SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket successfully boosted its unpiloted upper stage into space Thursday. The rocket was lost once it entered Earth’s atmosphere. CBS News space analyst Bill Hardwood reports.
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It’s been 70 years since Michigan has experienced a total solar eclipse, but we may get another chance to see it this year on Monday, April 8.
The path of totality, or the shadow cast when the moon completely blocks out the sun, will fall across just a tiny sliver of southeast Michigan. Since it will be another 75 years, in 2099, when Michiganders fall in the path of another total solar eclipse, astronomers are urging people to travel to see the beautiful, rare phenomenon if they can.
While there is also something called an annular eclipse that happens every one to two years, this one is different, and much more spectacular, according to University of Michigan astronomer David Gerdes. With both eclipses, the moon passes directly in front of the sun, but it is not completely covering it during an annular, or “ring of fire,” eclipse, so “the spectacular sights of a total eclipse — the delicate solar corona, darkness in the middle of the day, 360-degree twilight around the horizon — are not visible.”
Only three Michigan cities — Luna Pier, Ottawa, and Vienna, all located on the southeastern border — will be in the line of totality for the event.
However, most of Michigan will see at least a partial eclipse, and the closer to Ohio or Indiana borders the better. People in Ann Arbor can experience a very deep partial eclipse at 98.5%, while Detroiters will be able to see around 95%.
Fortunately, the event will last twice as long as the last one in 2017, at around four whole minutes.
So take a little road trip for the best view or catch the nearly total eclipse from home, but either way be sure to mark your calendar. You won’t want to miss this rare cosmic event.
American astronauts aren’t heading back to the moon just yet. NASA’s pricey Artemis mission is facing technical challenges. The space agency is now working with both SpaceX and Blue Origin.
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A small robotic lander built by a private company and carrying a scientific payload for NASA touched down near the south pole of the moon 11 days ago… and promptly tipped over on its side. Even so, it’s the first American spacecraft to land on the moon in more than 50 years.
NASA has a much more ambitious lunar program – called Artemis – which aims to send people back to the moon, to establish an outpost at the south pole, and to push on from there to Mars.
We previewed Artemis here in 2021, but there are significant questions now about the program’s costs and its timetable. In January NASA announced its new target for a manned landing – late 2026 – a year later than planned. but as we discovered, even that may be unrealistic.
When Artemis I soared into space in November of 2022, it was the beginning of a nearly flawless mission. In its first test flight, NASA’s new space launch system rocket sent an empty Orion crew capsule on a 1.4 million mile flyby of the moon before a picture-perfect return to Earth.
The next flight – Artemis II – meant to carry four astronauts on a lunar flyby – was supposed to launch this year, and then a year later Artemis III would land the first woman and first person of color on the moon. It’s not working out quite that way.
George Scott: I think it is safe to say, without significant reductions in cost, better cost controls, better planning, this Artemis program on its current trajectory is not sustainable.
George Scott is NASA’s acting inspector general. Don’t be misled by the ‘acting’; he’s been a top agency watchdog for more than five years. While NASA’s engineers have their heads in the stars, it’s his job to bring them back to Earth, particularly when it comes to costs.
George Scott is NASA’s acting inspector general.
60 Minutes
George Scott: Right now, we’re– we’re estimating that per launch– the Artemis campaign will cost $4.2 billion per launch.
Bill Whitaker: Per launch?
George Scott: Per launch. That’s an incredible amount of money per launch. A lot of that hardware is just going to end up in the ocean, never to be used again.
Bill Whitaker: The– inspector general for NASA says that the costs for the Artemis program are simply unsustainable. Is he wrong?
Jim Free: We didn’t necessarily agree with their conclusions. We, we feel like we’ve taken an affordable path to do these missions.
Jim Free is NASA’s associate administrator, and directly in charge of Artemis. We met him at historic Launch Pad 39b, from which both Apollo and Artemis rockets have flown.
Jim Free: We believe that the rocket we have is best matched for the mission and frankly the only one in the world that can take crews to the moon.
But as George Scott said, most components of that SLS rocket end up in the ocean; they’re not reusable. And with the goal of building an outpost on the moon, Artemis will need a lot of those $4.2 billion rockets!
Bill Whitaker: It’s going to take launch after launch after launch to get all that stuff up there.
Jim Free: Yes. So the number of launches is daunting. But it’s– it’s hard to get people to the moon.
When America sent Neil Armstrong and 11 more astronauts to the moon a half century ago, they got to the lunar surface aboard landers…owned and operated by NASA.
Bill Whitaker: You’re taking a different approach this time than with Apollo. What’s– what’s the difference this time?
Jim Free: The difference is we’re buying it as a service. We’re paying someone to take our crews down and take them up.
Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, at the historic launch pad 39B.
60 Minutes
That someone is Elon Musk. In 2021, NASA signed a nearly $3 billion contract with his SpaceX to use its new Starship mega-rocket as the lunar lander for the first Artemis astronauts.
SpaceX is preparing for its third Starship launch atop its enormous super-heavy booster. The first two launches both ended in roughly the same way.
Announcer (during SpaceX broadcast): As you can see, the super-heavy booster has just experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Bill Whitaker: And now you’ve seen some of the perils of relying on SpaceX.
Jim Free: We’ve seen some of the challenges they’ve had on Starship. We need them to launch several times– to give us the confidence that we can put our crews on there.
Bill Whitaker: But right now, as we sit here today, you have no way of getting the astronauts to the surface of the moon because of these problems that SpaceX has faced?
Jim Free: Because they haven’t– they haven’t hit the technical milestones.
SpaceX’s stated plan is to first put its Starship lander into low earth orbit, then launch 10 more starship tankers to pump rocket fuel into the lander in space…
… before sending it onward to meet astronauts in lunar orbit.
Bill Whitaker: And this has never been done before?
Jim Free: There’s been small-scale transfers in orbit, but not of this magnitude.
Bill Whitaker: It just sounds incredibly complicated.
Jim Free: It– it is complicated. There’s no doubt about that. It’s d– you don’t– you just– just launch ten times kind of on a whim.
George Scott: If it’s never been done before, chances are it’s going to take longer than you think to do it, and to do it successfully, and– and prove that technology before we trust putting humans on it. There is a long way to go.
NASA Artemis rocket
NASA
NASA’s contract with SpaceX requires the company to make an un-manned lunar landing with Starship before trying one with astronauts on board. But NASA still says the manned mission can happen in two and a half years.
Bill Whitaker: And that just seems like the time frame we’re talking about, the end of 2026, seems ambitious to say the least.
Jim Free: What we’re doing is ambitious And it’s a great goal to have. To do that–
Bill Whitaker: Is the goal realistic?
Jim Free: I believe it is. I– I believe it is.
Jim Free’s optimism is based on SpaceX’s track record with its smaller Falcon rocket.
Once it got the Falcon up and running, it demonstrated it can launch a lot – 96 times last year alone, with both commercial and government payloads. But so far Starship has yet to reach orbit even once.
Bill Whitaker: Does that concern you, that that’s going to keep pushing that timeline back further–
Jim Free: Of course it absolutely concerns me because we need them to launch multiple times.
SpaceX ignored our multiple requests for an interview or comment. But in an interview with “The Daily Wire” in January, Elon Musk said this:
Elon Musk (in “Daily Wire” interview): We’re hoping to have first humans on the moon in less than 5 years.
Jim Free: My view of that is we have a contract with SpaceX that says they’re going to launch our crew in the end of 2026.
Why does it really matter when we get back to the moon? Here’s why: China has said it plans to send its “taikonauts” to the moon by the end of the decade, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has publicly expressed concern.
Bill Nelson (during 8/8/23 briefing): Naturally, I don’t want China to get to the South Pole first with humans and then say, “This is ours, stay out.”
To ensure that the U.S. will plant its flag first, NASA signed a new $3 billion contract last year with Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, to build another lunar lander. And Jim Free is crystal clear that he sees it as an option if SpaceX Starships keep blowing up.
Jim Free: If we have a problem with one– we– we’ll have another one to rely on. If we have– a dependency on a particular aspect in– in SpaceX or Blue Origin and it doesn’t work out, then we have another lander that can take our crews.
In this battle of the star-gazing billionaires, Bezos’ Blue Origin has far fewer launches than Musk’s SpaceX, and has been far quieter about its ambitions… until now.
John Couluris: So what we’re looking to do is not only get to the moon and back, but make it reliable, and repeatable, and low cost.
Blue Origins’s John Couluris shows Bill Whitaker around Blue Origin’s Florida complex, just next to the Kennedy Space Center.
60 Minutes
John Couluris’s title at Blue Origin is “senior vice president of lunar permanence,” and it says a lot about the company’s ambition.
John Couluris: The landers that Blue Origin’s going to be building are reusable. We’ll launch them to lunar orbit. And we’ll leave them there. And we’ll refuel them in orbit, so that– multiple astronauts can use the same vehicle back and forth.
Our cameras were among the first to be allowed inside Blue Origin’s huge complex in Florida, just next to Kennedy Space Center.
Bill Whitaker: This is where the future is being built.
John Couluris: That’s right. This is the main factory floor for the New Glenn rocket.
New Glenn is Blue Origin’s first heavy lift rocket. Its maiden launch will be sometime this year.
John Couluris: So you can see over here we have three different second stages already in build here.
The first New Glenn is already out at Blue Origin’s launch complex. It’s designed to carry all sorts of payloads, including the lunar lander being built for NASA.
John Couluris: So this is the Mark 1 lander. We call this our small lander.
Bill Whitaker: This is the small one?
John Couluris: Yes.
It’s actually a mock-up of their cargo lander, in Blue Origin’s Florida lobby. John Couluris used to work at SpaceX, and he came over to Blue to help speed things up.
Bill Whitaker: Is there a bit of a space race between you and SpaceX?
John Couluris: So the country needs competition. We need options. Competition brings innovation.
Illustration of a Blue Origin lander
Blue Origin
Bill Whitaker: But you haven’t had anything close to the accomplishments that SpaceX has had at this point, have you?
John Couluris: SpaceX has done some amazing things. And they’ve changed the narrative for access to space. And Blue Origin’s looking to do the same. This lander, we’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today.
Bill Whitaker: 12 and 16 months from today–
John Couluris: Yes. Yes. And I understand I’m saying that publicly. But that’s what our team is aiming towards.
Bill Whitaker: But that’s for, that’s for the cargo lander. What about humans?
John Couluris: For humans, we’re working with NASA on the Artemis V mission. That’s planned for 2029.
That’s not so different from Elon Musk’s forecast of when SpaceX can land humans back on the moon… even if it doesn’t match NASA’s. Like the Starship, Blue Origin’s lander will require in-space re-fueling, but Couluris insists that it and their rocket will help NASA trim costs.
John Couluris: Our New Glenn vehicle will be– a reusable vehicle from its first mission. That lander for the astronauts is a reusable lander. So now you’re not just taking the equipment and throwing it away. You’re reusing it for the next mission.
Bill Whitaker: You do it again, and again, and again. Is that where the cost savings comes in?
John Couluris: Exactly. We are now building with NASA, the infrastructure to ensure lunar permanency.
Bill Whitaker: You have said that the Artemis program is the beginning, not the end. Tell me, what is the future you see?
Jim Free: I see us landing on Mars. Absolutely see us landing on Mars. But we have to work through the moon to get to mars.
Bill Whitaker: These are magnificent goals, you know, going back to the moon, going to Mars. Do we have the ability to do what we’re dreaming of doing?
George Scott: You know, this is NASA. Right? This agency is destined to continue to do great things. There’s no question about that. What we’re telling the agency is, “Just be more realistic.” There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic. In fact, it’s required. Right? In this business, optimism is required. The question is though, can you also be more realistic?
Produced by Rome Hartman. Associate producer, Sara Kuzmarov. Broadcast associate, Mariah B. Campbell. Edited by Craig Crawford.
Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.
Lunar night has come around again, presenting yet another test for the two landers that recently arrived on the moon’s surface. Both Japan’s SLIM spacecraft and Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus have gone to sleep for the two-week-long stretch of darkness, the two teams confirmed at the end of this week. There’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to resume operations afterward, but they’ll try to reestablish contact when the time comes.
While the solar powered landers weren’t built to withstand the frigid lunar night, SLIM — which has been on the moon since January 19 — has already beaten the odds before to pull through last month. It’ll be the first lunar night for Odysseus, which landed on February 22.
On March 1 at 3am JST, the sun set on the Shioli Crater and #SLIM re-entered a period of dormancy. Although the probability of a failure increases with the repeated severe temperature cycles, SLIM operation will attempt to resume when the sun rises (late March). #GoodAfterMoonpic.twitter.com/RHxNX1cmBF
The missions, though successful in that the spacecraft survived their respective descents to the surface, stand as further examples of how challenging it is to land on the moon; both landers fell over, leaving them stuck in non-ideal positions. SLIM face-planted, and Odysseus broke a leg and tipped onto its side.
SLIM has been able to capture a few images from the surface, and the team shared another look at the Shioli crater from its perspective on Thursday before it powered down. Odysseus has sent home some pictures too from its wide-angle camera, including one last transmission before lunar night that shows a portion of the lander and the surface of the moon, with a tiny crescent Earth in the distance. But the world has eagerly been awaiting third-person POV pictures from the EagleCam made by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which hitched a ride with Odysseus. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely to happen at this point.
Before its power was depleted, Odysseus completed a fitting farewell transmission. Received today, this image from February 22nd showcases the crescent Earth in the backdrop, a subtle reminder of humanity’s presence in the universe.
The camera wasn’t deployed as originally planned before the moment of touchdown, and while Intuitive Machines said this week that the team was able to power it up and eject it after Odysseus reached the surface, communications with the camera so far aren’t working. “The Embry‑Riddle team is working on that and wrestling with that to see if there’s anything they can do,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said on Wednesday. The onset of lunar night isn’t going to help those odds.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the tipped-over Odysseus lander on the surface of the moon, officials said Monday, confirming it touched down less than a mile from its planned landing site near the moon’s south pole.
Odysseus builder Intuitive Machines of Houston posted a picture captured by the lander during its final descent, along with a blurry shot apparently taken after touchdown, showing the rock-strewn surface immediately around the landing site.
“Odysseus continues to communicate with flight controllers in Nova Control from the lunar surface,” Intuitive Machines said on its website.
“After understanding the end-to-end communication requirements, Odysseus sent images from the lunar surface of its vertical descent to its Malapert A landing site, representing the furthest south any vehicle has been able to land on the moon and establish communication with ground controllers.”
Odysseus continues to communicate with flight controllers in Nova Control from the lunar surface. After understanding the end-to-end communication requirements, Odysseus sent images from the lunar surface of its vertical descent to its Malapert A landing site, representing the… pic.twitter.com/CuCkOVvBqu
Images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera confirmed Odysseus touched down at 80.13 degrees south latitude and 1.44 east longitude at an elevation of 1.6 miles, putting it within 5,000 feet of the landing site near a crater known as Malapert A.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a photograph of the Odysseus lander on the moon’s surface, a tiny dot casting a distinct shadow on the cratered terrain near the moon’s south pole.
NASA/Intuitive Machines
“After traveling more than 600,000 miles, Odysseus landed within (nine tenths of a mile) of its intended Malapert A landing site,” the company posted.
A second photograph showed the lunar terrain below Odysseus as the spacecraft descended straight down toward the moon, its fixed landing legs poised for touchdown.
Odysseus captured this image approximately 35 seconds after pitching over during its approach to the landing site. The camera is on the starboard aft-side of the lander in this phase. 2/5 (26FEB2024 0745 CST) pic.twitter.com/oUcjk3bCqW
Odysseus was launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 15 and landed at 6:24 p.m. EST last Thursday, becoming the first privately build spacecraft to successfully touch down on the moon and the first U.S. spacecraft of any kind to accomplish that feat in more than 50 years.
This image provided by Intuitive Machines shows its Odysseus lunar lander over the near side of the moon following lunar orbit insertion, Feb. 21, 2024.
Intuitive Machines via AP
But the spacecraft was moving to one side slightly at the moment of touchdown. One of its six landing legs apparently dug in, or got caught on a rock or stuck in a crevice, causing the 14-foot-tall Odysseus to topple over on its side.
While the lander survived touchdown, antennas were not properly aimed at Earth and data transmission has been slower than expected. In any case, the spacecraft will only survive a few more days before the sun sets at the landing site, ending its ability to generate solar power.
Japan’s moon lander survives lunar night
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, meanwhile, reported Monday that flight controllers had managed to reestablish contact with their SLIM lunar lander, which touched down on the moon Jan. 19 and promptly tipped over on its nose. One of the probe’s two engines malfunctioned shortly before touchdown, producing an unbalanced thrust that caused it to hit the surface while still moving forward.
Engineers did not expect the solar-powered spacecraft to survive the lunar night, but flight controllers reported they were able to re-contact the lander over the weekend.
“SLIM successfully survived the night on the lunar surface while maintaining communication capabilities!” the space agency reported. “Last night, as it was still midday and the temperature of the communication equipment was extremely high, communication was terminated after only a short period of time.
“From now on, preparations will be made so that observations can be resumed once the temperature has cooled sufficiently.”
A photo from one of SLIM’s navigation cameras was posted on X showing the surrounding landscape.
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
It turns out Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft didn’t land upright after all. In a press conference with NASA Friday evening, the company revealed the lander is laying on its side after coming in a little faster than expected, likely catching its foot on the surface at the moment of landing. Fortunately, Odysseus is positioned in such a way that its solar panels are still getting enough light from the sun to keep it charged, and the team has been able to communicate with it. Pictures from the surface should be coming soon.
While the initial assessment was that Odysseus had landed properly, further analysis indicated otherwise. Intuitive Machines CEO and co-founder Steve Altemus said “stale telemetry” was to blame for the earlier reading.
All payloads except the one static art installation, though — Jeff Koons’ Moon Phases sculptures — are on the upturned side. The lander and its NASA science payloads have been collecting data from the journey, descent and landing, which the team will use to try and get a better understanding of what happened. But, all things considered, it seems to be doing well.
The team plans to eject the EagleCam, developed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, so it can take a picture of the lander and its surroundings perhaps as soon as this weekend. It was supposed to be ejected during descent to capture the moment of landing, but issues on touchdown day prevented it from being released.
Intuitive Machines
Intuitive Machines
Once Odysseus was in lunar orbit and hours away from its landing attempt, the team discovered its laser range finders, which are key to its precision navigation, were not working — due entirely to human error. According to Altemus, someone forgot to flip a safety switch that would allow them to turn on, so they couldn’t. That realization was “like a punch in the stomach,” Altemus said, and they thought they could lose the mission.
The team was thankfully able to make a last-second adjustment cooked up on the fly by Intuitive Machines CTO and co-founder Tim Crain, who suggested they use one of the on-board NASA payloads instead to guide the descent, the Navigation Doppler LIDAR (NDL). In the end, Odysseus made it there alright. Its mission is expected to last a little over a week, until lunar night falls.
Hundreds of thousands of miles beyond Earth, a phone booth-size spacecraft is en route to take on a challenge no vehicle launched from the United States has attempted in more than 50 years.The lunar lander called Odysseus or IM-1, created by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, landed on the moon this week. Coverage of the historic event was livestreamed on NASA TV.Success is not guaranteed. Had it failed, Odysseus would have become the third lunar lander to meet a fiery demise on the moon in less than a year. Russiaâs first lunar lander mission in 47 years, Luna 25, failed in August 2023 when it crash-landed. Hakuto-R, a lander developed by Japan-based company Ispace, met a similar fate last April.Overall, more than half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure â tough odds for a feat humanity first pulled off nearly 60 years ago.The Soviet Unionâs Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to make a controlled, or âsoft,â landing in February 1966. The United States followed shortly after when its robotic Surveyor 1 spacecraft touched down on the moonâs surface just four months later.Since then, only three other countries â China, India and Japan â have achieved such a milestone. All three reached the moon with robotic vehicles for the first time in the 21st century. India and Japan each pulled off the monumental feat just within the past six months, long after the U.S.-Soviet space race had petered out. The U.S. remains the only country to have put humans on the lunar surface, most recently in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission.But the U.S. government hasnât even tried for a soft landing â with or without astronauts on board â since then. Private space company Astrobotic Technology had hoped its Peregrine lunar lander would make history after its recent January launch, but the company waved off the landing attempt mere hours after liftoff because of a critical fuel leak and brought the spacecraft back to burn up in Earthâs atmosphere.Regaining past knowledge and experience is a big part of the challenge for the U.S., Scott Pace, the director of George Washington Universityâs Space Policy Institute, told CNN.âWeâre learning to do things that we havenât done in a long time, and what youâre seeing is organizations learning how to fly again,â Pace said. âGoing to the moon is not a matter of just a brave or brilliant astronaut. Itâs a matter of entire organizations that are organized, trained, and equipped to go out there. What weâre doing now is essentially rebuilding some of the expertise that we had during Apollo but lost over the last 50 years.âTechnical know-how, however, is only part of the equation when it comes to landing on the moon. Most of the hurdles are financial.A new modelAt the peak of the Apollo program, NASAâs budget comprised over 4% of all government spending. Today, the space agencyâs budget is one-tenth the size, accounting for only 0.4% of all federal spending, even as it attempts to return American astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program.âThere were literally hundreds of thousands of people working on Apollo. It was a $100 billion program in 1960s numbers. It would be a multi-trillion-dollar program in todayâs dollars,â said Greg Autry, the director of space leadership at Arizona State Universityâs Thunderbird School of Global Management. âThereâs simply nothing that compares to it.âThe lunar landers of the 21st century are attempting to accomplish many of the same goals at a small fraction of the price.Indiaâs Chandrayaan-3 lander, which became the first spacecraft from the country to safely reach the lunar surface in August 2023, cost about $72 million, according to Jitendra Singh, the Minister of State for Science and Technology.âThe cost of Chandrayaan-3 is merely Rs 600 crore ($72 million USD), whereas a Hollywood film on space and moon costs more than Rs 600 crore,â Singh told The Economic Times, a media outlet in India, in August.In the U.S., NASA is attempting to drastically reduce prices by outsourcing the design of small, robotic spacecraft to the private sector through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS.Astrobotic was the first company to fly under the CLPS initiative, and after its January setback, Intuitive Machines has picked up the torch â soft-landing Odysseus near the lunar south pole on Thursday, though the craft is now reportedly on its side.âWeâre going a thousand times further than the International Space Station,â Intuitive Machines president and CEO Steve Altemus told CNN. âAnd then, on top of that, you set the target: Do it for $100 million when in the past itâs been done for billions of dollars.âWhy we canât just repeat ApolloItâs also unrealistic to expect that NASA or one of its partners could simply drag out the blueprints of a 1960s lunar lander and recreate it from scratch. Most of the technology used on those missions has long been retired, cast aside by the massive leaps in computing power and material sciences made in the past half-century.Each piece of hardware on a lunar lander must be sourced from modern supply chains â which look far different than those of the 20th century â or designed and manufactured anew. And every sensor and electronic component on the spacecraft must be created to withstand the harsh environment of outer space, a process the industry calls âhardening.âThe Apollo missions were famously controlled by computers less powerful than modern smartphones. But spaceflight is far too complex and dangerous to directly translate computing advancements to easier, cheaper moon missions.âLanding on the moon is very different than programming a game. The thing about the iPhone in your pocket is that there are millions and millions of these things. Whereas with space launches, thereâs maybe only a handful of them,â Pace said. âThe iPhone is, of course, a wonderful innovation with hundreds if not thousands of innovations buried within it, but it also benefits from just raw numbers. And so we really havenât had that kind of repetition in lunar landings.âA perilous descentAnd while technology has advanced in the past five decades, the fundamental challenges of landing on the moon remain the same. First, there is the sheer distance â itâs roughly a quarter of a million-mile journey from Earth to the moon. If you could drive a car to the moon at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour, it would take more than five months.âSome people have likened it to hitting a golf ball in New York and having it go into a specific hole in Los Angeles. That kind of precision in long distance is unbelievably difficult to do,â Pace said.Then, there is the tricky lunar terrain. The moon is covered in dead volcanoes and deep craters, making it difficult to find flat landing zones.âApollo 11 would absolutely have crashed and been destroyed if it had landed on the spot it originally came down on,â Autry said. âNeil (Armstrong) was literally looking out the window. He maneuvered the lander over a boulder field and a big crater and found a safe spot to land with just barely enough fuel left. If there wasnât a skilled pilot that could control it, the lander certainly would have wrecked.âWithout the assistance of human eyes inside the spacecraft, modern-day robotic lunar landers use cameras, computers, and sensors equipped with software and artificial intelligence to safely find their landing spot â and avoid boulders and craters â during the final descent. And even humans in mission control rooms back on Earth canât help the spacecraft in those final, critical seconds before touchdown.âIt takes time for a signal to go up and come back, about three seconds total round trip,â Pace said. âA lot can go wrong in that time. So when the vehicle is actually landing, itâs pretty much on its own.âFailure is an optionIn the early days of the 20th-century space race, far more spacecraft failed than safely touched down on the moon. The companies and governments dashing for the moon today â aiming for cheaper price points as they implement modern technology â acknowledge that legacy.And NASAâs commercial partners may be even more willing to embrace risks as they take their moonshots.â(Commercial companies) brought that iterative, fail fast model with them. Get the product out there, let it blow up, figure out what you did wrong, fix it, and go again,â Autry said. âThat is not the way the U.S. government operates. Because if your project dies, your government career is screwed.âFor its part, even NASA recognizes that a 100% success rate is not guaranteed for its partners.âWeâve always viewed these initial CLPS deliveries as being kind of a learning experience,â said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for NASAâs exploration, science mission directorate, during a February 13 briefing. âWe knew going into this ⦠we didnât believe that success was assured.âThe hope, however, is that failures early on will lead to repeatable successes down the road. Itâs already clear many of the modern moon race participants are prepared to bounce back from their initial failures.Both Ispace â the Japanese company that encountered a mission-ending software glitch last year â and Astrobotic, which lost its Peregrine lander to a propellant issue, have second attempts already in the works.âEverybody on those missions was a rookie. These are people doing it for the first time, and thereâs no substitute for that experience. Itâs like taking your first solo flight,â Pace said. âYes, theyâre failing, and some companies will go out of business. But if they learn from that failure and come back, now youâre going to have a strong team. This is really about educating a new generation.â
Hundreds of thousands of miles beyond Earth, a phone booth-size spacecraft is en route to take on a challenge no vehicle launched from the United States has attempted in more than 50 years.
The lunar lander called Odysseus or IM-1, created by Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, landed on the moon this week. Coverage of the historic event was livestreamed on NASA TV.
Success is not guaranteed. Had it failed, Odysseus would have become the third lunar lander to meet a fiery demise on the moon in less than a year. Russiaâs first lunar lander mission in 47 years, Luna 25, failed in August 2023 when it crash-landed. Hakuto-R, a lander developed by Japan-based company Ispace, met a similar fate last April.
Overall, more than half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure â tough odds for a feat humanity first pulled off nearly 60 years ago.
The Soviet Unionâs Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to make a controlled, or âsoft,â landing in February 1966. The United States followed shortly after when its robotic Surveyor 1 spacecraft touched down on the moonâs surface just four months later.
Since then, only three other countries â China, India and Japan â have achieved such a milestone. All three reached the moon with robotic vehicles for the first time in the 21st century. India and Japan each pulled off the monumental feat just within the past six months, long after the U.S.-Soviet space race had petered out. The U.S. remains the only country to have put humans on the lunar surface, most recently in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission.
But the U.S. government hasnât even tried for a soft landing â with or without astronauts on board â since then. Private space company Astrobotic Technology had hoped its Peregrine lunar lander would make history after its recent January launch, but the company waved off the landing attempt mere hours after liftoff because of a critical fuel leak and brought the spacecraft back to burn up in Earthâs atmosphere.
Regaining past knowledge and experience is a big part of the challenge for the U.S., Scott Pace, the director of George Washington Universityâs Space Policy Institute, told CNN.
âWeâre learning to do things that we havenât done in a long time, and what youâre seeing is organizations learning how to fly again,â Pace said. âGoing to the moon is not a matter of just a brave or brilliant astronaut. Itâs a matter of entire organizations that are organized, trained, and equipped to go out there. What weâre doing now is essentially rebuilding some of the expertise that we had during Apollo but lost over the last 50 years.â
Technical know-how, however, is only part of the equation when it comes to landing on the moon. Most of the hurdles are financial.
A new model
At the peak of the Apollo program, NASAâs budget comprised over 4% of all government spending. Today, the space agencyâs budget is one-tenth the size, accounting for only 0.4% of all federal spending, even as it attempts to return American astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program.
âThere were literally hundreds of thousands of people working on Apollo. It was a $100 billion program in 1960s numbers. It would be a multi-trillion-dollar program in todayâs dollars,â said Greg Autry, the director of space leadership at Arizona State Universityâs Thunderbird School of Global Management. âThereâs simply nothing that compares to it.â
The lunar landers of the 21st century are attempting to accomplish many of the same goals at a small fraction of the price.
Indiaâs Chandrayaan-3 lander, which became the first spacecraft from the country to safely reach the lunar surface in August 2023, cost about $72 million, according to Jitendra Singh, the Minister of State for Science and Technology.
âThe cost of Chandrayaan-3 is merely Rs 600 crore ($72 million USD), whereas a Hollywood film on space and moon costs more than Rs 600 crore,â Singh told The Economic Times, a media outlet in India, in August.
In the U.S., NASA is attempting to drastically reduce prices by outsourcing the design of small, robotic spacecraft to the private sector through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS.
Astrobotic was the first company to fly under the CLPS initiative, and after its January setback, Intuitive Machines has picked up the torch â soft-landing Odysseus near the lunar south pole on Thursday, though the craft is now reportedly on its side.
âWeâre going a thousand times further than the International Space Station,â Intuitive Machines president and CEO Steve Altemus told CNN. âAnd then, on top of that, you set the target: Do it for $100 million when in the past itâs been done for billions of dollars.â
Why we canât just repeat Apollo
Itâs also unrealistic to expect that NASA or one of its partners could simply drag out the blueprints of a 1960s lunar lander and recreate it from scratch. Most of the technology used on those missions has long been retired, cast aside by the massive leaps in computing power and material sciences made in the past half-century.
Each piece of hardware on a lunar lander must be sourced from modern supply chains â which look far different than those of the 20th century â or designed and manufactured anew. And every sensor and electronic component on the spacecraft must be created to withstand the harsh environment of outer space, a process the industry calls âhardening.â
âLanding on the moon is very different than programming a game. The thing about the iPhone in your pocket is that there are millions and millions of these things. Whereas with space launches, thereâs maybe only a handful of them,â Pace said. âThe iPhone is, of course, a wonderful innovation with hundreds if not thousands of innovations buried within it, but it also benefits from just raw numbers. And so we really havenât had that kind of repetition in lunar landings.â
A perilous descent
And while technology has advanced in the past five decades, the fundamental challenges of landing on the moon remain the same. First, there is the sheer distance â itâs roughly a quarter of a million-mile journey from Earth to the moon. If you could drive a car to the moon at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour, it would take more than five months.
âSome people have likened it to hitting a golf ball in New York and having it go into a specific hole in Los Angeles. That kind of precision in long distance is unbelievably difficult to do,â Pace said.
Then, there is the tricky lunar terrain. The moon is covered in dead volcanoes and deep craters, making it difficult to find flat landing zones.
âApollo 11 would absolutely have crashed and been destroyed if it had landed on the spot it originally came down on,â Autry said. âNeil (Armstrong) was literally looking out the window. He maneuvered the lander over a boulder field and a big crater and found a safe spot to land with just barely enough fuel left. If there wasnât a skilled pilot that could control it, the lander certainly would have wrecked.â
Without the assistance of human eyes inside the spacecraft, modern-day robotic lunar landers use cameras, computers, and sensors equipped with software and artificial intelligence to safely find their landing spot â and avoid boulders and craters â during the final descent. And even humans in mission control rooms back on Earth canât help the spacecraft in those final, critical seconds before touchdown.
âIt takes time for a signal to go up and come back, about three seconds total round trip,â Pace said. âA lot can go wrong in that time. So when the vehicle is actually landing, itâs pretty much on its own.â
Failure is an option
In the early days of the 20th-century space race, far more spacecraft failed than safely touched down on the moon. The companies and governments dashing for the moon today â aiming for cheaper price points as they implement modern technology â acknowledge that legacy.
And NASAâs commercial partners may be even more willing to embrace risks as they take their moonshots.
â(Commercial companies) brought that iterative, fail fast model with them. Get the product out there, let it blow up, figure out what you did wrong, fix it, and go again,â Autry said. âThat is not the way the U.S. government operates. Because if your project dies, your government career is screwed.â
For its part, even NASA recognizes that a 100% success rate is not guaranteed for its partners.
âWeâve always viewed these initial CLPS deliveries as being kind of a learning experience,â said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for NASAâs exploration, science mission directorate, during a February 13 briefing. âWe knew going into this ⦠we didnât believe that success was assured.â
The hope, however, is that failures early on will lead to repeatable successes down the road. Itâs already clear many of the modern moon race participants are prepared to bounce back from their initial failures.
Both Ispace â the Japanese company that encountered a mission-ending software glitch last year â and Astrobotic, which lost its Peregrine lander to a propellant issue, have second attempts already in the works.
âEverybody on those missions was a rookie. These are people doing it for the first time, and thereâs no substitute for that experience. Itâs like taking your first solo flight,â Pace said. âYes, theyâre failing, and some companies will go out of business. But if they learn from that failure and come back, now youâre going to have a strong team. This is really about educating a new generation.â
For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the moon.
There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.
But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.
Losing Your Way
The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the moon. Patching your spacecraft’s software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.
Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.
Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to face-plant into the moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.
One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kilogram package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the moon.
The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?
A New Home
The Odysseus lander started its descent from a circular orbit 57 miles (92 kilometers) above the surface of the moon, an hour and 13 minutes before its planned landing time. The lander began a powered descent, using its main engine powered by liquid oxygen and methane, 11 minutes before touchdown on this timeline. During these final, crucial minutes, Odysseus’ improvised terrain-relative navigation camera scanned the surface for hazards, such as boulders, to ensure a safe landing site.
After the touchdown, the mission controllers knew it might take a minute or two to get a good signal back from the lander, which was relaying signals back to large satellite dishes on Earth. First one, then two, and then five minutes passed with an increasingly uncomfortable silence in the mission control room for Intuitive Machines. Nothing.
Finally, after 10 minutes, mission director Tim Crain called out that the lander was sending a faint signal back to Earth.
“We’re not dead yet,” said Crain, who is a cofounder of the company.
Intuitive Machines’ private lander stumbled on its way down to the lunar surface and is possibly leaning over on a rock on the Moon. The vehicle is still operational and flight engineers are working to gather more data on its less than ideal position, the company said.
China’s Plan to Land Astronauts on the Moon
Odysseus landed on the Moon on Thursday, overcoming a glitch that jeopardized its ability to safely touch down. Although it made it to the surface, Odie’s landing was not so smooth, with the vehicle getting one of its legs caught, causing it to tip over on its side and possibly end up laying on a rock, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus revealed during a press conference on Friday.
“Yesterday we thought we were upright,” Altemus said. “When we worked through the night to get other telemetry data, we noticed that in this direction [pointing downwards] is where we’re seeing the tank residuals and so that’s what tells us with fairly certain terms the orientation of the vehicle.”
Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus explaining the orientation of the vehicle. Screenshot: NASA TV
“It was a quite a spicy seven-day mission to get to the Moon,” Altemus added, and he is not wrong. Intuitive Machines was racing to the lunar surface to become the first private company to land on the Moon following a series of failures by others. In January, Astrobotic failed in its attempt to reach the Moon due to a valve issue with its Peregrine spacecraft. In April 2023, Japan’s ispace Hakuto-R M1 crashed on the lunar surface, and Israel’s SpaceIL Beresheet lander met a similar fate in April 2019.
This time around, the Moon still put up a fight. Just hours before its scheduled descent, Odysseus’ laser rangefinders, which are designed to assess the Moon’s terrain to identify a safe landing spot, malfunctioned. In order to help guide the lander to the surface, flight engineers uploaded a software patch to repurpose a secondary laser on a NASA instrument that’s on board Odysseus.
The Houston-based company seemingly broke the lunar curse with Thursday’s touchdown, despite it not being entirely perfect. With the lander on its side, it is still receiving sunlight to its horizontal solar panel, and all of its active payloads are facing away from the surface and could therefore be able to operate from the Moon, according to Altemus.
Intuitive Machines secured a faint signal from its lander but it is still waiting on more data to be downlinked from Odysseus. Some of the antennas that the lander is designed to use to communicate with Earth, however, are pointed downward, which limits the mission’s ability to transmit data.
The IM-1 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to have a constant flow of private landers headed to the Moon to deliver government-owned and commercial payloads. With each private trip that launches to the Moon, NASA and its partner companies collect data to feed into the next mission.
“As landers come down, we would ideally like to have them come straight down,” Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator of Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, said during the press conference. “But because there’s errors in the operations of the system, you wind up going laterally…[we’re trying to] get an understanding of that lateral movement so that the system can counteract that and zero out that lateral motion to come straight down.”
Odysseus is designed to operate on the lunar surface for around a week, or until the Sun sets on the Moon’s south polar region. Intuitive Machines is hoping that the lander’s solar panels will be able to receive enough sunlight in their current position to power the lander through the coming days.
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In this image from video provided by NASA, Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, describes how it is believed the company’s Odysseus spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon, during a news conference in Houston on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. (NASA via AP)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A U.S. company says its spacecraft on the moon landed on its side.
The Odysseus lander was communicating with ground controllers and was sending back data after landing Thursday. Intuitive Machines initially said it was upright.
But a company official said Friday that the lander landed on its side near the south pole.
With Thursday’s touchdown, Intuitive Machines became the first private business to pull off a moon landing, a feat previously achieved by only five countries.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander circled the moon while aiming for a touchdown Thursday that would put the U.S. back on the surface for the first time since NASA’s famed Apollo moonwalkers.
Intuitive Machines was striving to become the first private business to successfully pull off a lunar landing, a feat achieved by only five countries. A rival company’s lander missed the moon last month.
The newest lander, named Odysseus, reached the moon Wednesday, six days after rocketing from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The lander maneuvered into a low lunar orbit in preparation for a late afternoon touchdown.
Flight controllers monitored the action unfolding some 250,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away from a command center at company headquarters in Houston.
The six-footed carbon fiber and titanium lander – towering 14 feet (4.3 meters) – carried six experiments for NASA. The space agency gave the company $118 million to build and fly the lander, part of its effort to commercialize lunar deliveries ahead of the planned return of astronauts in a few years.
Intuitive Machines’ entry is the latest in a series of landing attempts by countries and private outfits looking to explore the moon and, if possible, capitalize on it. Japan scored a lunar landing last month, joining earlier triumphs by Russia, U.S., China and India.
The U.S. bowed out of the lunar landscape in 1972 after NASA’s Apollo program put 12 astronauts on the surface . A Pittsburgh company, Astrobotic Technology, gave it a shot last month, but was derailed by a fuel leak that resulted in the lander plunging back through Earth’s atmosphere and burning up.
Intuitive Machines’ target was 186 miles (300 kilometers) shy of the south pole, around 80 degrees latitude and closer to the pole than any other spacecraft has come. The site is relatively flat, but surrounded by boulders, hills, cliffs and craters that could hold frozen water, a big part of the allure. The lander was programmed to pick, in real time, the safest spot near the so-called Malapert A crater.
The solar-powered lander was intended to operate for a week, until the long lunar night.
Besides NASA’s tech and navigation experiments, Intuitive Machines sold space on the lander to Columbia Sportswear to fly its newest insulating jacket fabric; sculptor Jeff Koons for 125 mini moon figurines; and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for a set of cameras to capture pictures of the descending lander.
Houston-based Intuitive Machines readied its Odysseus lander for touchdown on the moon today, a nail-biting one-hour 13-minute descent from orbit to become the first U.S.-built spacecraft to stick a moon landing in more than 50 years and the first ever by a private company.
One day after braking into a 57-mile-high orbit tilted 80 degrees to the moon’s equator, Odysseus’ methane-fueled main engine was primed to ignite at 4:17 p.m. EST, lowering the far side of the orbit to a point near the landing site some 186 miles from the moon’s south pole.
Intuitive Machines provided a timeline showing major events in the Odysseus lander’s descent to the surface of the moon. Times given in Central Standard Time.
Intuitive Machines
As the 14-foot-tall spacecraft descends toward the surface, on-board cameras and lasers are programmed to scan the ground below to identify landmarks, providing steering inputs to the lander’s guidance system to help fine tune the trajectory.
One hour later, at 5:18 p.m., the main engine is expected to ignite again at an altitude of about 18 miles and to keep firing for the final 10 minutes of the descent, flipping Odysseus from a horizontal orientation to vertical and dropping straight down at just under 4 mph.
As the spacecraft drops below 100 feet, an innovative camera package, known as “EagleCam,” built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, will fall away and attempt to photograph the lander’s final descent from the side. NASA cameras on board the spacecraft will photograph the ground directly below.
By the time Odysseus reaches an altitude of about 33 feet above the surface, the main engine was to have throttled down to the planned landing velocity of about 2.2 mph — walking speed for senior citizens.
A camera on the Odysseus lander captured an image of the moon below the spacecraft after a critical engine firing Wednesday to brake into lunar orbit.
Intuitive Machines
Video from the lander’s on-board cameras and the EagleCam cannot be transmitted back to Earth in real time, but Intuitive Machines’ engineers at the company’s Nova Control center in Houston say they should be able to verify touchdown within about 15 seconds. The first pictures are expected within a half hour or so.
A successful lunar landing would mark the first touchdown by a U.S.-built spacecraft since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 and the first ever by a privately-built spacecraft.
Pittsburg-based Astrobotic hoped to claim that honor last month with its Peregrine lander, but the mission was derailed by a ruptured propellant tank shortly after launch Jan. 9. Two earlier private moon ventures, one by Israel and the other by Japan, also ended in failure.
Only the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India and Japan have successfully put landers on the surface of the moon, and Japan’s “SLIM” lander was only partially successful, tipping over on touchdown Jan. 19.
Peregrine and Odysseus were both funded in part by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS (pronounced CLIPS), designed to encourage private industry to develop transportation capabilities that NASA can then use to transport payloads to the moon.
An artist’s impression of Intuitive Machines’s Odysseus lander on the surface of the moon.
Intuitive Machines
The agency’s goal is to help kickstart development of new technologies and to collect data that will be needed by Artemis astronauts planning to land near the moon’s south pole later this decade.
NASA paid Astrobotic $108 million for its part in the Peregrine mission and another $129 million for the Odysseus instruments and transportation to the moon.
What’s on board the Odysseus moon lander?
Odysseus was equipped with six NASA instruments and another six commercial payloads, including small moon sculptures by the artist Jeff Koons, proof-of-concept cloud storage technology, Columbia Sportswear insulation blankets and a small astronomical telescope.
Among the NASA experiments: an instrument to study the charged particle environment at the moon’s surface, another designed to test navigation technologies and the downward-facing cameras designed to photograph how the lander’s engine exhaust disrupts the soil at the landing site.
Also on board: an innovative sensor using radio waves to accurately determine how much cryogenic propellant is left in a tank in the weightless environment of space, technology expected to prove useful for downstream moon missions and other deep space voyages.
Odysseus and its instruments are expected to operate on the surface for about a week, until the sun sets at the landing site. At that point, the lander’s solar cells will no longer be able to generate power and the spacecraft will shut down. Odysseus was not designed to survive the ultra-cold lunar night.
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander is well on its way to the moon after launching without a hitch on Thursday, but it managed to snap a few incredible images of Earth while it was still close to home. The company shared the first batch of images from the IM-1 mission on X today after confirming in an earlier post that the spacecraft is “in excellent health.” Along with a view of Earth and some partial selfies of the Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, you can even see the SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage falling away in the distance after separation.
Intuitive Machines successfully transmitted its first IM-1 mission images to Earth on February 16, 2024. The images were captured shortly after separation from @SpaceX‘s second stage on Intuitive Machines’ first journey to the Moon under @NASA‘s CLPS initiative. pic.twitter.com/9LccL6q5tF
Odysseus is on track to make its moon landing attempt on February 22, and so far appears to be performing well. The team posted a series of updates on X at the end of the week confirming the lander has passed some key milestones ahead of its touchdown, including engine firing. This marked “the first-ever in-space ignition of a liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine,” according to Intuitive Machines.
The Odysseus lunar lander, nicknamed “Odie” or IM-1, has embarked on a historic journey to the lunar surface â aiming to make the first touchdown of a U.S.-made spacecraft on the moon in over five decades.The launch follows closely on the heels of a separate U.S. lunar landing mission that failed in January. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has ramped up the development of robotic spacecraft via private partners to evaluate the lunar environment and identify key resources â such as the presence of water â before it attempts to return astronauts to the moon later this decade.Odie lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:05 a.m. ET Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The mission had been slated to launch on Wednesday, but an issue with the temperature of propellant needed to power the spacecraft delayed the attempt by 24 hours.Journey to the moonThe rocket fired Odie into Earth’s orbit, blazing to speeds topping 24,600 mph, according to Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that developed the spacecraft under contract with NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.Odie’s path amounts to “a high-energy fastball pitch towards the moon,” as Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus put it.After burning through its fuel, the rocket detached from Odie, leaving the lunar lander to fly solo through space. The robotic explorer then consulted an onboard map of the stars so it could orient itself in space, pointing its solar panels toward the sunâs rays to charge its batteries.”We are seeing most everything that we would expect,” according to a dispatch from Intuitive Machinesâ mission control around 2 a.m. ET.Odie is now on an oval-shaped path around Earth, stretching as far out as 236,100 miles from home. And about 18 hours into spaceflight, the vehicle will ignite its motor for the first time, continuing its fast-paced trip toward the lunar surface.The moon, which orbits roughly 250,000 miles away from Earth, is expected to give Odie a gentle gravitational tug as the spacecraft approaches, pulling the vehicle toward its cratered surface.Odie is slated to make its nail-biting touchdown attempt on Feb. 22, aiming for a crater near the moonâs south pole.It will be a dangerous trek. If Odie fails, it will join a growing list of missions that have unsuccessfully sought a lunar touchdown: The first U.S.-built lunar lander to launch in five decades, Astrobotic Technologyâs Peregrine, was hampered by a critical fuel leak last month. That came after two failed missions from other countries in 2023: one from Russia and another from a company based in Japan.China, India and Japan are the only nations to have soft-landed vehicles on the moon so far in the 21st century.What Odie will do on the moonOdieâs trip to the moon can be considered a scouting mission of sorts, designed to assess the lunar environment ahead of NASAâs current plan to return a crewed mission to the moon through the Artemis program in late 2026.The moon’s south pole is an area of widespread interest amid a new international space race, as the region is thought to be home to stores of water ice. The precious resource could be converted into drinking water for astronauts or even rocket fuel for missions exploring deeper into space.Packed on board the lunar lander are six NASA science and technology payloads. They include a radio receiver system that will study lunar plasma, which is created by solar winds and other charged particles raining down on the moonâs surface.Other payloads will test technology that could be used on future lunar landing missions, such as a new sensor that could potentially help guide precision landings.The Navigation Doppler Lidar, as the sensor is called, “shoots laser beams to the ground and measures spacecraft velocity â thatâs the speed â and the direction of the flight,” said Farzin Amzajerdian, the principal investigator for the lidar payload at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.Also on board the lander are technological and commemorative payloads from the private sector. Columbia Sportswear, for example, developed a special insulation material that could help shield Odie from the moon’s extreme temperatures. A small sculpture representing the phases of the moon â designed in consultation with artist Jeff Koons â will be tucked on board as well.Odie also houses a camera system called EagleCam that was developed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. The device is set to pop off of the lunar lander as it approaches the surface and captures images of the vehicle’s descent.”Hopefully, weâll get a birdâs-eye view of that landing to share with the public,” Altemus said.Odie is expected to operate for seven days on the lunar surface before darkness falls on the landing site, blocking the spacecraftâs solar panels from the sun and plunging it into freezing temperatures.
The Odysseus lunar lander, nicknamed “Odie” or IM-1, has embarked on a historic journey to the lunar surface â aiming to make the first touchdown of a U.S.-made spacecraft on the moon in over five decades.
The launch follows closely on the heels of a separate U.S. lunar landing mission that failed in January. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has ramped up the development of robotic spacecraft via private partners to evaluate the lunar environment and identify key resources â such as the presence of water â before it attempts to return astronauts to the moon later this decade.
Odie lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:05 a.m. ET Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The mission had been slated to launch on Wednesday, but an issue with the temperature of propellant needed to power the spacecraft delayed the attempt by 24 hours.
Journey to the moon
The rocket fired Odie into Earth’s orbit, blazing to speeds topping 24,600 mph, according to Intuitive Machines, the Houston-based company that developed the spacecraft under contract with NASA through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
Odie’s path amounts to “a high-energy fastball pitch towards the moon,” as Intuitive Machines CEO Stephen Altemus put it.
After burning through its fuel, the rocket detached from Odie, leaving the lunar lander to fly solo through space. The robotic explorer then consulted an onboard map of the stars so it could orient itself in space, pointing its solar panels toward the sunâs rays to charge its batteries.
“We are seeing most everything that we would expect,” according to a dispatch from Intuitive Machinesâ mission control around 2 a.m. ET.
Odie is now on an oval-shaped path around Earth, stretching as far out as 236,100 miles from home. And about 18 hours into spaceflight, the vehicle will ignite its motor for the first time, continuing its fast-paced trip toward the lunar surface.
The moon, which orbits roughly 250,000 miles away from Earth, is expected to give Odie a gentle gravitational tug as the spacecraft approaches, pulling the vehicle toward its cratered surface.
Odie is slated to make its nail-biting touchdown attempt on Feb. 22, aiming for a crater near the moonâs south pole.
It will be a dangerous trek. If Odie fails, it will join a growing list of missions that have unsuccessfully sought a lunar touchdown: The first U.S.-built lunar lander to launch in five decades, Astrobotic Technologyâs Peregrine, was hampered by a critical fuel leak last month. That came after two failed missions from other countries in 2023: one from Russia and another from a company based in Japan.
China, India and Japan are the only nations to have soft-landed vehicles on the moon so far in the 21st century.
What Odie will do on the moon
Odieâs trip to the moon can be considered a scouting mission of sorts, designed to assess the lunar environment ahead of NASAâs current plan to return a crewed mission to the moon through the Artemis program in late 2026.
The moon’s south pole is an area of widespread interest amid a new international space race, as the region is thought to be home to stores of water ice. The precious resource could be converted into drinking water for astronauts or even rocket fuel for missions exploring deeper into space.
Packed on board the lunar lander are six NASA science and technology payloads. They include a radio receiver system that will study lunar plasma, which is created by solar winds and other charged particles raining down on the moonâs surface.
Other payloads will test technology that could be used on future lunar landing missions, such as a new sensor that could potentially help guide precision landings.
The Navigation Doppler Lidar, as the sensor is called, “shoots laser beams to the ground and measures spacecraft velocity â thatâs the speed â and the direction of the flight,” said Farzin Amzajerdian, the principal investigator for the lidar payload at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
Also on board the lander are technological and commemorative payloads from the private sector. Columbia Sportswear, for example, developed a special insulation material that could help shield Odie from the moon’s extreme temperatures. A small sculpture representing the phases of the moon â designed in consultation with artist Jeff Koons â will be tucked on board as well.
Odie also houses a camera system called EagleCam that was developed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. The device is set to pop off of the lunar lander as it approaches the surface and captures images of the vehicle’s descent.
“Hopefully, weâll get a birdâs-eye view of that landing to share with the public,” Altemus said.
Odie is expected to operate for seven days on the lunar surface before darkness falls on the landing site, blocking the spacecraftâs solar panels from the sun and plunging it into freezing temperatures.
Houston-based space company Intuitive Machines is gearing up for an actual moonshot at the end of this month, when it’ll try to land a spacecraft named Odysseus on the lunar surface — ideally without it breaking in the process. The mission follows Astrobotic’s unsuccessful attempt in January; that company’s lander, Peregrine, never made it to the moon due to a propellant leak that cut its journey short. Peregrine’s failure means Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission could be the first ever commercial moon landing if it makes it there intact.
Intuitive Machines is hoping to make its landing attempt on February 22, targeting the Malapert A crater near the moon’s south pole for touchdown. This arrival date is dependent on Odysseus, one of the company’s Nova-C class landers, leaving Earth atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sometime between February 14 and February 16. The launch window opens at 12:57AM ET on Wednesday.
Odysseus is the first of three Nova-C landers Intuitive Machines plans to send to the moon this year, all of which will have commercial payloads on board and NASA instruments as contracted under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. At 14 feet tall (4.3 meters), the lander is roughly the size of a giraffe and can carry about 280 pounds (130kg) of cargo. Its mission, if it nails a soft landing, will be a short but potentially valuable one for informing future excursions to the region, including NASA’s upcoming crewed Artemis missions. Orbiting probes have found evidence of water ice at the lunar south pole, which could be used for astronaut subsistence and even fuel, making it an area of high interest for human exploration.
NASA
The solar-powered craft and any functional equipment it’s carrying are only expected to be in working condition for about a week before the onset of lunar night, a 14-day period of frigid darkness that the company says will leave the lander inoperable. But while everything’s up and running, the various instruments will gather data at the surface. NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a $77 million contract for the delivery of its payloads back in 2019, and there are six NASA instruments now hitching a ride on Odysseus.
One, the Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA), will “function as a permanent location mark” from its position on the moon after landing to help incoming spacecraft determine their distance from the surface, according to NASA. The lander is also carrying the Navigation Doppler LIDAR for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing (NDL), a sensor that measures velocity and altitude to better guide the descent, and the Lunar Node 1 Navigation Demonstrator (LN-1) to support communication and autonomous navigation in future missions.
NASA is also sending instruments to study surface plumes — everything that gets kicked up when the lander touches down — along with radio waves and the effects of space weather. That includes the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS), which will capture images of these dust plumes, and the Radio wave Observation at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES) instrument.
The rest of the payloads on board Odysseus are commercial. Columbia Sportswear worked with Intuitive Machines to incorporate the brand’s Apollo-inspired Omni-Heat Infinity thermal reflective material, which is being used for this mission to help protect the cryogenic propulsion tank, according to Intuitive Machines. Students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University developed a camera system dubbed the EagleCam that will attempt to separate from the lander before it touches down and snap a picture of the moment from a third-person point of view. EagleCam is also equipped with an experimental dust-removal system.
Intuitive Machines
There are even some Jeff Koons sculptures heading to the moon, which will have physical and NFT counterparts back on Earth. In Koons’ Moon Phase piece, 125 small stainless steel sculptures of the moon at different phases are encased in a clear cube made by 4Space, with the names of important historical figures from around the world listed below each sphere. The International Lunar Observatory Association, based in Hawaii, and Canadensys Aerospace are sending a 1.3-pound dual-camera system called ILO-X, with which they’ll attempt to capture wide and narrow field images of the Milky Way from the moon.
Odysseus is also carrying small discs called “Lunagrams” from Galactic Legacy Labs that contain messages from Earth, including text, images, audio and archives from major databases such as the Arch Mission Foundation and the English-language version of Wikipedia. Similar archival materials were sent to space with Peregrine last month. The information technology company Lonestar plans to demonstrate its Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) by storing data on the lander and transmitting documents ( including the US Declaration of Independence) between Earth and the moon. It’ll follow this up with a prototype mini data center on Intuitive Machines’ next launch.
Now, the pressure is on for the Odysseus Nova-C lander to actually get to the lunar surface safely. This year started off rocky for moon missions, with the failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine and a descent hiccup that caused JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft to faceplant into the lunar surface (though the latter was miraculously able to resume functions to some degree after a few days). Intuitive Machines will have other chances to get it right if it doesn’t this time — it has multiple missions already booked up — but only one private lander can be “first.”
For the first time in more than 50 years, a commercially built American lander was fired off to the moon early Monday, a small robotic probe called Peregrine that’s packed with 20 experiments and international payloads, including five NASA science instruments and a sensor valued at $108 million.
Other payloads include university experiments, a collection of Mexican and U.S. micro rovers, artwork, compact time capsules, a bitcoin and even a small collection of human “cremains” provided by two companies that offer memorial flights to space.
While the Peregrine lander, built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, was the mission’s showcase payload, its ride to space was equally important, if not moreso: the long-awaited maiden flight of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket, a heavy-lift booster that’s replacing the company’s workhorse Atlas and Delta family of launchers.
The first United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket carrying a commercial moon lander – the first U.S. mission to the lunar surface since the Apollo program more than 50 years ago – roars away from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in a picture-perfect maiden launch.
William Harwood/CBS News
After a surprisingly problem-free countdown, the Vulcan’s two methane-burning BE-4 engines and twin solid-propellant strap-on boosters thundered to life at 2:18 a.m. EST, lighting up the deep overnight sky with a brilliant burst of fire and billowing clouds of exhaust.
The 198-foot-tall, 1.5-million-pound rocket majestically climbed skyward from launch complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station atop two million pounds of thrust, quickly arcing away to the east over the Atlantic Ocean in a sky-lighting spectacle visible across central Florida
The flight plan called for the Peregrine lander to be released into a highly elliptical Earth orbit. The spacecraft is expected to spend about 18 days in that orbit before firing its thrusters to head for the moon.
After loitering in a low-altitude circular orbit while waiting for sunrise at the landing site, the spacecraft will begin its descent on Feb. 23, targing touchdown near an enigmatic volcanic feature known as the Gruithuisen Domes.
“It’s hard to put into words how excited Astrobotic is for making this first mission back to the surface of the Moon since Apollo,” said CEO John Thornton. “This is a moment 16 years in the making. We’ve had to overcome a lot along the way, a lot of doubt.
“When we started in Pittsburgh, the idea of building a space company, much less one to go to the moon, was completely foreign and alien, and folks literally laughed at the concept. But 16 years later … here we are on the launch pad.”
Along with adding a powerful new rocket to the U.S. inventory, the launch was the first in a series of private-sector moon missions funded under a NASA program intended to spur development of commercial lunar transportation and surface delivery services.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program or CLPS, “will usher in not only great new science for NASA in the United States, but the first test of this new model where it’s not NASA’s mission, NASA is being carried to the surface of the moon as part of a commercial mission with a commercial launch vehicle,” said Joel Kearns, a senior CLPS manager.
As for the Vulcan, Mark Peller, ULA’s vice president of Vulcan development, said “it’s the future of our company.”
An artist’s impression of the Peregrine lunar lander on the moon’s surface. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine is the first commercially-built U.S. moon lander and the first American mission to head for the lunar surface since the last Apollo moon landing in 1972.
Astrobotic
“The system that we’ve developed is really positioning us for a very bright, prosperous future for many, many years to come,” he said. “It has proven to already be an extremely competitive product in the marketplace, having an order book of over 70 missions before first flight.”
Replacing the company’s expensive Delta 4 and workhorse Atlas 5 rocket, which uses Russian RD-180 Russian engines, the Vulcan relies on two BE-4 first stage engines built by Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
At liftoff, the twin BE-4s generate 1.1 million pounds of thrust. Two Northrop Grumman strap-on solid-propellant boosters, or SRBs, generate another 919,200 pounds of push, providing a total thrust of just over 2 million pounds. The Vulcan can be launched with up to six strap ons depending on mission requirements.
The new rocket also features a more powerful hydrogen-fueled Centaur upper stage with two Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C engines capable of boosting heavy military payloads into so-called high-energy orbits that can’t be easily reached by rockets optimized for low-Earth orbit.
“No one in the world still designs a high-energy-optimized rocket,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno told a small group of reporters at the launch pad Saturday. “That market has been abandoned by the commercial providers because it’s less expensive (and) less risky to develop rockets designed for LEO (low-Earth orbit) operations.”
“Not only is it very, very capable, it’s also less expensive,” he added, saying a Vulcan costs about one third the price of a Delta 4 Heavy.
SpaceX now dominates the commercial launch marketplace, firing off a record 96 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy flights last year, not counting two partially successful test flights of the company’s new Super Heavy-Starship. Sixty three of the Falcons launched in 2023 were used to put the company’s Starlink internet satellites into orbit.
After separation from the Vulcan rocket about 50 minutes after launch, the Peregrine lander will first loop around the Earth and then head for an initially elliptical orbit around the moon. Once in a low-altitude circular orbit, it will descend to touchdown as early as Feb. 23.
Astrobotic
Peller said the Vulcan is an “extremely good value and is very competitive in the marketplace.”
“What’s unique about Vulcan, and what we originally set out to do, was to provide a rocket that had all the capabilities of Atlas and Delta in one single system,” he said. “And we achieved that in a vehicle that has performance that’s even greater than the three-body Delta 4 Heavy.
“What we’ve been able to achieve is a vehicle that goes all the way from medium to heavy lift in a single core configuration. Unlike Delta 4 (and) some of our competitors, where they have to use three-body configuration vehicles for heavy lift, Vulcan can do that all in a single core.”
As for SpaceX’s gargantuan Super Heavy-Starship, Bruno called it “an extreme example of a LEO-optimized rocket. So a veritable freight train to LEO. I mean, I’ll be straight with you guys, a Starship, when successfully fielded, will carry four times the mass that (Vulcan) can carry to LEO.”
But he said the fully reusable Starship uses all its fuel just to reach low-Earth orbit. “That’s why they talk about on-orbit refueling because it’s dry once it gets there,” he said, adding, “it’ll be an excellent platform for carrying Starlinks.”
Maiden flights typically feature small, relatively inconsequential payloads because of presumably higher risks. But Astrobotic opted to put Peregrine atop the first Vulcan because of ULA’s long history, its record of successful launches and because the Vulcan, other than the BE-4 engines, is essentially an upgraded version of the flight-proven Atlas 5.
“We chose United Launch Alliance as first flight of Vulcan because we believe so much in the company, and we’re very, very confident that this mission will be successful,” Thornton said. “And of course, that came with some relief on the price, and that makes this mission possible.”
Only the United States, Russia, China and India have successfully put landers on the surface of the moon. If successful, Peregrine will be the first U.S. lander to reach the moon’s surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the first privately developed American lander and only the third overall.
Two privately funded moon landers, one from Israel and the other from Japan, crashed during landing attempts in 2019 and 2023 respectively.
Peregrine is designed to serve as a lunar delivery vehicle, carrying payloads from governments, universities, nonprofits and even individuals to the surface of the moon. Astrobotic’s website says the cost to put a payload into orbit around the moon is $300,000 per kilogram (2.2 pounds). The price for a landing is $1.2 million per kilogram.
NASA put five sophisticated instruments on Peregrine Mission 1, along with a space navigation sensor. The agency’s total investment in the mission is $108 million.
Other payloads include five micro rovers provided by Mexico, an experimental Astrobotic navigation sensor, a Japanese time capsule with messages from more than 185,000 children, bitcoins, a small rover from Carnegie Mellon University, commemorative plaques and a DHL “Moonbox” containing a variety of mementos, including a tiny rock from Mount Everest.
Also on board: samples of cremated remains provided by Celestis and Elysium Space, companies that offer to send small amounts of ashes of loved ones into space as memorials.
The president of the Navajo Nation recently told NASA the presence of human remains of any sort aboard spacecraft landing on the moon amounts to desecration of a celestial body that is “revered by our people.” NASA officials said they were willing to discuss the concerns, but the Peregrine launch was expected to proceed as planned.
“I’ve been disappointed that this conversation came up so late in the game, I would have liked to have this conversation a long time ago,” Thornton said. “We announced the first payload manifest of this nature back in 2015, a second in 2020. We really are trying to do the right thing, and I hope we can find a good path forward with Navajo Nation.”
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
The first trailer for Rebel Moon: The Scargiver quietly dropped on Christmas Day, but even with 1 million views and counting, it’s unclear if Netflix got a prized gift in its stocking or lump of coal.
Rebel Moon is currently the #1 movie on Netflix (accounting for 23.9M views as of first six days on the platform, according to the now slightly transparent company). It’s also a blemish on director Zack Snyder’s track record; While he’s not typically a critical darling, the fantasy space opera has garnered some of the sourest reviews of his career, hovering between Sucker Punch and Justice League (the first attempt) on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator. Is there hope for the Rebel Moon universe?
Netflix has to hope so — not only does the streamer have a Rebel Moon sequel, The Scargiver, locked and loaded for spring 2024, there’s transparent hope for a greater expansion of the universe into other properties. At the very least, we’re getting an R-rated cut of the first film, Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire, and a four-player co-op Rebel Moon video game from Super Evil Megacorp… eventually.
But while it’s hard to imagine “course correction” for the budding franchise — it’s Snyder’s baby through and through — the first trailer for Rebel Moon: The Scargiver could see improvement. A Child of Fire promised a Seven Samurai-esque team movie with a climactic battle of underdogs versus imperial scum… without actually delivering the climactic battle. With the muscle now in place, The Scargiver looks like a third act of the original pitch broken out into a sequel. If it’s all slo-mo action and reference-heavy iconography swirling around in a cloud of action, it might be what Snyder was envisioning all along? At the very least, we’re getting a lot more Djimon Hounsou, which is a good sign.
Rebel Moon: The Scargiver will premiere on Netflix on April 19, 2024. And either before or after that, we’re getting the rated-R cuts of one or both of the movies, which might be worth holding out for. At the very least, Snyder says they take place in a “different dimension” than the PG-13 movies, so there’s that.
The longest — and last — full moon of the year will appear on Monday night and peak on Tuesday.
December’s full moon, also known as the Cold Moon and Long Night Moon, will reach peak illumination at 7:33 p.m. ET on Tuesday, according to NASA. It will look like a full moon until Thursday morning. The Old Farmer’s Almanac details specific moonrise times for different ZIP codes across the United States.
A formation of geese fly in for a landing on Stoney Creek with the last full moon of 2022 behind them. The Farmers Almanac calls it the Cold Moon. December 9, 2022.
Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Where does December’s full moon get its name from?
December’s full moon gets its Cold Moon moniker from Mohawk traditions, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. The name is based on the frigid conditions of the time of year.
The full moon is also called the Long Night Moon because December’s full moon occurs near the winter solstice, which has the longest night of the year. This year’s solstice was on Dec. 21.
“The full moon takes a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite to the low sun, so the moon will be above the horizon longer than at other times of the year,” according to NASA.
Other names for December’s full moon include Drift Clearing Moon, Frost Exploding Trees Moon, Moon of the Popping Trees, Hoar Frost Moon, Snow Moon, Winter Maker Moon, Moon When the Deer Shed Their Antlers and Little Spirit Moon, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. Ancient pagans in Europe called the December full Moon the Moon Before Yule.
Next month’s full moon is dubbed the Wolf Moon. It will peak on Jan. 25.
Known as the “Wolf Moon”, this full Moon is the first that occurs after the Winter Solstice, in the northern hemisphere, where the nights are still very long, or summer, in the southern hemisphere.
Alex Pena/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Is the moon ever full on Christmas?
December’s full moon does fall on Christmas sometimes, but it’s a rare occasion. The last full moon to peak on Christmas was in 2015.
Before that, there hadn’t been one since 1977.
Astronomers say the next Christmas full moon won’t be until 2034.
Aliza Chasan is a digital producer at 60 Minutes and CBSNews.com. She has previously written for outlets including PIX11 News, The New York Daily News, Inside Edition and DNAinfo. Aliza covers trending news, often focusing on crime and politics.
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Happy December, Polygon readers! It’s the last weekend before the Christmas holiday, and we’ve got a whole sack full of exciting new releases on streaming and VOD for you!
This week, Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire, the first installment of Zack Snyder’s epic space opera starring Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service) finally comes to Netflix along with Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Gareth Edwards’ sci-fi action thriller The Creator finally comes to Hulu, and the black comedy thriller Saltburn arrives on Prime Video. There’s plenty of new movies available to rent this week as well, including The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, and much more.
Here’s everything new to watch this weekend!
New on Netflix
Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Netflix
Genre: Epic space opera Run time: 2h 15m Director: Zack Snyder Cast: Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman
Zack Snyder returns to Netflix with an all-new, Star Wars- and Seven Samurai-inspired space opera in the form of Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire. Set in a far-off galaxy besieged by a brutal interplanetary empire, the film follows the story of a soldier-turned-farmer who must recruit a band of warriors to fight alongside her against the regime she once served. Also, Anthony Hopkins shows up as a robot and Doona Bae (Cloud Atlas) has cool definitely-not-lightsaber butcher swords. Neat!
The best that can be said about Snyder is that he’s at least capable of a kind of manic brouhaha that’s not unbecoming in this kind of genre filmmaking. Despite the lack of character or emotion in his films, he certainly can be one of the best filmmakers at capturing the pure excess of a piece of lurid fantasy art, or the distinct flair of a Frank Miller drawing. But in Child of Fire, the results couldn’t even be called stylish. The CGI seems to degenerate as the running time goes on. The production and costume design had this Dune agnostic bumping that film up half a star on Letterboxd. And Tom Holkenborg’s score sounds like Space Enya.
Maestro
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Photo: Jason McDonald/Netflix
Genre: Biographical drama Run time: 2h 9m Director: Bradley Cooper Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper directs and stars in this biographical drama about the life of the acclaimed American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his complicated relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre.
Maestro takes on new shades when compared with Cooper’s directorial debut, that Star Is Born remake. It’s the inverse of Maestro in a lot of ways. In A Star Is Born, singer Jackson Maine (Cooper) sees something magical in Ally (Lady Gaga), and struggles to cope as they fall in love and her career eclipses his. Conversely, Maestro is built around Leonard Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), who Bernstein is captivated by and devoted to — at least, part of him is. Felicia, who first appears on camera in a black-and-white sequence, illuminates the screen with her talents and ambitions, then is ironically suffocated as Cooper widens Maestro’s aspect ratio and fills it with color. Leonard’s ambition, his dueling appetites, and his affairs with men like David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer) edge her out and dim her world.
Operation Napoleon
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Image: Magnet Releasing/Magnolia
Genre: Historical thriller Run time: 1h 42m Director: Óskar Þór Axelsson Cast: Vivian Ólafsdóttir, Jack Fox, Iain Glen
An Icelandic lawyer (Vivian Ólafsdóttir) finds herself drawn into a deadly international conspiracy after her brother accidentally stumbles upon a German World War II plane buried beneath the snow. Hunted by ruthless criminals and a unrelenting CIA director (Iain Glen), she’ll have to get to the heart of the mystery if she has any hope of surviving.
New on Hulu
The Creator
Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu
Image: 20th Century Studios
Genre: Sci-fi action Run time: 2h 15m Director: Gareth Edwards Cast: John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe
John David Washington (Tenet) stars in Rogue One director Gareth Edwards’ latest sci-fi adventure as an undercover operative in the far-future searching for the mysterious creator of a rogue-artificial intelligence. After being entrusted with the care of a human-like robot named “Alphie” (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), the pair embark on a journey in search of answers and salvation.
The Creator would be a wonderful video game. I mean that earnestly — video games are terrific for interacting with lore, with the bits and bobs of world-building that all storytellers spend years developing, but leave as subtext in the story proper. That can also be true of video games, but games of larger scope often flesh out their virtual worlds with said lore, which players are often free to roam and engage with. There are all sorts of ways that lore can become text — optional conversations with characters, diary and book excerpts to read, video or audio ephemera, all ambient and non-compulsory, a substrate where the player can find meaning whether the main narrative is fulfilling or not. The Creator is a fully realized future in the service of a rote story and flat characters that only gesture in compelling directions; I’d rather not bother with that story at all.
New on Prime Video
Saltburn
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
Image: Prime Video
Genre: Psychological thriller Run time: 2h 11m Director: Emerald Fennell Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe
‘What if The Talented Mr. Ripley, but set in a palatial Oxford-family estate with young adults in the mid-2000s?”
That’s essentially the premise of this black comedy about class and privilege starring Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) and Jacob Elordi (Euphoria), from Promising Young Woman filmmaker Emerald Fennell.
Genre: Surrealist tragicomedy horror Run time: 2h 59m Director: Ari Aster Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan
A24 horror maestro Ari Aster returns with a different kind of project in this horror-comedy about a man confronting his fears after the death of his mother.
Genre: Biographical drama Run time: 1h 40m Director: Guy Nattiv Cast: Helen Mirren, Camille Cottin, Liev Schreiber
Helen Mirren stars in this biographical drama about Golda Meir, the 4th Prime Minister of Israel, and her role during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
New to rent
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Photo: Murray Close/Lionsgate
Genre: Dystopian action Run time: 2h 37m Director: Francis Lawrence Cast: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage
Francis Lawrence returns to the world of The Hunger Games to tell the story of the early years of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), who would go on to become the president of Panem and the nemesis of Katniss Everdeen.
Set 60 years before the events of the first film, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes recalls the fateful meeting between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a tribute from District 12 who would leave a profound impact on his life and worldview.
Collins’ book and Lawrence’s movie don’t redo the action of the Hunger Games events; they dissect them, then force us to sit on the Capitol side of the equation. They demand to know why we were even drawn to the love triangle, the pretty dresses, and the themed arenas in the first place. We’ve always been the spectators, after all, watching Katniss’ story from a safe distance. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes shows us what happens if we get too carried away by propaganda, luxury, and the promise of safety. In that way, it’s a fitting end to the franchise — and a fitting end to the way the genre evolved into a beast of its own.
Trolls: Band Together
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: DreamWorks/Universal
Genre: Adventure comedy Run time: 1h 31m Directors: Walt Dohrn, Tim Heitz Cast: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Kenan Thompson
The Trolls have returned, and they’re getting the band back together! After Branch’s brother Floyd is kidnapped, he’ll have to team up with Poppy to reunite with his other brothers in order to find the culprit and save the day.
Thanksgiving
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Photo: Pief Weyman/Sony Pictures
Genre: Slasher horror Run time: 1h 46m Director: Eli Roth Cast: Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Gina Gershon
Just in time for Christmas, Eli Roth is back with a brand new holiday-themed slasher! After a tragic Black Friday riot, the quiet town of Plymouth, Massachusetts is terrorized by a Thanksgiving-inspired killer wearing a ghoulish John Carver mask.
Comedic slashers where both halves complement each other are rare, even among the genre’s most entertaining offerings. Movies like Totally Killer or Happy Death Day are too funny and lighthearted to ever really earn a genuine scare, while a movie like House of 1000 Corpses is so dark and gross that the humor isn’t likely to land on a first viewing. Few movies have ever struck that balance quite as well as Craven’s four Scream movies. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite reach that series’ meteoric heights, but it comes far closer than anything else in recent years — including the Scream franchise itself.
Silent Night
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Photo: Carlos Latapi/Lionsgate
Genre: Action thriller Run time: 1h 44m Director: John Woo Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Scott Mescudi, Harold Torres
After nearly 20 years, action movie legend John Woo has returned with a Christmas-themed revenge thriller starring Joel Kinnaman as a vigilante who embarks on a mission to exact vengeance on the gang who murdered his son in a Christmas Eve drive-by. Polygon spoke to Woo about the process that went into this film and why he was first attracted to the unique project.
Anatomy of a Fall
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
This Palme d’Or-winning French courtroom drama follows the story of a writer trying to prove her innocence following the mysterious death of her husband outside of their home. Was it murder or was it suicide? Beyond a simple interrogation of guilt, the film is a psychological thriller that delves deep into the complicated circumstances behind the couple’s relationship.
Dream Scenario
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: A24
Genre: Horror comedy Run time: 1h 42m Director: Kristoffer Borgli Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera
Nicolas Cage (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) continues his streak of meta self-referential projects in this horror-comedy about a mild-mannered biology professor who inexplicably becomes famous overnight after appearing in the dreams of people around the world.
Dream Scenario’s vague, nebulous type of fame gives Borgli an avenue to comment on celebrity and its price without taking a specific stand. He’s just exploring the cost of being highly visible, being up for endless interpretation by total strangers, and being disconnected in the public eye from any actual real-world intentions or actions. Once Paul starts deliberately taking a more active role in people’s dreams, the script takes a Charlie Kaufman-esque approach, playing with the ideas around so-called cancel culture as part of the world of instant fame. He also keeps the visuals refreshing and interesting, fully veering into dream-sequence horror, with enjoyably weird results.
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