Nova Hopper: Intuitive Machines/NASA
• Lunar Radiometer (on the Hopper): German Aerospace Center (DLR)
• Puli Lunar Water Snooper (on the Hopper): Puli Space Technologies Ltd. (Hungary)/NASA
• Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform rover: Lunar Outpost
• YAOKI rover:  Dymon Co, Ltd (Japan)
• Freedom (a data storage system): Lonestar Data Holdings
• Omni-Heat Infinity and Omni-Shade Sun Deflector (attached to the lander): Columbia Sportswear

IM also anticipates observing a lunar eclipse from the lander on March 14 at about 2:00 am Eastern Standard Time. The Moon will move into Earth’s shadow at that time.

 

This article has been updated.